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Not just mentoring
What started out as a mentoring project has developed into much
more for English's Roberta Vann.
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When Roberta Vann, professor of English, was asked to mentor a new assistant
professor she wasn’t all that surprised.
"A big part of the responsibility is helping the new faculty member
network and giving feedback on research," Vann said. "A mentor
is there to support the research and teaching agenda of the new professor."
But when Vann was asked to mentor Katherine Bruna, assistant professor
of curriculum and instruction, she initially did a double take.
"It's pretty unusual to mentor a faculty member outside your own
department, not to mention in an entirely different college," Vann
said.
Vann is sharing mentoring duties with Leslie Bloom in the Department of
Curriculum and Instruction.
Vann was asked to participate because Bruna's research interests focus
on the education of K-12 students whose native language isn't English.
Vann's own research interest falls in that same area. She coordinates
the ESL endorsement program for Iowa State and also teaches in the master's
program in TESL/Applied Linguistics where she specializes in literacy
for second language learners and discourse analysis.
It didn't take long for Vann and Bruna to add co-investigators to their
professional relationship.
The pair have recently received an Iowa State University Special Research
Initiation Grant (SPRIG) for their project, "Teaching the Language
of School: An Exploratory Study of the Conceptualization and Implementation
of Math- and Science-Related Academic Language Instruction for Iowa's
Language Minority Students."
"While even monolingual English-speaking children come to school
with differing amounts of exposure to academic registers, language minority
students face particular challenges in using language to make the kinds
of meanings expected at school," Bruna writes. "It is essential
not only to these students' cognitive and linguistic development but also
to their academic success that they gain competence in the languages of
schooling."
Vann says there are a large number of non-native speakers in Iowa school
systems with upwards of an 80 percent increase in the number of elementary-
and secondary-aged children in Iowa with limited English proficiency in
recent years.
While there is a dramatic change in this area in major metropolitan areas
such as Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, the effects are hitting rural Iowa
as well. In the Perry and Marshalltown school districts alone, upwards
of 25 percent of the school population are non-native speakers of English.
Many of these non-native speaking students may be able to speak the English
language well, but it's a different story when it comes to understanding
concepts in various academic disciplines.
"We went to a ninth grade math class in Marshalltown,' Vann said,
"and they were discussing fractions that day. The challenges that
the non-native speakers faced were incredible. They had real trouble understanding
the basic concepts of math as well as the language.
"Because of that many teachers at the elementary and secondary level
are reluctant to push and challenge these kids in school. This population
never makes it to physics and chemistry courses; instead they only enroll
in the basic science classes."
Bruna and Vann hope to develop a conceptual framework for understanding
the state of practice of math- and science-related academic language instruction
in Iowa. They also hope to articulate a relationship between language
and content in math and science instruction and help set an agenda for
pre-service teacher education and in-service professional development
that disseminates information about effective language minority instruction
as it relates to academic language in the math and science areas.
Their study will look at students in the fourth, seventh and ninth grades.
The same academic-language instruction is also apparent in other academic
disciplines including social studies and reading. Vann and Bruna are particularly
interested in science and math courses however.
"These students are very underrepresented in the science and mathematics
fields here at Iowa State and we hope to shed light on why that might
be," Vann said.
Around LAS
March 22 to April 4, 2004
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