Fostering Educator Buy-in of Language and Literacy in the Science Classroom

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

• Thank you for doing this exciting and important work! Critical language awareness in science education is very near and dear to my heart, so I was excited to get this review invitation. My comments are made in the spirit of strengthening this important work.

• Make terminology consistent and explain this terminology. In just the first three pages, there are already a wide variety of terms used to describe the student population(s) you are hoping science teachers will better serve–culturally and linguistically diverse, ELs, non-White, racial minority, minoritized, underrepresented, Hispanic, etc. The overall effect is that your purpose gets a bit muddled; who exactly is it that you want teachers to better serve, and how will you define this population or populations? If I may be so bold, I think this inconsistency is symptomatic of a larger problem (see next bullet point).

• Explain the role of systemic racism in generating the problem you are trying to solve. What these disparate populations all have in common is that they are harmed by systemic racism and by language ideologies that are derived from / caused by systemic racism, but you have not yet explicitly named or sufficiently explained this rationale in the paper. Instead, the text sort of dances around it, talking about “misunderstandings” and “underrepresentation” and such as though these phenomena simply emerge from an ahistorical vacuum. This was surprising to me, since critical language awareness is a focus of your work and it seems like it would be hard to do CLA work in the U.S. context without explicitly discussing racism. I think adding an explanation for the rationale that unites these seemingly disparate populations, and then following that rationale with an explicit definition of the term(s) you will use to refer to these populations, would strengthen the paper immensely. 

• Missing key citations. I would expect to see citations of the works of (at the very least) Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa, as well as at least citations to relevant work by one or more of the following: Anne Charity Hudley, Bryan Brown, Catherine Lemmi, Chris Chang-Bacon, María Gonzalez-Howard, Aris Clemons, Sharese King, etc.

• Line edits - I think there may be some missing words around lines 128-129ish, I found this passage a little difficult to understand.

• Acknowledge critical perspectives on academic language. I was also a bit surprised to see the discussion of academic language here; while this is important, it’s also a construct worthy of critique for the ways it can prove inadvertently harmful (I would recommend reading and citing George Bunch & Daisy Martin’s work on this topic), and I was surprised to see academic language presented uncritically in a paper that professes to be taking a CLA lens. This almost felt like it belonged in a different paper from the one set up at the beginning of the article. You don’t need to necessarily *agree* with the critiques that many scholars have of academic language as a construct, but I think you need to at the very least acknowledge and briefly summarize some of these critiques.

• Lines 205-213 - this is interesting and important and I totally agree with it–and, also, it felt weird to read this and not see a citation of Bryan Brown’s work, as he has been at the forefront of this work in science education for the past two decades. 

• Lines 214-229 - I disagree a bit with some of what you have written here, but I also think that the version of this argument you present is probably one of the most compelling possible versions of such an argument, so I am willing to concede the point. However, I do think you need to read and consider some of the research of Bryan Brown, whose findings arguably contradict some of the points you are trying to make (or, if they don’t contradict your arguments here, then I think your arguments here need to be explained in a bit more depth).

• Table 1 + findings. This seems like the first real red flag in the paper. There is a column labeled “critical language awareness,” but it is not apparent where/when/how a critical perspective is present in the activities described. The definition of CLA that you quoted above insists on an interrogation of power relations, but this interrogation is not yet apparent in this table or in the accompanying findings. Reflecting on one’s personal opinions about language is a valuable starting point to developing critical language awareness–but if the reflection does not go further to engage with the social and historical systems of racism, sexism, classism, etc. that shape language ideologies, then it’s hard to see how this could be described as CLA. The nature of these reflection activities should be clarified in greater detail; if they involved explicitly interrogating power relations then that should be described, and if they were not, then you really need to come up with a different framework for this besides CLA. I suspect the latter might be the case, as one of the quotes supplied as evidence of CLA references EL students needing to “improve” their language, which is exactly the sort of deficit framing you critiqued at the start of the paper. Furthermore, you talk about teachers seeing “all student language as a resource” as evidence of CLA – but this sounds like exactly the kind of neoliberal discourse that Fairclough developed CLA to critique. It’s fine to say you tried hard to do CLA work with teachers and that specific part of your effort met was not as successful as hoped–that happens!--or else it’s fine to say you were doing something other than CLA. But you should avoid arguing that you were successfully doing CLA if it isn’t yet clear how the modules were critical and there isn’t yet clear evidence that teachers themselves became more critical. This is a significant (but not fatal) structural problem that runs throughout the paper, and the theoretical framework, methods, findings, and discussion all need substantive rewrites in order to fix it.

• “After initial hesitation from the lead professor” - this sounds fascinating and important, but if it was mentioned/described earlier then I missed it. Can you elaborate on this point?

• “The tickets out during piloting” - what does “tickets out” mean? Can you clarify the wording here?

• “few participant responses focused on valuing vernacular ways of using language. The lack of uptake on this topic shows that it should be amplified and discussed regularly” - is this what it shows? You sort of skipped directly from a finding to an implication without first hypothesizing why this finding arose, and the reasons for this pattern could have important implications. For example, this may be symptomatic of the approach to CLA taken in the intervention; perhaps a different approach (rather than simply a longer/more intensive approach) would yield a different result. This possibility should be explicitly acknowledged.

• “it is worth noting that the experts and lead faculty member are white, with English-speaking linguistic privilege.” I appreciate this (and this is also my positionality as a reviewer). For this reason, I think it is all the more important to follow the Charity Hudley Rule for Liberatory Linguistics (see Charity Hudley et al.’s recent book “Talking College”): if you are doing research directly or indirectly focused on a marginalized population or marginalized language variety, your publications should explicitly describe your efforts to support increased participation of this population/users of this variety in your field. This should be part of an explicit positionality statement, and should be further up in the article (ideally right before you start talking about how the modules were developed).

• Thank you for doing this important work! I am glad you are doing it, and my comments are offered in the spirit of supporting you in making your work stronger and more critical.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

No comments. This was an easy and engaging read, except for the minor typos or confusing wording I've noted above.

Author Response

We would like to thank you for your guidance and support in this work. Your detailed feedback was very helpful in refining and organizing our paper. The most extensive revisions were:

• We revised the paper to provide additional background on the overall program and situate it more clearly within current discussions of systemic racism and STEM education. We also incorporated our positionality statement into this more detailed description of the program to better explicate the role of the “educational linguists” in the overall program.
• We expanded our discussion of critical language awareness and incorporated several of the suggested citations. We also highlighted more explicitly where critical language awareness was integrated in the language modules.
• We inserted details and examples from the modules into the text to help the reader better understand the module content.

Please see the attachment for a detailed response to each of your comments. 

We sincerely appreciate the time that you spent providing feedback on our work. The feedback was thoughtful and thorough, and we believe that addressing your comments has significantly strengthened our paper. We have tracked our changes and highlighted substantive additions to the text in yellow in the manuscript.

Thank you again for the opportunity to respond to this feedback. We look forward to any additional thoughts on our work.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The article describes a very complex experience of collaboration between school and university focused on the importance of language in science and on the awareness of this importance. The project phases are well described, although there are not a sufficient number of examples of how the activities were conducted in the classrooms. I am referring to Table 1: the examples for each area could be inserted in the body of the text or attached, in order to convey a more concrete idea of the activities actually implemented in the classes (for example, synonymy and polysemy can highlight the distortion the authentic meanings of words when scientific lexicon is mixed with common language; analyzing that contributes to critical skills).

Author Response

We would like to thank you for your guidance and support in this work. Your feedback was very helpful in refining and organizing our paper. The most extensive revisions were:

• We revised the paper to provide additional background on the overall program and situate it more clearly within current discussions of systemic racism and STEM education. We also incorporated our positionality statement into this more detailed description of the program to better explicate the role of the “educational linguists” in the overall program.
• We expanded our discussion of critical language awareness and incorporated several of the suggested citations. We also highlighted more explicitly where critical language awareness was integrated in the language modules.
• We inserted details and examples from the modules into the text to help the reader better understand the module content.

We would also like to respond specifically to your comment here:

Reviewer Comment

Response to Reviewer

The article describes a very complex experience of collaboration between school and university focused on the importance of language in science and on the awareness of this importance. The project phases are well described, although there are not a sufficient number of examples of how the activities were conducted in the classrooms. I am referring to Table 1: the examples for each area could be inserted in the body of the text or attached, in order to convey a more concrete idea of the activities actually implemented in the classes (for example, synonymy and polysemy can highlight the distortion the authentic meanings of words when scientific lexicon is mixed with common language; analyzing that contributes to critical skills).

In a previous publication we detailed and sampled activities from the modules [see author citation] so we tried not to be redundant here. Nevertheless, we recognize that incorporating explicit examples is helpful to the reader and added some examples below Table 1 to highlight the types of activities and how they exemplified the core linguistic principles.

We sincerely appreciate the time that you spent providing feedback on our work. We believe that addressing your comments has significantly strengthened our paper. We have tracked our changes and highlighted substantive additions to the text in yellow in the manuscript.

Thank you again for the opportunity to respond to this feedback. We look forward to any additional thoughts on our work.

 

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The corresponding author response is considered satisfying