Language-Focused Writing Instruction for Emergent Bilingual Learners
Implementing SFL Genre Pedagogy in Elementary Bilingual Classrooms
Welcome!
This website was made through a collaboration between bilingual educators including Denver Public Schools teachers, University of Colorado researchers and teacher educators, and representatives from the Colorado Department of Education.
It stems from our collective work supporting bilingual learners through SFL genre pedagogy.
In this website, you will find
01
Information and resources to help you learn about a genre-based approach to writing instruction
02
Pedagogical considerations for supporting bilingual learners
03
Resources to help you teach different literary genres.
The Genre-Based Approach
A Functional Perspective
This approach draws on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), an approach that focuses on how people use language to communicate their ideas.
The Teaching & Learning Cycle
Genre-based pedagogy involves using multiple languages to build students' knowledge of the field, deconstruct mentor texts, jointly construct texts, and independently construct texts.
Student Work Analysis
Genre-based pedagogy helps teachers adopt asset-based methods of assessing how students use genre-specific organization and language features to communicate their ideas.
The Genres
Each genre is characterized by organizational and language features that help authors achieve the genre's communicative purpose.
Argument
Purpose: To persuade the audience about a position or point of view or to do something.
Report
Purpose: To inform / organize information about a topic
Fictional Narrative
Purpose: To tell a story, entertain, teach, or share cultural values
Personal Recount
Purpose: to tell what happened based on a personal experience in an entertaining way