Intellectual Practices for ELL students
Intellectual Practice 1:
Students engage with the key ideas and concepts of the discipline in ways that reflect how “experts” in the field think and reason.

Encouragement with key discipline – related ideas and concepts involves students in pursuing a coherent line of reasoning through activities that require them to “mirror” the ways of thinking and meaning of scientists, historians, or mathematicians; that is, to use content and process that are central to the particular discipline. This requires students to have some “deep knowledge” of the field, rather than simply a knowledge of isolated facts. Of course we should not discount the importance of students’ being familiar with traditional items of knowledge (indeed such knowledge is critical to thinking creatively and inactively within the discipline). But it is the use to which such knowledge is put that is significant in students’ developing an in-depth understanding and knowledge of the field.

Intellectual Practice 2:
Students transform what they have learned into a different form for use in a new content or for a different audience.

Information-transfer exercises have long been common practice in language classrooms and are excellent ways to focus on language learning as well as content. These exercises require students to transfer information from one form to another – for example, to represent the information contained in a text as a graph. Here, however, the notion of transfer is much boarder and refers to students’ reconstructing knowledge or artifact. The transformation usually involves of considering amounts of learning.

Intellectual Practices 3:
Students make links between concrete knowledge and abstract theoretical knowledge.

This refers to the relationship between everyday knowledge and concepts and between discipline-related concepts and literacy. Chapter 1 gave an example of this, comparing a child’s concrete and everyday experience of magnetism (the magnet sticks to the fridge) to the same phenomenon as expressed more abstractly within a specific frame-work (magnets are attracted to ferrous metals). Being able to use the appropriate language to express the scientific concept is of course of central importance, and this discussed in detail in Chapter 3. Learning to control this academic language (or register as Chapter 3 describes it) is one of the most demanding challenges for EL learners.

At the same time, we do not want students to “parrot” academic language without understanding it, any more than we want them to be constrained by having access only to everyday ways of using language. This ability for students to understand and talk about the connections between concrete and theoretical knowledge – to be able to express ideas in both concrete and abstract ways and recognize the relation between them – is perhaps one of the most important characteristics of “deep knowledge” of a subject.

Intellectual Practice 4:
Students engage in substantive conversation.

Substantive conversation involves extended talk around the substantive ideas (“big ideas”) inherent in a topic and focuses on creating understandings of subject matter. As well as building on what students already know, the process of taking part in substantive conversations leads to an increased understanding of subject content, since it creates space for student to explore new ideas, clarify their understandings, initiate questions, and make their reasoning visible to peers. Such conversations promote shared understandings.  Unlike traditional classroom talk where the teacher controls all the talk (which is often aimed, throughout aimed questions, at testing what students know), substantive conversation is more reciprocal and extended, with student taking a much more central and significant role in directing its flow and content.
This kind of talk not only is important for helping students develop understanding of subject content, but also has particular significance for second language learning: Merrill Swain (2000) has shown how extended talk is not simply an indication of what has already been learned, but since it involves learners in ongoing interaction, also it provides an enabling content for new language learning. Se comments that knowledge- building dialogue “is where language use and language learning can occur” (97). So for EL learners in particular, substantive conversation provides important contexts for both content learning and language development.

Intellectual Practice 5:
Students make connections between the spoken and written language of subject and other discipline-related ways of making meaning.

Language is the primary system for making meaning in school, but in addition, different subjects make use of alternative ways of representing information, such as diagrams, graphs, tables, maps, or flowcharts. Other systems of making meaning include mathematical or chemical symbols and musical notation. Students who are engaged in disciplinary learning need to learn to “read” these visual representations just as they learn other forms of literacy. They also need to be able to interpret and explain them through language.

While presenting meanings in nonlinguistic ways in an intellectually challenging activity, it may, conversely, also be supportive one for EL learners, because it provides them with an alternative source of meaning that may be more accessible than language alone. Mathematical symbols, for example, may be quite comprehensible to an EL learner who is already familiar with them, and serve as a bridge to the related spoken or written language. Using alternative representations of meanings alongside languages may help make complex language and abstract concepts more comprehensible to EL learners, such as the use of the calculation to help students understand a problem in intellectual practice 4.

Intellectual Practice 6:
Student take a critical stance toward knowledge and information.

Taking a critical stance towards knowledge and “accepted wisdom” requires students to recognize that it can be questioned. Traditional vies of knowledge in schools see it as a given body of facts, “a body of truth to be acquired by students” (Queensland School Reforms Longitudinal Study 2001). In reality this view of knowledge is inconsistent with the reality of much authentic disciplinary work, which acknowledge that knowledge is not static: indeed, it is changing at a pace previously unknown in history of humanity.

In the classroom, this “problematization” of knowledge means that students are encouraged to take a critical approach to reading a text, identify bias, critique different views, pursue a novel line of inquiry, offer an alternative solution to a problem, or change their own thinking as a result of new learning. As the earlier examples have suggested, much of the work in an intellectually challenging program involves students in collaborative problem solving and so in dealing with alternative views.

Intellectual Practice 7:
Students use metalanguage in the context of learning about other things.

Language plays a central role in any intellectual activity, and using it effectively in reading, writing, and speaking is central to learning and to demonstrating learning. But as well as learning how to use language, students also need to develop a language to talk about language – that is, to develop metalangauge. What this means in reality is that students are able to talk about language for the purposes of developing their language use, such as to develop more effective writing skills, develop an explicit awareness of how to read more effectively, or understand how different ways of expressing an idea may be more or less effective depending on context. For example, there may be explicit talk about the structure of a science report in the content of writing up an experiment, so that students are learning about language in the context of using it. In this process the teacher talks about language, for example, drawing students’ attention to the function and form of the passive voice in this context, and how to express cause and effect. Running through all the other intellectual practices that have been described is the practice of taking and reflecting on language itself.