Reflections on the relationship between language, curriculum content and instruction¹

In a ‘formative experiment’ (following Newman et ah, 1989), twenty‐seven 4th‐grade students transitioning from Spanish to English read a short story (in English) about two mischievous friends and then participated in one of two video‐taped lessons by the same teacher: (1) a theme‐based discussion following a format called Instructional Conversation, or (2) a more conventional ‘basal‐like’ reading comprehension lesson. The same content was thus approached via different instructional paths, allowing for an examination of the interaction between content and instructional mode in content‐based language arts instruction. The students’ understanding of the material was subsequently gauged by a short answer comprehension test and an essay on friendship. While students in both conditions achieved equivalent levels of literal comprehension (76%), essays of students who had discussed the reading demonstrated a more complex and differentiated conceptualisation of friendship. These results suggest that the quality of classroom talk can be traced into eventual student uptake of curricular content. For second‐language learners, questions of classroom talk and curricular uptake are of extreme importance.