This study describes an inquiry approach involving a practitioner-researcher partnership and examines its impact on teachers' capacities to conduct explicit instruction of disciplinary literacy. The partnership comprised iterative cycles of sessions that engaged content teachers in exploring their students’ language challenges using student writing as the stimulus of inquiry. Data from the inquiry sessions and lessons provided evidence of the impact of the inquiry on the teachers. The impact includes self-reported changes in their language sensitivity, beliefs and assessment practices as well as observable changes in their classroom instruction. The relationship between the impact and teacher language awareness are discussed.

The role of language in science learning and teaching has been a focus of science education research for over three decades. This rich body of research has led to the insight that learning the language of science is constitutive of learning science: simultaneously with participating in classroom activities and conversations, describing observations and constructing conceptual understanding, students must begin to appropriate the language of science.

We report on the Phase 2 research activities and findings of the NIE/OER Educational Research Funding Programme and MOE CORE 3 project titled 'Integrating Multiliteracies into the English Language Classroom'. The project has two Phases: Phase 1 from March 2019 to December 2019 and Phase 2 from January 2020 to December 2021.

The purpose of this project is first to understand how multiliteracies, specifically multimodal literacy, are currently taught in the English Language subject classroom in Singapore schools and then second, to develop an instructional approach, informed by Systemic Functional Theory, multiliteracies, and multimodality studies, to teach multimodal literacy for upper primary and lower secondary students.

The study adopts a design-based research approach which involved the team of researchers working closely with the teacher-participants in the co-design of lesson packages. The goal of design-based research is to develop contextually-sensitive pedagogical practices and instructional strategies with a focus on the teacherparticipants’ professional learning and growth in the process.

Learning science involves learning how to use specific, conceptual language in talking, reading and writing for reasoning and problem solving (Lemke, 1990). However, research has argued that language is a major barrier to students learning science (Wellington Osborne 2001). In response, this chapter reports on a project in a Singapore secondary school, where researchers worked with five science teachers at different stages over two years to trial a functional literacy approach to the teaching of lower secondary science. The functional literacy approach was informed by systemic functional theory and drew on the work of (Rose Martin, 2012) and (Rose, 2015) for language learning in the science context. This chapter focuses on the shifts in language awareness for teaching science from the teacher reflections collected during the process of implementing ideas from the functional literacy approach to address students’ needs. The reflections indicated a shift from initial reservations to an eventual recognition of the value of how awareness and attention to language can support students’ learning of scientific concepts, develop communicative classrooms and make the knowledge process visible.

This paper describes a pilot study exploring how an approach drawing on systemic functional linguistics can inform science teaching. This study is an exploratory effort between researchers from a linguistics background and secondary school science teachers in the Singapore science classroom.

The teachers designed activities in the joint construction of texts to support students’ negotiation of meanings and clarification of conceptual understandings. With this, the teachers applied strategies to draw attention to the language of science in their lessons. The study points to the value of the functional literacy approach in science teaching and presents implications on teacher professional learning as well as the role of linguistics in developing disciplinary literacy in students.