High challenge, high support: Integrating language and content instruction for diverse learners in an English literature classroom

In this paper, I argue for a response to the needs of linguistically and culturally diverse students that is both high challenge and high support. In elaborating this argument I draw on an English literature programme that was designed for a year 7 boys’ class (the first year of high school) in an Australian public school. The students in the programme were diverse in terms of their socio-cultural and linguistic backgrounds and although academically capable, required on-going English language support. Although all were English as a Second Language (ESL) students, they worked in a ‘mainstream’ class, and were expected to participate in full content instruction of all key curriculum areas.In the paper, I focus in particular, on the ways in which the teacher, in a Unit of work on Romeo and Juliet, drew on socially oriented theories both of learning and of language to articulate the nature of the challenge that students faced in their engagement with academic language in the mainstream curriculum. I suggest that the ways in which the teacher wove both content and language teaching in her lessons. Her explicit teaching of language, as well as her ability to incorporate drama into the Unit, contributed to her students’ successful learning of intellectually challenging curriculum content and their affective engagement with that content. The teacher's approach to ESL learning in a mainstream content classroom, I suggest, provided a constructive and positive alternative to the more common response of modifying the curriculum for ESL learners.