Latino(a) and Burmese elementary school students reading scientific informational texts: The interrelationship of the language of the texts, students’ talk, and conceptual change theory

This article is the result of an investigation examining 17 multilingual students transacting with scientific informational texts during miscue analysis. Students’ retellings scores were generally found to be low despite high semantic acceptability during read alouds. Further investigation involving the use of social semiotics and discourse analysis revealed that the language patterns found in the scientific texts had similar social purposes to the language patterns in many students’ retellings. Conceptual change theory was also applied to examine segments of students’ retellings that differed from the retelling rubrics. As a result multilingual Latino(a) and Burmese students in this study were found to possess resources as readers during the assessment process that were not initially measured through retelling scores.