Teacher questions: Learning the discourse of science in a linguistically diverse elementary classroom

Using ethnographic and sociolinguistic perspectives the authors examined the quality and quantity of questions asked by one teacher in a diverse fourth grade classroom with a large number of emergent bilinguals and low-income students during a six-week science unit in a school located in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. This study illustrates how teacher questions played a pivotal role in facilitating students' access to both the content and the genre specific language of science.