Learning to Facilitate English Language Discussion with Newcomers Using Visual Narratives

This self-study reports a teacher educator’s efforts to support college student tutors in facilitating English language discussions about a wordless picturebook with immigrant and refugee youth at a newcomer high school. Drawing on critical sociocultural theory and practice-based teacher education, the study reports how tutors adopted a new and unfamiliar pedagogical repertoire as they became more skilled discussion facilitators. The study documents support needed (and missing) for the college tutors to take up this skill. Additionally, the study reports the affordances of a particular wordless book, The Arrival, as a tool that college student tutors used in the process of learning to facilitate second language discussions that fostered English language development. Wordless picturebooks offer a fertile instructional context for significant talk to support English language development and a helpful context for practice-based teacher education about learning to facilitate student talk. Yet using them to foster discussion requires skill and support.