Making Language Visible

Making Language Visible is a remarkably effective book that helps social study teachers become educators who can make disciplinary literacy apparent and useful to their students. I know it will improve my own classroom instruction.

In 2024 Sharon Besser and I wrote a book on doing disciplinary literacy in a social studies classroom, published by Routledge. The idea for a book came from our work on the WIDA ELD Standards when we were developing Language Functions and Features for Explain and Argue in Social Studies: key disciplinary genres, straight out of the C3 Framework for States Social Studies Standards.

Below is my recording of the orientation to chapter 2 for South Dakota social studies educators who used my book in their book study in the summer of 2024. You will see what they had to say about the book after they completed the book study.

The ideas in this book were difficult to understand at first as a social studies teacher. As I continued reading, I began to understand how many of these ideas were things we already do as teachers, and the book is helping you visualize them. I found the tables and figures very helpful in understanding how I can apply these ideas in my classes.

As a social studies educator, it can seem a bit daunting once we start talking about how we can support ELA skills in our classrooms. However, this books gives you all the tools and education you will need in order to feel like you can successfully have a language based social studies classroom. I am ready to hit the ground running with new ideas and strategies this upcoming school year!

Thank you for all the charts. That is what I’m going to go back and look at in the future to create some things. You have so many examples with examples with examples that I feel like I have a lot of material to work with and use as I need!

I really appreciated Besser and Westerlund knowledge on making language more visible (and accessible and exciting) in Social Studies through the videos, additional resources, and especially the detailed teacher scripts to use as models in our own classrooms.

“Making Language Visible in Social Studies” gave me key insights into how to structure the explanations and arguments that I expect students to be able to make in the classroom in writing. This book gave practical, actionable steps and teaching tools to improve my pedagogy especially for those multi-cultural students that might benefit from a more novel, systematic approach to disciplinary literacy.

If you are interested in using it in your school book study, I will be able to provide a set of discussion questions for free. Just email me – you can connect with me either via LinkedIn or Facebook or leave a comment below.