Building a Language Toolkit for Teachers: A Functional Approach

This book is designed for pre-service teachers and K-8 educators seeking to develop their knowledge of how language works. Grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics, it serves as a practical language toolkit, offering supportive task cycles with exercises that help teachers identify, analyze, and apply language features to support student learning. This book is essential for those looking to develop their pedagogical language knowledge (PLK) to support multilingual students. Through accessible, targeted, task-based resources for pre-service teachers, this guide supports teachers to apply a functional approach for disciplinary purposes of narrating, informing, explaining, and arguing in elementary and middle grade level instruction. Although this book focuses on unpacking the WIDA English Language Development Standards, it is well suited to support teachers' development of language in any context.