How can foreign language education integrate the learning of language with learning of content, and culture on a systematic basis, when assessment typically focuses on language in isolation from meaning? Examining developmental data gathered over a three-year period from elementary students in a Chinese program in North America, we explore the…

This article uses a functional view of language to frame and analyze issues of language and content in mainstream classrooms. Describing a Western Canadian grade one/two science class, it examines how a teacher and her class of young ESL students were able to build up a simple theory of magnetism in a scientific register, link its technical terms…