ABSTRACT
The combined influences of rapid demographic changes, global economic and political shifts, and high-stakes school reforms rooted in standardizing ideologies, such as the Common Core education standards, mean that all teachers are deemed responsible for teaching disciplinary knowledge and related literacy practices to all students, including those in the process of learning English as a second or additional language. This study follows three preservice science teachers into their practice teaching assignments after they had taken a course on sheltered instruction that included a focus on systemic functional linguistics (SFL). The research focuses on their writing instruction, and specifically feedback practices, to investigate how they used the concepts from their teacher education course. The findings suggest that SFL concepts like register, genre, and genre pedagogy supported the teachers in seeing connections between language choices and how they function in different types of science writing, influencing the feedback they gave on writing assignments, as well as their planning of instruction. Their feedback practices appeared to be influenced by their different approaches to curriculum, instruction, and assessment; their perceived autonomy as student teachers; and contextual factors like district pacing guides and expectations for how the feedback would be taken up by students.
