Functional Language Instruction and the Writing Growth of English Language Learners in the Middle Years SALLY HUMPHREY AND LUCY MACNAUGHT Australian Catholic University New South Wales, Australia In this article the authors report on the use of a scaffolding peda- gogy (Gibbons, 2009), informed by systemic functional linguistics, to support the writing of English language learners in middle years cur- riculum learning. They focus on the work of one teacher and her English class across the first 18 months of a longitudinal design-based literacy research project, Embedding Literacies in the Key Learning Areas (ELK). This 3-year project was conducted in an Australian urban secondary school with 97.5% of students from language back- grounds other than English. A core aspect of the pedagogy imple- mented through the ELK project is the use of a shared metalanguage to make visible the patterns of language valued for dis- cipline learning. Analysis of instructional materials, classroom dis- course, and data on students’ achievement on standardized external and formative internal assessments of writing over 18 months indi- cates that growth in writing is related to pedagogical practices that include consistent use of a functional metalanguage in classroom modeling of exemplar texts and in feedback on students’ writing. doi: 10.1002/tesq.247 O ver the past decade there has been renewed interest amongst TESOL educators in how instructional pedagogies informed by descriptive and/or functional language descriptions may be used for making meaning resources of discipline literacies visible to students (Byrnes, 2013; Ellis, 2006; Fang & Coatam, 2013; Hammond & Gibbons, 2005; Johns, 2011; Schleppegrell, 2013; Unsworth, 2006). This is in part due to international policy changes that have seen a shift away from bilingual education, greater accountability of teachers for learning outcomes of second language (L2) learners (Gebhard, Willett, Jimenez, & Piedra, 2010), and the inclusion of language content in English programs of study and curricula internationally TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 0, No. 0, xxxx 2015 © 2015 TESOL International Association 1