Search

The abstract is available here: https://uscholar.univie.ac.at/o:1591006

Drawing on a corpus of pre-service teacher training classroom interactions in an English-medium instruction university in Turkey, we examine teacher follow-up turns that introduce specialized terms, showing how a teacher transforms student’s responses into pedagogically relevant points using academic language. We argue that teacher third-turns following student contributions accomplish several interrelated actions, not only introducing new terminology to these teachers-in-training, but also familiarizing them with ways of thinking specific to their discipline, i.e., these turns model “doing being a teacher.” These teacher actions are used to bridge student contributions to more scientific talk, that is, the teacher confirms contributions as subject-relevant by steering the direction of the upcoming talk, while also introducing students to potentially unfamiliar terminology, speaking as a member of an unnamed group of subject-matter experts. Notably, we argue that these content-based follow-ups are realized multimodally, drawing on prosodic, gestural, and proxemic resources, among others, and that these multimodal actions are an important aspect of teacher’s classroom interactional competence, showing how instructors socialize pre-service teachers into thinking and talking like professionals, i.e., like teachers. peerReviewed

This article is concerned with the role of language(s) in education from the viewpoint of secondary school subject teachers in Finland at the time of transition to a new curriculum. The curriculum highlights the role of language throughout education and makes reference to changes in society that foreground multilingualism. Seven mainstream and CLIL content teachers of different subjects were interviewed and employing qualitative content analysis, the data were scrutinised under four language-related themes: multilingualism, multiliteracy, subject-specific language, and the role of language in knowledge construction. The results indicate teachers as reasonably well aware of subject-specific language of their field and of the value of multiliteracy practices. Multilingualism as the diversity of students’ languages and its impact on pedagogical practices received less attention. Overall, the teachers’ orientation to the language ideological statements in the new curriculum were widely agreed upon even if the ideas still remained somewhat abstract in the transition phase before actual implementation to the praxis.

Denna studie gjordes för att få mer kunskap om hur området energi behandlas i svenska läroböcker i NO för mellanstadiet. Teorin utgår från tidigare forskning om olika aspekter av undervisning och lärande om energi, samt om olika kunskapsemfaser i undervisningen. Studien är således en deduktiv läromedelsanalys. Resultatet visar att det abstrakta begreppet energi vanligen beskrivs genom metaforer, vilka används för att underlätta steget mellan vardagliga föreställningar och vetenskapliga begrepp. En sak som också framgår är att läroböckerna utöver faktakunskaper även tar upp sådant som naturvetenskapens vägar till kunskap och dess plats i samhället. This study was conducted in order to get more knowledge about how the area of energy is treated in Swedish science textbooks for grades 4-6. The theory is based on previous research on different aspects of teaching and learning about energy and different curriculum emphases in education. The study is, therefore, a deductive analysis of teaching material. The result shows that the abstract concept energy is often described through metaphors, which are used to facilitate the step between everyday conceptions and scientific concepts. Apart from targeting factual knowledge, the textbooks also bring up themes like the process of how scientific knowledge is formed, and the role of science in society.

Syftet med studien är att bidra med ökad kunskap om lärares arbete med faktatexter i flerspråkiga klassrumskontexter. I studien undersöks därför hur två lärare strukturerar textarbetet i momentet ekonomi i samhällskunskap, vilka olika sätt att förhålla sig till en text som möjliggörs för eleverna genom de två lärarnas sätt att ställa frågor och tala om texten i undervisningen, samt hur lärarna i undervisningen stöttar elevers användning och förståelse av ämnesspecifika ord och begrepp. I studien antas ett receptionsteoretiskt perspektiv på läsande, där det i interaktionen mellan läsare och text anses ske meningsskapande möten. Vidare antas i studien ett sociosemiotiskt perspektiv, som ger språkvetenskapliga verktyg för att beskriva hur lärarna skapar struktur och använder texters ämnesbegrepp i undervisningen. I diskussionen av hur lärare rör sig diskursivt mellan ett ämnesspecifikt språk och ett vardagsspråk är Vygotskijs (2001) teorier om elevers begreppsutveckling relevanta i studien. Materialet i studien består av videofilmade lektioner från två olika klasser i år 5, när klasserna arbetade med temat familjens ekonomi inom ämnet samhällskunskap. I videofilmerna fokuseras läraren i respektive klass. Materialet har transkriberats och analyserats med utgångspunkt i makrogenrer operationaliserat som läsförlopp, textrörlighetsmodellen samt idéerna om diskursiv rörlighet. Resultatet visar att lärarna, som arbetade med samma tema, hade olika sätt att strukturera sina arbeten med texten. Trots olika arbetssätt framträder dock en varierad textrörlighet i båda lärarnas undervisning. Resultatet visar också att de filmade lärarna bygger broar mellan en ämnesspecifik språkdiskurs och en vardaglig språkdiskurs genom att använda sig av olika språkliga sambandsmarkörer. Sammanfattningsvis visar resultatet att i den lektion som består av flertalet av läsförloppets sekvenser visas variation i fler typer och dimensioner av textrörlighet och dessutom används fler sambandsmarkörer, jämfört med i den lektion som består av ett färre antal av läsförloppets sekvenser.

This paper is concerned with content and language integrated learning (CLIL), i.e. classrooms where a foreign or second language (L2) is used as the means of instruction and where content and language learning objectives merge. More specifically, it explores the potential of hands-on tasks in CLIL chemistry and physics lessons to serve as sites for using and learning subject-specific language, conceptualised as both special concepts and terminology as well as subject-specific ways of constructing meaning. Using discourse analysis, attention was directed to hands-on tasks as well as pre-task and post-task phases. The findings indicate that despite the evident content orientation in the tasks, language matters feature in the handling of the tasks. The pre-task and post-task phases seem more conducive to students engaging in subject-specific language use than the action-oriented hands-on tasks that involved highly indexical language use. Overall, the orientation to language of the subject remained implicit rather than explicit throughout. This indicates the importance of awareness raising so that CLIL teachers can better come into terms with their specific remit in language education as ones in charge of making the language of their subjects visible and approachable to students. peerReviewed

Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) is a term used especially in Europe for forms of bilingual education where an additional language, in most cases English, is used as the language of instruction in non‐language school subjects. This chapter outlines the development of CLIL, embedded both in European level policies and in growing awareness of the new orientations to language learning introduced, for example, in language immersion research. Because of its potential to serve as a context for meaningful language use and situated language learning, CLIL has been regarded by EU institutions as an important instrument to foster European citizens’ bi‐ and multilingualism, to be offered alongside regular foreign language teaching for students in mainstream education. This chapter introduces the main strands of CLIL research that have revealed a great deal of the possibilities and challenges that CLIL as an educational approach entails, for both students and teachers. Overall, there has been a shift in emphasis in research from studies orienting to effects of CLIL on language learning outcomes to studies that point towards the need to adopt a truly integrated view on language and content, and to explore the potential that CLIL has in supporting the development of subject literacies. peerReviewed

From 2009/10, all pupils in Year 9 in Sweden are obliged to take a national test in one of the science subjects physics, chemistry or biology. There are several aims of the national test system, among others to support teachers’ work by concretizing the curriculum and syllabi. In this article, we examine how the introduction of national tests in science education could affect the content selection teachers express that they do in their teaching. The data consists of interviews with 29 teachers teaching science in the upper years of compulsory school. The result shows that there are three themes of contents that teachers highlight as new in the national tests; scientific argumentation, the history of science and laboratory work. In an analysis, looking through the lens of curriculum emphases, it is shown that what unites these three content areas is that emphasis put on the intellectual skills of the scientific craftsmanship. An explanation for this could be that many teachers recognize this as a key content in scientific activities, but a content that they did not teach to a large extent.

In this work, I present a linguistic investigation of the language of Swedish textbooks in the natural sciences, i.e., biology, physics and chemistry. The textbooks, which are used in secondary and upper secondary school, are examined with respect to traditional readability measures, e.g., LIX, OVIX and nominal ratio. I also extract typical linguistic features of the texts, typicality being determined using a proposed quantitative method, labelled the index principle. This empirical, corpus-based method relies on automatic linguistic annotations produced by language technology tools to calculate what I call index lists, rank-ordered lists of characteristic linguistic features of specific text corpora as compared to reference texts. I produce index lists for typical vocabulary, noun phrase structures and syntactic structures, extracted from a 5.2 million word textbook corpus, compiled as a part of the work presented. As well as being frequent and well dispersed, the linguistic variables selected for the index lists are also characteristic of the text type in question, as is evident when they are compared to a reference corpus, comprising textbooks in the social sciences and mathematics, as well as narrative and academic (university-level) texts. The results show that textbooks in natural science contain a lot of content-specific, technical vocabulary. This characteristic not only distinguishes natural scientific language from everyday language, but also from social scientific language, which on the lexical level has more in common with narrative texts. On the other hand, the textbook language as a whole is structurally distinguishable from narrative texts, as clearly seen, e.g., in its noun phrase complexity. In the transition between secondary and upper secondary school, the scores of almost every readability measure go up, indicating an increase in linguistic demands on the readers. In the upper secondary textbooks the words are longer, the vocabulary more varied, the noun phrases longer and more elaborate, and the most typical syntactic structures more complex. Notably, the linguistic development between the form levels is more marked in the natural-science textbooks, compared to social sciences and mathematics. Nevertheless, the textbook language overall shows a relatively low complexity in comparison to academic language.

This thesis focuses on how different semiotic resources, such as spoken and written texts, artefacts and activities interact with classroom design and classroom communication in three school subjects in Swedish secondary school: Home and Consumer Studies, Biology and Chemistry. The research process has been concerned with the affordances that are created through different semiotic resources in classroom design and in classroom communication in the three school subjects, focusing on academic language and student participation. The study used an ethnographic approach, employing multiple methods for material production and analysis. Video and audio recordings formed the foundation for analysis. Material production also includes field notes, photographs and interviews with teachers and students. The research draws on sociocultural theory using a three-legged theoretical framework based in sociocultural theory. Basil Bernstein’s sociological theories were used as an overarching theory for understanding the results. The sociosemiotic theories of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Social Semiotic Multimodality were adopted for analyzing classroom design and classroom communication. This study shows that classroom design and classroom communication are tied together. Classroom design presents affordances for a subject’s ideational and interpersonal meaning. These affordances are reproduced in classroom communication. In classrooms with subject-focused design, classroom communication is school-focused. Learning is segmented without connection between school subjects or other contexts. In one classroom, designed to create relevance for both school and everyday knowledge, communication is both school-focused and also creates relevance for students’ use of the contents in other contexts. Learning in this classroom is cumulative and students’ participation and meaning-making is integrated in teaching and design. This study also shows how different semiotic resources influence teacher’s and students’ linguistic choices. Vertical discourse, i.e. abstract and distant academic language, is realised in written texts such as text books and whiteboard texts. Few other artefacts introduce and encourage participants’ vertical discourse. Teacher and student communication realises mainly horizontal discourse, i.e. context embedded everyday language. Classroom communication provides few opportunities for students to appropriate academic language through semantic waves, as academic language is only unpacked into everyday language and not repacked into academic language.