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Syftet med denna studie är att bidra med kunskap om de effekter lärare som deltagit i det regeringsinitiativ i form av kompetensutvecklingssatsningen Språk- och kunskapsutvecklande arbetssätt (SKUA) upplever att satsningen har haft på användningen av ämnesspråk i svenskundervisningen. Detta har undersökts genom att samla in och analysera exit tickets som de deltagande lärarna fått fylla i, i anslutning till de träffar som genomförts under satsningen, samt genom att genomföra kvalitativa intervjuer. Intervjuerna var av semistrukturerad form där informanterna givits möjligheten att svara fritt för att på bästa sätt få förmedla sina egna erfarenheter och upplevelser av SKUA. Allt material från datainsamlingen har analyserats och bearbetats med hjälp av den vetenskapliga analysmetoden fenomenografi och studiens teoretiska utgångspunkter grundar sig i läroplansteoretiska perspektiv på kunskap, samt begreppet scaffolding. Med stöd i tidigare forskning skildras ämnesspråkets betydelse vid bedömning och betygssättning, där ökade ämnesspråkliga kunskaper anses bidraga till elevers ökade måluppfyllelse. Studiens resultat synliggör att lärare upplever att SKUA har bidragit tillatt de har utvecklat en medvetenhet om det samband som finns mellan språk- och kunskapsutveckling. Denna medvetenhet förväntas enligt lärarna bidra till ett på sikt ökat användande av ämnesspråk i svenskundervisningen. The purpose of this study is to contribute knowledge about the effects that teachers who participated in the governmental competence development initiative Language- and knowledge development methods (SKUA), experience that this initiative has had on the use of subject specific language in swedish language education. This has been investigated by analyzing exit tickets that the participating teachers was asked to fill in, in the end of the meetings during the initiative, as well as through qualitative interviews. The semi-structured interviews gave the participants the opportunity to answer freely, in order to best convey their own experiences of SKUA. All material from the data collection has been analyzed and processed through thescientific analysis method phenomenography, and the study’s theoretical framework are based on curriculum theory perspectives, as well as the concept of scaffolding. Based on earlierresearch, the importance of the subject specific language in assessment and grading is stated, where increased knowledge of subject specific language is considered to contribute to students’increased goal achievement. The results of the study show that teachers experience that SKUA has contributed to their develop of an increasingly growing awareness of the connection between subject specific language and knowledge development. According to the teachers, this awareness is expected to contribute to an increased use of subject specific language in swedish language education in the long term.

The role of skills in the language of instruction for mathematics learning is well established by longitudinal studies at the primary school level. Explanations for these relations lead to the question: are they mostly due to general, domain-overarching language skills, or does the command of subject-specific language registers play an important role? Integrating prior research threads, we propose two instruments to measure subject-specific language skills in mathematics: One measuring mathematical vocabulary, and one measuring mathematical text comprehension. We report on a longitudinal study withN = 237 German grade 3 students, which investigated the predictive value of these instruments beyond prior arithmetic skills, general language skills, and control variables such as general cognitive skills and socio-economic status on students’ later arithmetic skills. We applied a multidimensional assessment model to measure arithmetic skills. Apart from replicating the prominent role of general language skills found in earlier studies, our results indicate a substantial, additional role of subject-specific language skills for the development of mathematics skills. These relations could be identified for knowledge of mathematical vocabulary, as well as for mathematical text comprehension. The results indicate that fostering subject-specific language skills already at the primary school level is not only one of many goals of mathematics instruction, but is a core prerequisite to supporting mathematical skill acquisition.

The project has been implemented as teacher driven action research, where subject-specific reading was studied in classroom practitioners and analyzed by using Legitimation Code Theory (LCT). The purpose was, partly to research which linguistic domains the teachers used in the part detailed reading in Reading to Learn (R2L) and how the discursive movement looked, and partly if progression could be seen during a school year and in that case, how it affected the educators’ teaching. Participating in the study were four teachers working in a Swedish gymnasium: a chemistry teacher and a teacher of social studies, who were working in academic preparatory programs and a teacher in Swedish as a second language and a teacher in history in one of the introductory programs. The leader of the project and author of this study is also a teacher and colleague to the participants. Totally, twelve observations of detailed reading were implemented: three observations each teacher during one academic year. The most prominent characteristic of the project was how the teachers, by becoming aware of the linguistic domains, changed their way of using detailed reading and by using the discursive movement, they were able to make semantic waves. The experience of the teachers was that through the action research they received new tools to develop their subject-specific reading and therefore the students’ language and knowledge increased which contributed to a higher object achievement. Notable was that all students seemed to benefit from detailed reading, even the high performing and/or the students with Swedish as their native language. The result of this study may be relevant to studies on how to augment classroom practices to better implement the subject-specific reading which may lead to change for both teachers and students, regardless of students’ language and knowledge level, stage, or subject.

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

This chapter compares two teachers’ definitional practices in two Content-and-Language-Integrated-Learning (CLIL) lessons, i.e. physics and history, which are taught in English in Finland. It adopts Dalton-Puffer’s (Eur J Appl Linguistics 1(2):216–253, 2013; Cognitive discourse functions: specifying an integrative interdisciplinary construct. In: Nikula T, Dafouz E, Moore P, Smit U (eds) Conceptualising integration in CLIL and multilingual education. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, pp. 29–54, 2016) theoretical construct of cognitive discourse functions (CDF) and showcases how it can be operationalized with empirical grounding. Multimodal conversation analysis (CA) is used to trace and observe how the teachers employ various multimodal resources in performing definitions of key concepts in classroom interaction, whereby they make the conceptual field related to the lessons’ topic accessible to the students. The study has two aims. First, it describes the similarities and differences in the teachers’ definitional practices and thereby contributes to our emerging understanding of what subject-specific language comprises when approached from an interactional perspective. In doing so, it also provides new insights into the relationship between content and language not only in L2, but also in L1 teaching. Second, by proposing a ‘pedagogical reflection tool’ that is based on the repeated and comparative practice of viewing either videos or transcripts, it illustrates methods to help raise and broaden teachers’ awareness of the notion of subject-specific language and of the relevance of multimodal resources in teaching. The findings can thus serve as a stepping-stone for pre- and/or in-service teacher training, which is not meant to provide ‘recipes’ of how definitions ought to be done, but rather to demonstrate how locally situated, yet recognizable teachers’ definitional practices are. As such, they are also transportable and adaptable to different situations across different subjects.

This study investigates subject teachers’ practical knowledge and teaching behaviour regarding integrated language teaching in the context of vocational education. The emphasis was on the nature of teachers’ subject-specific language awareness and how they enact this awareness in their teaching practice. For this purpose, teachers in vocational education were interviewed and observed while teaching. The results reveal that teachers differ in their subject-specific language awareness. Some teachers are unaware of the relation between language and learning, while others are aware of this relation and feel responsible towards their students’ language proficiency. Teachers who feel this responsibility stimulate students’ active language use and use more advanced interaction strategies to promote students’ higher cognitive thinking. The results of this study indicate that raising subject teachers’ language awareness needs to be part of activities for teacher professional development.

In this paper we discuss the outcomes of our research into effective teaching strategies to enhance understanding of subject specific language by international and non-traditional students. Teaching strategies with an emphasis on improving scientific literacy were trialled over the course of the academic year 2010/11 in foundation level chemistry. The outcomes from this research led to the development of an E-glossary to support the development of subject language understanding. The E-glossary was trialled over the academic year 2011/12. It consists of student generated content (with over 100 contributions) explaining scientific terms and concepts in a variety of ways at an appropriate level for foundation students. The outcomes of this research are considered in relation to the development of scientific literacy and conceptual understanding.

Research in Australian schools in the 1980s and 1990s (Christie 1989; Derewianka 1991; Gibbons 1995) has suggested that in the primary years teachers have been too reliant on the ‘recount’ genre – that is, the use of a narrative structure in pupils’ writing. More recent research in the UK has suggested that pupils do not have an explicit understanding or experience of the different genres they may be asked to use other than narrative (Davies 1996). However, the National Curriculum English Orders (DfE 1995b: 15) are quite explicit, stating that at Key Stage 2: ‘Pupils should be given opportunities to write for varied purposes . . . They should be taught to use writing as a means of developing, organising and communicating ideas . . . The forms in which they write should include non-fiction e.g. reports, instructions, explanations, notes, letters.’ Moreover, ‘they should be taught to use features of layout and presentation’ (la, 1c). In reading, they are required to ‘read and use a wide range of sources of information . . . including information technology-based reference materials, newspapers, encyclopaedias, dictionaries’ (1c, ibid.: 13). These orders have clear implications for the teaching of writing in history, as do the requirements for speaking and listening, where ‘Pupils should be given opportunities to talk for a range of purposes’ (la), many of which seem to be particularly relevant to their development as historians: ‘exploring, developing and explaining ideas, planning, predicting and investigating, sharing ideas . . . and opinions, reporting and describing events and observations, presenting to audiences’ (1a, ibid.: 11).

This study reports on a Professional Development Program (PDP) designed to raise teachers' subject-specific language awareness (TSLA) as a relevant and specific element of their practical knowledge and improve their language integrated teaching behaviour. The design of the PDP was based on the interconnected model of teacher professional growth (Clarke & Hollingsworth, 2002). Data were collected using semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, and video-stimulated interviews. The PDP resulted in change in both teachers' subject-specific language awareness and related teaching behaviour. Teachers' sense of responsibility to address students' language learning appeared to be relevant for teachers' change of behaviour.

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

Today’s modern society is multicultural, school is therefore a meeting place for pupils withdifferent experiences, prior knowledge, and mother tongue. Second language students whohave not yet developed good skills in various subject languages, face several challenges inupper secondary school. To succeed in different school subjects these students need todevelop language that is specialized for each school subject. The purpose of this study is toexamine how social science teachers in the upper secondary school experience and work withsecond language students who have difficulties with content-based language. The appliedmethod in the study is qualitative interviews. The theoretical framework is based on differentconcepts of literacy to analyze the results. The results in this study show that the teachers useboth similar and different methods to develop second language students’ understanding ofconcepts, reading, and writing skills, subject language, and subject knowledge. However,several differences between teachers’ perceptions and approaches are also discerned. Theteachers in this study understand the importance of placing the language in focus within thesubject, however some of the teachers experience difficulties with integrating language andsubject into the teaching.

Introduction: Language learners’ discourse, the theme of this volume, is approached in this chapter from the viewpoint of content and language integrated learning, known as CLIL (e.g. Coyle, Hood & Marsh 2010). The context is Finland, with data from secondary level history classes taught in English. More specifically, this chapter explores learner discourse in a hitherto underexplored context: group-work situations where students are involved in peer discussions without the presence of the teacher. While reaching a research-based understanding of the dynamics of teacher-student interaction in CLIL settings continues to be important for the whole CLIL enterprise and a goal worth pursuing further, it is also worthwhile to direct an analytical gaze at group-work situations and at learners’ joint processes of negotiation and interaction, because we know less about the value of these contexts for learning. What further characterizes this chapter is that rather than focusing on how students learn or how well they master the target language as a system (i.e. paying attention to the correctness of formal aspects of language), the purpose is to explore what students’ group-work interaction reveals about content and language integration, a crucial concern in CLIL given its dual and overlapping goals. In so doing, it seeks to investigate students’ joint processes of meaning making and the extent to which their discursive practices reveal any orientation to subject-specific language use. The focus is thus on the very notion of subject and language integration, how students co-construct understanding of a subject-specific activity, and the type of language this requires. Theoretically, the study is based on a discourse-pragmatic orientation to interaction which emphasizes both the necessity of situated exploration of the details of talk and attention to the social-interpersonal dimensions inherent in any communicative encounter (for more details, see Nikula 2005, 2008). As regards the approach to learning, the study draws on socio-constructivist understandings of learning, according to which it is useful to see learning as social accomplishment and meaning making as a joint construction rather than a process undertaken solely by individuals (e.g. Lantolf & Poehner 2008). 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.

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