The article examines student teachers' pedagogical language knowledge. The analysis is based on data from an applied task in which Finnish student teachers (n D 221) of 16 school subjects assessed second language (SL) learners' writing skills. First, we briefly discuss subject teachers' role in language and literacy teaching in the multilingual and multicultural classroom. Our findings indicate that the student teachers use a range of criteria but focus mainly on word-level assessment when assessing writing samples, and that their assessment orientation varies from technical to analytical. Finally, we discuss the challenges of developing teacher education to promote pedagogical language knowledge across the curriculum.
In multilingual learning settings, in order to provide optimal learning conditions for all learners and support both disciplinary and language knowledge development, subject teachers need knowledge on and understanding of how language is used to construct meanings in their discipline and how to scaffold learning from the premise of learners’ current skills. In this article, we report a descriptive case study of two teaching interventions carried out in pre-service subject teacher practice. Student teachers of science and ethics collaborated with student teachers of Finnish language and literature to plan and implement thematic units that focused on particular disciplinary phenomena and the language and project skills needed in exploring those phenomena in a multilingual and multicultural teaching setting. Audio-recorded planning sessions and interviews of teacher students were analysed using thematic analysis and discourse analysis to identify emerging discourses reflecting their pedagogical language knowledge. The student teachers seemed to approach language mainly as bounded sets of linguistic resources, and various means for meaning-making were used to a large extent separately without strategic consideration. Spoken language in particular was unconscious, unanalysed, and considered a self-explanatory means for meaning-making.
The article deals with diagnostic assessment conducted in the Finnish language and literature course for classroom teacher students. The research context was a hybrid learning environment, where the students evaluated both their linguistic and pedagogical competence using a self-assessment tool. The research questions were 1) what kind of linguistic competence the students showed in the beginning of the course, 2) how the results of linguistic competence and self-assessment were related, and 3) how the final grade of Finnish language and literature and the matriculation examination test of Finnish predicted the results of a diagnostic test. The data of the pilot research consisted of the results of a diagnostic test of 127 students and their self-assessment based on a five-step criterion-referenced scale. The research was quantitative and statistical methods were used in the analysis. The results showed that there were statistically reliable connections between the results of the self-assessment and the diagnostic test. With the help of the test, it is possible to assess different areas of students’ linguistic competence to some extent reliably.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.