Negotiating language across disciplines in pre-service teacher collaboration

Abstract

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.

Content Subject Teachers’ Views of Implementing the English Across the Curriculum (EAC) Approach: A Study of Some South African High Schools

“…Contained in their descriptions of PCK as a challenge is their understanding of teaching knowledge from a sociocultural worldview. This aligns with the observation made by Huang (2011) and Aalto and Tarnanen (2017) acknowledging that teachers are producers of their own PCK, which they draw from both experiential and formal preparation. However, the EAC approach poses a challenge to the content subject teachers as they do not have prior experiences explicitly observing it being implemented in the classrooms.…”

“…The key to ensuring the effectiveness of learners' language development in ESL is the teacher (Aalto & Tarnanen, 2017). Drawing from sociocultural and dialogic orientations, Swart et al (2018) explain that, as an approach to ensure effective learning, there is a need to include within the teacher professional competence the knowledge to integrate linguistic skills and subject matter.…”

“…Although language is a critical component of content subject teaching and learning, it is "very much taken for granted both in practice and in educational research" (Svensson et al, 2009, p. 207). However, several researchers have indicated that the major challenges in the implementation of EAC are content subject teachers' preparation in it, their limited knowledge of linguistic skills, and the availability of teaching and learning resources for integrating content and language learning (Aalto & Tarnanen, 2017;Chionis et al, 2017;Kao, 2020;Karabassova, 2019Karabassova, , 2020.…”

“…Anita's pedagogical challenge in the lesson represents a curriculum design issue that could have been handled through an activity that stimulated learners' prior knowledge by means of pre-reading activities such as vocabulary development, questioning, or prediction, and the like. Anita's views on these challenges highlight that she lacks the experience to guide learners when reading lengthy contextual texts by introducing contentspecific vocabulary to aid comprehension and decoding skills to activate learners' prior knowledge (Aalto & Tarnanen, 2017;Alford & Windeyer, 2014). According to Rapetsoa and Singh (2017), these pre-reading activities activate learners' pre-existing concepts about the world and about the text, thus enhancing their comprehension.…”

“…The two teachers (Bee and Cee) who were intentionally practising the implementation of the EAC approach confirmed that the profession cannot be totally mastered. Indeed, it is a lifelong process of constructing knowledge and refining skills through classroom experiences (Aalto & Tarnanen, 2017).…”