Pre-service teachers linking their metalinguistic knowledge to their practice: a functional approach

Abstract

Existing work in Anglophone countries has raised concerns regarding teachers' knowledge about language (KAL); this may well be an issue in other countries also, with notable exceptions such as Finland. In Australia, with the introduction of the new Australian Curriculum, the question of teacher KAL has become crucial. Teachers, both practising and pre-service, generally have some knowledge about language as an object, usually including the text structures of particular school genres and information about sentence structure and word classes. This knowledge may be based on traditional grammar and may not be well applied above the sentence level. Teachers may also have an intuitive knowledge of discourse structures and are beginning to reflect on their own discourse using understandings of dialogic teaching. This paper provides an example of how first-year pre-service teachers (PSTs) were introduced to KAL at both the grammatical and the discourse levels, as part of an introductory unit on spoken language. A range of approaches was used, including a functional view of discourse. The PSTs then applied their KAL by putting it into a context that was meaningful for them: discussing their own practice. The paper gives an illustration of some of the work they produced that demonstrates their emerging understandings.

Analyzing Diverse Learners' Writing in Mathematics: Systemic Functional Linguistics in Secondary Pre-Service Teacher Education

“…Nevertheless, the professional expectations of secondary teachers in the United States and many international contexts increasingly include the design and implementation of curriculum that supports students in developing advanced disciplinary literacies (e.g., Gleeson, 2015;Gorgorió & Planas, 2001;Love, 2010;Morgan, 2001, regarding international contexts). Therefore, PSTs need professional development that explicitly targets their development of disciplinary linguistic knowledge to support students in constructing knowledge about mathematics in ways that are seen as successful (Thwaite, 2015). This means PSTs must develop an understanding of and ability to operationalize an awareness of how language constructs knowledge in their disciplines.…”

Semantic and Syntactic Fraction Understanding

“…Thus, limited content in the form of teaching only halves and quarters and the use of pre-partitioned manipulatives, could be contributory factors. Some studies also demonstrate that semantic alignment largely correlates with the learning of fractions (DeWolf et al, 2014;Kallai & Tzelgov, 2009;Park & Brannon, 2013Sasanguie et al, 2013;Schulze, 2016;Schleppegrell, 2007;Thwaite, 2015;Turkan, de Oliveira, Lee, & Phelps, 2014;van Lier & Walqui, 2012). Both children and adults find it easier and more natural to solve or construct semantically-aligned rather than misaligned word problems (DeWolf et al, 2014).…”