Volume 2 (2019): Edition 1 (December 2019)

Increase in migration around the world has put a focus on the role language plays in the construction of knowledge across school subjects, as attention to language can support diverse learners in subject area learning. Drawing on the notions of register and grammatical metaphor from systemic functional linguistics, this article shows how nouns are powerful resources for knowledge construction and presentation that vary in the ways they are drawn on in different disciplines for functional purposes. In addition, it shows how developmentally, children move from elaboration and expansion of the noun group toward abstraction and grammatical metaphor through nominalization. Examples from language arts, science, and history/social studies illustrate the roles nouns, noun groups, and nominalization play in constructing knowledge at different age levels and in different subject areas. Implications for pedagogy are drawn.

Self-regulated reading is an effective approach to foster reading comprehension, but many teachers are insecure about how to support strategic reading in natural classrooms. For a successful implementation of self-regulated reading into language and content area teaching discipline-specific strategy-oriented reading instruction has to be defined. This study analyzes teachers’ perspectives (N = 231) on the instruction of self-regulated reading in German language teaching, biology, and mathematics classes. The study reveals subject differences (e.g. the frequency of cognitive strategies in class), but also commonalities between subjects (e.g. the instruction of cognitive strategies and the frequency of metacognitive strategies, the activation of resource management strategies). The perspective on teachers’ discipline-specific reading instruction sheds light on content-specific as well as also cross-curricular reading instruction routines.

Giving effective instructional explanations is one of the most important teacher competences. Recent didactic literature provides, however, little insight on teacher explanations. In our previous work we developed guidelines for designing comprehensible explanations in the field of business (teacher) education, which are along general lines transferable to other subject areas and target audiences. In this article, we first compare our guidelines to the state of research in general and mathematics didactics. We then investigate their applicability to teaching operations research at university level, based on interviews with professors of the international operations research community.

This paper introduces a novel teacher training format, the “Teaching and Learning Laboratory-Seminar” (TLL-S) which was first implemented at Freie Universität Berlin in 2016. The TLL-S serves as a response to the demand for both more and better field experiences during early teacher training. There is strong evidence to assume that field experience is most effective when linked to such theory inputs perceived by trainees as relevant and embedded into reflective field experiences. Thus, the TLL-S-intiatives delineated here were designed according to a common framework defining a fixed set of consecutive steps allowing teacher trainees to first familiarize themselves with didactic theories, exploring them in a sphere of reduced complexity, and eventually reflecting their experiences. Consequently, the main objective of this paper is to trace and report the effects of the TLL-S on teacher trainees’ self-efficacy development and perception of ‘relevance of theoretical contents for practice’ in four subject domains (i.e. didactics of English, History, Physics, and Primary Education). Preliminary results indicate that complexity reduction of the practice environment provided by the TLL-S allegedly stabilizes teacher trainees’ self-efficacy even after repeated field experiences across all subject domains. Furthermore, ‘relevance of theoretical contents for practice’ was rated higher for the TLL-S than for previous university training formats.

Although CLIL streams have shown to have desirable learning outcomes, the less known option of implementing CLIL modules is under-represented in empirical research. This is unsurprising as the guidelines regarding this concept are vague compared to programmes that are already firmly and internationally established making it particularly difficult to investigate. However, studying CLIL modules may offer unknown insights into overlooked effects of bilingual teaching when the selection process of eligible students is ignored. This is particularly true for the attitudinal and emotional level of engagement of the students learning in such a setting. Therefore, the present study looks at affective differences caused by a CLIL stream and module intervention, and more particularly at variations within the CLIL module. Although there are some accounts for expected variation, we find conflicting evidence regarding the benefits of CLIL modules.

Stereotypes are simplifications of complex characteristics of groups of persons and are common and widespread through media as well as everyday experiences. Especially regarding occupational groups stereotypes can be a problem because many young people base their occupational choices on these simplified conceptions. It is thus important to comprehensively depict scientists´ fields of activities. Therefore, we categorized typical scientific activities into the so-called RIASEC+N dimensions. Based on these dimensions, we investigated the self-perceptions of junior scientists (n = 92) and professors (n = 10) about their own work and compared these perceptions with the perceptions of school students ranging from grades 10 – 13 (n = 244). The results show differences between some scientific activity fields for the three groups. For example, students tend to underestimate creative and social aspects of typical scientists´ work fields and hold rather stereotypical views. Thus, interventions to promote an authentic image of science are needed.

To overcome language challenges in subject-matter school achievement, mainstream teachers of all subjects are requested to foster students’ academic language proficiency in subject-matter classrooms without being systematically prepared for this job, for instance, for the question what kind of language demands count as relevant in their classroom. The study investigates how 223 secondary mathematics teachers analyze students’ written explanations in a diagnostic activity aimed at unpacking the language demands they identify as relevant. The study reveals that teachers activate a large variety of different diagnostic categories, and many teachers focus on language demands that are too peripheral to subject-matter learning. These teachers’ unproductive focus seems to be connected to their language-related orientations, which were captured in a questionnaire. The statistical analysis of the data shows some language-related orientations are significantly connected to the activation of more suitable categories. Thus, which language demands teachers notice and value in students’ mathematical explanations seems to influence whether they assume responsibility for language learning. Consequences for professional development are discussed.

The promotion of learning motivation is a central task of all school subjects. Literature education is expected to promote reading motivation in particular. To meet this expectation, different concepts in literature learning and teaching have been proposed. However, to date little empirical evidence exists of a direct and maybe causal relationship between reading motivation and teacher action. The TAMoLi study (Texts, Activities, and Motivations in Literature Education) uses a multi-level analysis to examine the connection between reading motivation of Swiss and German students at lower secondary level on the one hand, and the aims and actions of teachers in the literature classroom on the other (N_students = 2.017, N_classes = 116). The results suggest that students’ reading motivation is not directly related to teachers’ self-reported aims and actions. Instead, how motivated the students are to read is influenced much more by students’ perception of teachers’ aims and actions – in particular, by students’ perception of teachers’ student-oriented aims. These findings add to evidence on student motivation in mathematics and second language learning and teaching.

Teacher judgments of student achievement influence how effectively students learn and how teachers organize their lessons. Teachers’ diagnostic competence is therefore an important field of research for subject-specific teaching and learning. This study investigates how pre-service English teachers assess complex learner essays using assessment rubrics. In particular, it explores whether instructional videos are effective in minimizing distortion effects in essay assessment by raising participants’ awareness about them. English pre-service teachers (N = 81) in Switzerland and Germany assessed four argumentative essays of varying lexical and overall quality. Prior to the assessment task, the treatment group saw a ten-minute video about how to assess vocabulary, while the control group watched a video about general aspects of assessment. In their judgments, pre-service teachers recognized higher/lower overall quality and higher/lower lexical quality. More importantly, the results showed significant effects of the variation in lexical quality on other text characteristics, indicating halo effects. These effects were similar in both groups, suggesting that the video instruction on its own was no safeguard against distortion effects in essay assessment. Implications for teacher education and further research are discussed.