Language-aware subject teaching

Curriculum 21 lists the promotion of school language competencies as something all subject areas must address. This article reports on a further education offering for schools considering how this re-quirement can be implemented.
The school-based further education offering presented was developed by Zurich University of Teacher Education in cooperation with the FHNW School of Education. It is available to schools as part of QUIMS-component C, "Assessment and support with a focus on language", from 2019 to 2026.
This article explains how the school-based further education offering was co-designed as a joint initia-tive by external experts and representatives of the individual school. This is complemented by a dis-cussion of
aspects of language-aware subject teaching. In addition, the article shows how teachers work on the
quality of their pedagogical and methodological activities within the scope of school-based further ed-ucation. Concrete examples are drawn from kindergarten and primary teaching in the subject ‘NMG’ ("Nature, Man, Society").

Texts are a central medium in (subject) teaching at school. Understanding texts and tasks is essential for learning subject content in any lesson. Factual and technical texts frequently present difficulties for students dealing with their complex, specific demands and these difficulties are often considered a consequence of dealing with features of educational language. Attempts have therefore been made to simplify the surface linguistic features in factual and input texts for tasks. However, these studies revealed minimal to no effect on text comprehension.

In text comprehension, it is above all the interdependence between linguistic structures in texts on one hand and cognitive processes in reading on the other hand which must be taken into account. This article will make clear that the various cognitive levels involved in text comprehension must interact with the "text on paper" in order to arrive at a "text in the head" (Nussbaumer, 1991).

On the side of the text, the focus here is primarily on text coherence while on the side of the readers, the focus is on individual reading-related skills and abilities.

It is worth examining the comprehension of factual and specialised texts in detail so as to deal with texts in language-sensitive subject teaching as only then can we understand what obstacles are present and what support is possible.

Literacy practices are changing in the digital context. Today's students are developing skills that are crucial for life in society, namely the reception and the digital and multimodal production of information. At the heart of these changes are teachers who are themselves acquiring these competences and identifying problems and needs in connection with their teaching. This article reports on the action research project MultiNumériC (2020-2023), in which eight teachers at primary and secondary levels in Québec jointly developed, tested and optimised pedagogical settings for promoting the development of digital and literacy competences for three subjects: art, French and social studies. After contextualising the research project, we explain the principles behind the co-creation of the tools and supply an overview of the initial critical feedback received from the teachers involved.

Reading literary texts is one of the fundamental activities characterising language learning in school. Such texts have to be accessible to learners; that is, they have to be able to read and understand them. Recent theoretical debate has vacillated between opting for authentic texts – which can be too complex – and simplified texts, which alter the original text, at times not even easing comprehension and readability. One alternative to these options is controlled writing, a tool that allows authors to write texts at a level difficulty adapted to the abilities of the readers and which therefore require no simplification before being read in a class of learners of Italian as a foreign language (or ‘L2’). The project of the Alta Scuola Pedagogica dei Grigioni (ASPGR) "in dentro e in fuori - Antologia letteraria per la scuola" is situated in this theoretical context and brings together eighteen texts by authors from the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland aimed at learners of Italian as a foreign language. Throughout the process of writing the texts, the authors were accompanied by an academic group and by the practical experience of two Italian teachers working in secondary schools, who pointed out further elements to be linguistically simplified in order to make the stories more accessible. This article introduces the project, situates it in the theoretical framework and analyses the linguistic development of texts at various stages of writing and simplification.

This article outlines the sociolinguistic features of Italian in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland and presents the results of a questionnaire on the perception of linguistic school-related regionalisms of a group of students of primary teaching which was implemented at the Department of Education and Learning at SUPSI (University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland). These constitute the first results of the project Repertorio lessicale dei regionalismi d'uso scolastico della Svizzera italiana (A lexical repertoire of school regionalisms in Italian-speaking Switzerland) which grew out of a joint endeavour by SUPSI's Department of Education and Learning and the Osservatorio linguistico della Svizzera italiana. The project aims to promote the Italian of Switzerland in Ticino (ISIT) in the school context and to fight disapproving or even sanctioning attitudes to this language variety based on prejudice in the area of register or language variety.

When subject and language learning are linked in language-aware subject teaching, language education is at the service of subject learning (section 1). To support text comprehension in Biology classes, learners should acquire (meta-)cognitive knowledge of reading strategies, as well as practising reading strategies and using them regularly (section 2). What remains largely unknown, however, is the role reading strategies actually play in Biology lessons from the learners' perspective (section 3). To answer this question, fifth grade learners at German secondary schools were interviewed about their Biology lessons (section 4). The results show that reading strategies are used fairly infrequently and that teachers tend to teach these implicitly rather than explicitly. It is also revealing that domain-specific reading comprehension and the degree of learner familiarity with reading strategies influence classroom perceptions of the teaching and use of reading strategies, and that metacognitive strategies are employed largely to check comprehension of subject matter (section 5). We discuss how findings from the learners' perspective relate to strategy recommendations for science teaching (section 6) and to what extent research on reading strategies (in subject-specific pedagogy) could be developed further (section 7).

Scientific phenomena and practical scientific work can be accessed without language, but at the same time the two areas also offer a range of opportunities for speaking. For this reason they provide a good opportunity to acquire further linguistic competencies, especially for students with weaker language skills. Furthermore, the role played by language in the learning of scientific and technical concepts should not be underestimated. On one hand, students should increasingly use technical language as they progress through school. On the other hand, the concepts of scientific and technical phenomena which children and adolescents bring to NMG or NT lessons are shaped not only by their own experiences but also by everyday language, a language which is not always compatible with technical language.

To begin with, the article presents in section 1 the fundamentals of language support in science lessons, considering also basic competencies, Curriculum 21 and the role of teachers. Next, section 2 examines everyday and technical language as well as technical terms and forms of representation in science teaching. Section 3 then focuses on the role of language in practical science work. This is followed by a discussion of the promotion of language in science teaching materials, which also includes concrete examples of how these can be implemented. The article closes with a fifth section which offers a conclusion on linking subject and language learning.

This article presents the analysis of a group interview with four teachers who, two years previously, had participated in a collaborative research project involving learners aged 9 to 11 and concerned with language (especially spoken) for learning and the teaching of grammar. The goal of the interviews was to establish what the teachers had understood about this specific use of language – which differs from everyday language usage – and to discover what actions they take to promote its learning and to assist learners in stance-taking in the grammar classroom. The analysis deals with visible features of discourse around grammar in utterances made by the two teachers as well as identifiable strategies they use in teaching as well as their perceptions of student stance-taking in the grammar classroom. We also try to identify the teachers’ own stance in relation to knowledge, language and grammar. Finally, we enquire about the transfer of grammar-related teaching practices to other knowledge in grammar and about the implementation of similar considerations in other subjects.

This paper deals with mathematical terminology in the context of mathematics pedagogy, adopting an interdisciplinary perspective connected with the Italian language. To understand the characteristics of the language of mathematics and the difficulties it presents, it is essential to follow a synergetic approach because this makes it possible to clarify phenomena, reasoning, and critical points. In the first sections of the article we outline the features of mathematical language before focusing on lexis. More specifically, we concentrate on "misleading" words, polysemous items that evoke a variety of meanings, and not only mathematical ones, in students’ minds. If not explicitly addressed, these can affect how students construct mathematical concepts. We use empirical data to reflect on these concepts and to outline possible ways for a common pedagogical approach.

This article analyses statements made by teachers from French-speaking Switzerland who participated in the 2019 public reading of The Iliad held in many venues as part of the European Festival of Greek and Latin. As we will see, these teachers prepared two groups of students for the performance that the public reading represents by means of teaching scenarios which call on the notion of the "detour across other languages and cultures". This will therefore be the focus of this paper, which is divided into four sections. The first describes the research context; the second draws on the literature to define the notion of the ‘detour’; the third analyses the teacher interviews where the teaching scenarios are described; and the last section offers a concluding discussion of the notion of the ‘detour’ in the light of the data analysed, and identifies four typologies: detours across culture, across linguistic forms, across text structure and across the performative dimension.