Volume 10, Issue 1

New adolescent migrants from Arabic-speaking countries face complex challenges when participating in regular mathematics classes in Germany: They have been educated in their family language(s) and are obliged to adapt to a new (second or target) language and to different styles of teaching. In contrast, 3 rd generation multilingual students, who usually are schooled in German only, have rarely ever used their family languages in mathematics. This poses different challenges for the introduction of multilingual teaching and learning. By comparing German-Turkish 3 rd generation students and adolescent refugees from Arabic speaking countries, both in 7 th grade, this paper argues for the epistemic importance of considering “multilingual profiles” (i. e. including individual languages and history of migration) for linguistic analyses as well as for didactical designs of learning opportunities. For this purpose, a functional pragmatic discourse analysis of transcribed video-data from bilingual mathematics sessions with up to four multilingual students was conducted. This allows to characterize discursive multilingual profiles and to distinguish different perspectives on and verbalizations of mathematical concepts (in this case: fractions) in classroom discourse. Furthermore, language-specific interfaces of mental and linguistic processes are unfolded which enable new insights into conceptual understanding. The analysis focusses on the languages German, Turkish and Arabic and on 7 th grade mathematics classes. The paper shows that the activation of multilingual resources in mathematics classrooms sets a promising approach for a sustainable integration of migrants, since they are enabled to use their subject-related knowledge which, in the long run, holds the potential support for the acquisition of the target language on a pre-academic level.

In the last decade, thousands of forcibly-displaced people have sought refuge in the Netherlands. Many of them are highly educated, and their integration into the host society’s labour market could improve their own quality of life as well as making a significant contribution to the country’s economy. However, refugees face many challenges in their search for employment. This is the first exploratory study of the role that professional intercultural communicative competence (PICC) plays in highly-educated refugees’ integration in the Dutch labour market. Interviews and focus groups were used to collect data from refugees who had already successfully integrated into the Dutch workforce as well as from newcomers who were still in the process of achieving this. Content analysis was performed on the data, using rounds of deductive and inductive coding and analysis. The findings indicate that the development of PICC (including resilience) plays an important role in helping refugees overcome the challenges they face. The article discusses the implications of the findings – should they generalise – in terms of PICC training offered to refugees themselves (as part of their language courses) and to professionals who work with them, with the aim of facilitating and promoting the refugees’ labour market integration.

This study uses an interdisciplinary approach to explore the interplay of linguistic and subject-matter learning. Drawing on previous linguistic work on discourse and genre acquisition, subject-matter teaching as well as the convergence of linguistic and content learning in multilingual classrooms, the study seeks to examine the following questions: (1) How can patterns of classroom talk support or hinder the acquisition of academic discourse competence and subject-matter learning? (2) How are these two learning domains related? The analyses of 120 video-recorded mathematics and German lessons in five classes (n=149 students, 10 teachers) in different German school types revealed two patterns of teacher-student-interaction, which differ in the participatory roles and the (language) learning opportunities they assign to the students. Two larger excerpts from mathematics-lessons are analyzed to illustrate the ways in which linguistic and content learning merge in the two patterns.

The present study attempts to propose a taxonomy for the discourse functions of importance markers in English academic lectures and examine their effects on ESL learners’ comprehension of important points in lectures. To this end, a corpus of 160 lecture transcripts from the BASE corpus was analyzed to identify and classify the main functions of words and expressions that mark importance in them. It was found that importance is indicated by the following lecture-specific devices and attributes: 1) student involvements, 2) topic announcers, 3) exam-related markers, 4) discourse clarifiers, 5) hedging markers, and 6) message promoters. A total of 62 Malaysian ESL students (38 females and 24 males) participated in this study and were divided into an experimental group and a control group, both of them of the same size. Through 12 forty-minute sessions of explicit instruction, the participants in the experimental group were instructed the discourse functions of importance markers in university lectures, whereas those in the control group did not receive such instruction. The result of the posttest of comprehension of important points indicated that familiarity with how importance is marked in lectures can boost ESL students’ understanding of main topics. The findings suggest that both novice lecturers and ESL/EFL students may profit from instruction as to how importance is indicated by native speaker lecturers through several lecture-specific discourse functions.

Research suggests that explicit pronunciation teaching improves second language speech production, but language teachers often lack the relevant knowledge to teach pronunciation. This study examined segmental error patterns in Finnish-accented English and the relationship between segmental errors and foreign accent ratings in two groups differing in amount of second language experience. Our study identified a number of common segmental error patterns in Finnish-accented English, which may guide formal pronunciation instruction. We further found that the sheer number of segmental errors in a sentence affected foreign accent ratings as did the number of vowel errors in a sentence. We speculate that the detrimental effect of vowel errors may be related to the finding that vowel errors resulted in non-English segments more often than consonant errors did. Finally, we found a facilitative effect of second language experience on foreign accent rating that cannot be reduced to number of segmental errors, despite the finding that number of consonant errors was reduced with increased second language experience.

The increasing importance of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) has led to research on the linguistic characteristics of its levels, as this would help the application of the CEFR in the design of teaching materials, courses, and assessments. This study investigated whether CEFR levels can be distinguished with reference to syntactic complexity (SC). 14- and 17-year-old Finnish learners of English (N=397) wrote three writing tasks which were rated against the CEFR levels. The ratings were analysed with multi-facet Rasch analysis and the texts were analysed with automated tools. Findings suggest that the clearest separators at lower CEFR levels (A1–A2) were the mean sentence and T-unit length, variation in sentence length, infinitive density, clauses per sentence or T-unit, and verb phrases per T-unit. For higher levels (B1–B2) they were modifiers per noun phrase, mean clause length, complex nominals per clause, and left embeddedness. The results support previous findings that the length of and variation in the longer production units (sentences, T-units) are the SC indices that most clearly separate the lower CEFR levels, whereas the higher levels are best distinguished in terms of complexity at the clausal and phrasal levels.

The concept of historical significance is seen as a key concept of historical reasoning. Assigning significance is based on criteria and related to the identity of who assigns significance. However, little is known about reasoning-, reading-, and writing processes when students attribute significance. The aim of this study is to investigate how students and experienced history teachers with a master’s degree reason, read, and write about historical significance while thinking aloud. We analyzed the think-aloud protocols of twelve 10th-grade students and four history teachers on reasoning, reading, and writing processes. While thinking aloud, participants read two contrasting accounts after which they wrote an argumentative text about the historical significance of Christopher Columbus. Analysis of participants’ think-aloud protocols and their written texts showed that students did not recognize historical accounts as perspectives—influenced by the historical context. In contrast, teachers looked for the authors’ judgement, evidence, and context. In addition, students’ limited use of metaknowledge regarding texts and the concept of historical significance hampered them. These out-comes provide direction for teaching reasoning, reading, and writing with respect to historical significance.