In post-Bologna Europe, there has been a noticeable increase in English-medium instruction. In this article we take the case of Sweden as an illustrative example of the wider disciplinary issues ...involved in changing the teaching language in this way. By 2008 the use of English in Swedish higher education had risen to such an extent that it had to be regulated at the governmental level and through university language policies. Such policies have attempted to provide generalised pragmatic guidelines for language use across educational programmes. In this paper we argue that such general policies fail to take into consideration fundamental disciplinary differences and their potential impact on language use. We present a theoretical argument about the knowledge structures of disciplines, relating these to the disciplinary literacy goals of educational programmes. We then illustrate our argument using data from an extensive survey carried out at a major Swedish university. We conclude that the disciplinary variation in the use of English can be seen as a product of different knowledge-making practices and educational goals. This conclusion problematises "one-size-fits-all" language policies which only deal with general features of language use and do not allow for discipline-specific adjustments.(HRK / Abstract übernommen).
This study documents the experiences of Swedish university lecturers when theychange from teaching in their first language to teaching in English. Eighteenlecturers from two Swedish universities took ...part in a training course for teacherswho need to give content courses in English. As part of the course theparticipants gave mini-lectures in their first language in a subject area that theyusually teach. The following week, the lecturers gave the same lectures again, thistime in English. The pairs of lectures were videoed and commented on by thelecturers themselves and the whole course cohort in an online discussion forum(an input of approximately 60 000 words). In addition, twelve of the lecturerswere interviewed about their experiences of changing language in this way (totalof 4 hours of recorded material). The paper presents a qualitative analysis of thethoughts and experiences expressed by the lecturers in their online discussionsand in the interviews concerning the process of changing the language ofinstruction to English. These results are presented as nine themes. Ninerecommendations for teachers changing to teaching in English are alsopresented. The findings replicate those of earlier studies with one notableexception: the lecturers in this study were acutely aware of their limitations whenteaching in English. It is suggested that this may be due to the lecturers’ relativeinexperience of English-medium instruction.
This paper analyses the ability of twenty-one physics undergraduates at two Swedish universities to orally describe and explain in both Swedish and English the science concepts met in their lectures. ...This ability is related back to the language used to teach the concepts (English, Swedish or both languages). Transcripts of student descriptions in both languages are rated using three measures:1. Fluency (in terms of syllables per second and mean length of runs)2. Code-switching3. A judgment about the ‘disciplinarity’ of what is said.Comparison between languages finds that students speak on average 45% slower and have 33% shorter runs in their English descriptions. However, these differences in speaking rate and run length become much lower (28% and 26% respectively) in those transcripts where students appear to have adequately understood the concepts that were presented in the lectures. These latter values are in line with findings in comparative studies of other types of speech event (See Hincks 2010). Analysis of code-switching identifies some students (n=3) who have great difficulty describing disciplinary concepts in English. These were first year students and were being taught in English for the first time. It is thus concluded that for some students disciplinary English is indeed a problem. However, from a disciplinary point of view, all other students give similarly good (or bad) descriptions of physics concepts in both Swedish and English, regardless of the language used in the lectures.
In this paper we are interested in the relationship between disciplinary knowledge and its representation. We carry out a social semiotic analysis of a central tool used in astronomy-the ...Hertzsprung-Russell (H-R) diagram-in order to highlight its disciplinary and pedagogical affordances. The H-R diagram that we know today combines many layers of astronomical knowledge, whilst still retaining some rather quirky traces of its historical roots. Our analysis shows how these 'layers of knowledge' and 'historical anomalies' have resulted in a number of counterintuitive aspects within the diagram that have successively lowered its pedagogical affordance. We claim that these counterintuitive aspects give rise to potential barriers to student disciplinary learning. Using our analysis as a case study, we generalise our findings, suggesting four types of barrier to understanding that are potentially at work when students meet disciplinary-specific semiotic resources for the first time. We finish the paper by making some general suggestions about the wider use of our analysis method and ways of dealing with any barriers to learning identified. In the specific case of the H-R diagram, we suggest that lecturers should explicitly tease out its disciplinary affordances by the use of 'unpacked' resources that have a higher pedagogical affordance. Keywords: Disciplinary affordance, Pedagogical affordance, Graphs, Disciplinary learning, Astronomy education, Social semiotics
From a disciplinary discourse perspective, all university courses can be said to involve content and language integrated learning (CLIL) even in monolingual settings. Clearly, however, things become ...much more complex when two or more languages are involved in teaching and learning. The aim of this paper is to introduce readers to the linguistic situation in Swedish universities, where two languages--English and Swedish--are commonly used in the teaching and learning of a number of disciplines. The paper describes the linguistic landscape of Swedish higher education and presents an illustrative case study from a single discipline (physics) with a hierarchical knowledge structure (Bernstein 1999). Semi-structured interviews were carried out with ten physics lecturers from four Swedish universities. The lecturers were asked about their disciplinary language-learning expectations for their students. These interviews were analysed using qualitative methods inspired by the phenomenographic approach. Six main themes resulting from the analysis are presented and discussed. From a CLIL perspective, one recurring theme is that none of the lecturers saw themselves as teachers of disciplinary Swedish or English. The paper concludes by discussing the generalizability of the findings to other disciplines with similar (hierarchical) knowledge structures. (Contains 3 figures.)
This theoretical article problematizes the access to disciplinary knowledge that different physics representations have the possibility to provide; that is, their disciplinary affordances . It is ...argued that historically such access has become increasingly constrained for students as physics representations have been rationalized over time. Thus, the case is made that such rationalized representations, while powerful for communication from a disciplinary point of view, manifest as learning challenges for students. The proposal is illustrated using a vignette from a student discussion in the physics laboratory about circuit connections for an experimental investigation of the charging and discharging of a capacitor. It is concluded that in order for students to come to appreciate the disciplinary affordances of representations, more attention needs to be paid to their “unpacking.” Building on this conclusion, two questions are proposed that teachers can ask themselves in order to begin to unpack the representations that they use in their teaching. The paper ends by proposing directions for future research in this area.
In this paper we discuss the role of transduction in the teaching and learning of science. We video-filmed pairs of upper-secondary physics students working with a laboratory task designed to ...encourage transduction (Bezemer & Kress, 2008). The students were simply instructed to use a hand-held electronic measurement device (IOLab) to find the direction of the Earth's magnetic field and mark its direction using a paper arrow. A full multimodal transcription of the student interaction was made. In our analysis of this transcription we identify three separate transductions of meaning. In particular, we observed that student transduction of meaning to the paper arrow allowed it to function as both a persistent placeholder for all the meaning making that had occurred up until that point and as a coordinating hub for further meaning making. Our findings lead us to recommend that teachers interrogate the set of resources necessary for appropriate disciplinary knowledge construction in the tasks they present to students. Here, teachers should think carefully about whether the introduction of a persistent placeholder would be useful and in that case what this placeholder could be. We also suggest that teachers should think about what persistent resource may function as a coordinating hub for the students. Finally, we suggest that teachers should be on the lookout for student transductions to new semiotic resources in their classrooms as a sign that learning is taking place. We claim that the constraining and complementary nature of transduction offers a good opportunity for teachers to check student understanding, since disciplinary meanings need to be coherent across semiotic systems (modes). Keywords: disciplinary affordance, pedagogical affordance, transduction, coordinating hub, placeholder, critical constellation, multimodal discourse analysis
The idea for this special issue of Designs for Learning emerged during the 8sup.th International Conference on Multimodality (8ICOM), held in Cape Town in December 2016. During that conference, a ...special stream of papers was organised, all of which addressed the question of science and/or engineering teaching from a multimodal perspective. In this editorial we discuss the issue of multimodal access to science and engineering and introduce the papers in the special issue. Keywords: multimodality, access to science, equity, science education, engineering education
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