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Article published In:
Dutch Journal of Applied Linguistics
Vol. 6:2 (2017) ► pp.213–230

Academic language in elementary school mathematics

Academicness of teacher input during whole class instruction

| Fontys University for Applied Sciences
| Tilburg University
| Tilburg University
| Fontys University for Applied Sciences
| Tilburg University

Students who are proficient academic language (AL) users, achieve better in school. To develop students’ AL register teachers’ AL input is necessary. The goal of this study was to investigate the extent of AL features in the language input first and second grade teachers give their students in whole class mathematics instruction. Five key features could be distinguished: lexical diversity, lexical complexity, lexical specificity, syntactic complexity and textual complexity. Teachers used all features, but the amount in which they used them varied. While all teachers used lexical specific language when teaching mathematics, they did not use very complex language input. The academicness of teachers’ input was significantly higher in grade 2 than in grade 1 with respect to lexical diversity and lexical specificity. The input during explanation and discussion only differed with regard to textual complexity, which was higher during explanation.

Keywords: academic language, input, teacher, elementary school, mathematics instruction
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework
    • 2.1Academic language
    • 2.2Differences in AL input
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Instruments and procedure
    • 3.3Analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1AL Input
    • 4.2AL key features
    • 4.3Key features and background characteristics
  • 5.Conclusions
  • References
Published online: 30 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dujal.17007.dok
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