Abstract
This article focuses on the opportunities and challenges afforded by teacher talk in Grade Six (10 and 11 year old students) English as an Additional Language, Maths, and Science classes in an international school context in Germany. Teachers recorded their classroom discourse for one week of classes three times in one academic year in each subject. The data shows that high frequency vocabulary prevails in all three subject areas, and Science has a higher vocabulary load than the other two subjects overall. The amount of academic vocabulary, measured by Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List, and science vocabulary, measured by Coxhead & Hirsh’s EAP Science List (2007), were lower over the teacher talk than over secondary school textbooks. This means that teacher talk is lexically easier than textbooks. Over the course of the year, the vocabulary load of the teacher talk increases in all three subjects. This article looks at opportunities and challenges presented by the lexis of teacher talk in these subjects for second and foreign language students in these classes and their teachers. Suggestions for further research are presented by way of a conclusion.
Highlights
This article focuses on the opportunities and challenges afforded by teacher talk in Grade Six (10 and 11 year old students) English as an Additional Language, Maths, and Science classes in an international school context in Germany
The data shows that high frequency vocabulary prevails in all three subject areas, and Science has a higher vocabulary load than the other two subjects overall
Research Question Three: What coverage do the Academic Word List (AWL) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP) Science word lists have over the teacher talk over the whole corpus and individually in Science, Maths and EAL?
Summary
This article focuses on the opportunities and challenges afforded by teacher talk in Grade Six (10 and 11 year old students) English as an Additional Language, Maths, and Science classes in an international school context in Germany. Teachers recorded their classroom discourse for one week of classes three times in one academic year in each subject. In the international school in Germany reported on in this study, over 100 nonnative speaking Grade 6 students scored below mastery of the first 2000 words of English (under review) These results suggest that the students would not be able to cope with the vocabulary load of the textbooks which were written for first language readers. The amount of text is roughly equal for each time, with the lowest amount at 32,920 for the first set of recordings in September 2014 and the most in the second set of recordings, due to the large amount of teacher talk in Maths for that week
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