Promoting professional vision of language-awareness in primary science education – a video- and practice-based seminar of Master of Education

Abstract

The language skills of pupils in primary science education are already an important prerequisite for learning. For teachers, the promotion of both the technical and language skills of learners pose a major challenge. Studies show that even experienced teachers feel frequently overwhelmed with performing this kind of specialist teaching. Therefore, it may be beneficial to prepare prospective teachers in the course of their early studies for a sensitive use of language in the science classroom. One strategy to promote this is to work on the professional vision of language-awareness in teachers' actions. This strategy is based on existing findings that suggest that a professional vision has a positive influence on teachers' actions in the classroom as well as on the pupils' learning. However, the intention of this article is to explore how a university seminar can be designed to promote the professional vision in this domain. First, the construct of professional vision will be defined and the video footage had to be analyzed regarding all potential language-aware measures which were subsequent described and according to the theoretically framework characterized. In the following the resulting video- and practice-based master seminar will be discussed which aimed at the development of the students’ professional vision and the application of appropriate measures. Finally, instructions for the implementation of the described training approach, including possible uses, are given and initial evaluation results are presented.