Nanke Dokter

Summary Stimulating academic language during mathematics instruction Introduction Elementary school student teachers have to learn how to stimulate students’ academic language development in classroom practices. Academic Language (AL) is a language register used at school to communicate efficiently about abstract, not directly visible content. Mastering the AL register is important for school success. In mathematics, where students need to decontextualize and solve complex problems, the AL register is especially important. As the AL register differs from their home language, elementary school students need the help of teachers in developing AL. Teachers play a key role, firstly by offering AL input, secondly by helping students to understand this input, and thirdly by triggering students to produce AL. Together, this can be defined as AL stimulating behavior. Until now, research on AL was mainly aimed at language input of teachers and the effects of this input on students’ results. In this research the AL stimulating behavior of teachers was added and investigated and found insights were used to design and investigate an effective training for student teachers to improve their AL stimulating behavior. This research can be divided in two parts. In the first part, AL stimulating behavior of elementary school teachers was investigated. Explanations for found differences were sought in background characteristics of the teachers (age, years of experience, educational background), characteristics of the context (instructional methods, grade, class size) and specific teacher characteristics (knowledge, attitude and skills related to AL). In the second part of the research, insights of the first part were used together with theoretical educational design principles to develop a training for student teachers in AL stimulating behavior. The effectiveness of the training was investigated, using the integrative model of professional growth as developed by Clarke and Hollingsworth. Part 1 Teachers’ AL stimulating behavior in elementary school mathematics School subjects are taught through academic language. Different studies have shown that students who are proficient AL users achieve better in school. AL is used at school to communicate efficiently about abstract, not directly visible content and it has Su