Nanke Dokter

256 Stimulating academic language during mathematics instruction The next step was to investigate the AL stimulating strategies the teachers used. All strategies were used during the eight minutes that were analyzed, although individual teachers used a limited set of strategies. Power down strategies were used the most and this is in accordance with the AL use of the teachers: they simplify their language to make sure students understand them. Although teachers in general use less power up than power down strategies, during the instructional method discussion they used significantly more power up strategies and students were stimulated to produce more language. In order to stimulate students’ AL development, teachers could use the instructional method discussion more often during their mathematics instruction. Four case studies were conducted, in which the AL stimulating behavior of nine teachers was investigated. These case studies were aimed at the content, student population, students’ language background and two different lessons from each teacher. The studies showed that the choice for a certain strategy seemed to be both teacher and context based, especially regarding students’ language background. Because of the small number of participants, no general conclusions could be drawn. After investigating the teachers’ AL stimulating behavior, the correlations between their behavior and their specific teacher characteristics (knowledge, attitude and skills related to AL) were analyzed. No correlation was found between the teachers’ behavior and specific teacher characteristics. The background characteristic ‘years of experi- ence’ correlated negatively with the AL features the teachers used in the writing skills task and ‘educational background’ correlated negatively with attitude. No other correlations were found. Part 2 An intervention program for student teachers Stimulating AL is an important task for elementary school teachers. The first part of this research showed that when designing their mathematics instruction, teachers choose instructional methods that offer less opportunities to stimulate their students’ AL. They did not use all AL features in their own language during the instruction and the used AL stimulating strategies varied. They were aimed at students’ AL under- standing and were power down . Teachers seem to be unaware of the possibilities they have to improve their AL stimulating behavior. There was no correlation between teachers' AL stimulating behavior and their specific teacher characteristics. These in- sights were used to train student teachers in showing proper AL stimulating behavior. The training was focused on recognizing and practicing AL stimulating strategies. The research question was: In what way can elementary school student teachers effectively get trained in showing academic language stimulating behavior during mathematics instruction? A pre- and posttest design with a control and experimental group was used. The experimental group was trained by a mathematics teacher educator. The control group followed a similar training, without explicit instruction on AL stimulating strategies, by the same teacher educator. To design the training, ten design criteria were used: