Disciplinary literacy in primary teacher education

This project aims to (a) develop an in-depth understanding of disciplinary literacy in the university disciplines of Swedish, English and Mathematics in teacher education, grades 4–6, and (b) to identify ways of strengthening the teaching of disciplinary language in teacher education for grades 4–6.

Developing disciplinary literacy is an integral and important part of learning a discipline (Fang & Robertson 2020).

However, such subject-specific communication is highly complex, spanning multiple dimensions (Bergh Nestlog 2020) and needs to be made explicit in teacher education.

If this is achieved, teacher students can be expected to strengthen not only their own learning but also enhance their future pupils’ opportunities to communicate knowledge. The research design is informed by linguistic ethnography and case study methodology.

Data include observation of lectures and interviews with teacher educators about disciplinary literacy and disciplinary literacy teaching, student texts including feedback from the teacher educator, and student interviews, focusing on the teacher educator’s feedback and the student teachers’ perceptions about learning disciplinary literacy.The project engages six researchers whose expertise includes disciplinary literacy, assessment, multimodal analysis, discourse analysis and systemic functional linguistics.

Data will be collected in years 1–2 at three different universities. Years 2–4 are devoted to analysis and dissemination of results.