This presentation is part of a larger project that aims to gain an in-depth understanding of disciplinary literacy in primaryschool teacher education in Sweden, including for example teacher educators’ beliefs about literacy practices. In thepresentation we will discuss the results from a sub-study of three teacher educators’ talk about literacy in relation totheir teaching practice and about students’ writing in their respective discipline, namely biology, Swedish (comparativeliterature) and mathematics. Nexus analysis, based on mediated discourse theory (Scollon & Scollon 2004), is used asthe analytic framework focusing on the concepts of ‘social action’, ‘historical body’ and ‘discourse in place’. Drawingon dialogical interviewing principles (Way et al. 2015), semi-structured interviews were conducted on Zoom at auniversity in the south of Sweden. Analysis revealed clashes between the historical body of the participants and thediscourses in place due to the intricate web of literacies and interdisciplinary fields that teacher educators need tonavigate. We argue that this type of meta-methodological perspective, in which the social actions of the participantscome to the fore, can clarify the complex connections inherent in literacy practices as opposed to common proceduresin the field such as think-aloud protocols and expert-novice distinctions.

References

Way, A., Kanak Zwier, R., & Tracy, S. J. (2015). Dialogic Interviewing and Flickers of Transformation: An Examination and Delineation of Interactional Strategies That Promote Participant Self-Reflexivity. Qualitative Inquiry,21(8), 720–731.

Scollon, R. & Scollon, S.W. (2004). Nexus Analysis. Discourse and the Emerging Internet. London & New York:Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

Vocabulary experts recommend first language (L1) translation equivalents for establishing form–meaning mappings for new second language (L2) words, especially for lower proficiency learners. Empirical evidence to date speaks in favor of L1 translation equivalents over L2 meaning definitions, but most studies have investigated bi- rather than multilingual learners. In our study, we investigated instructed English vocabulary learning through an intervention study in six language-diverse secondary school English classrooms in Sweden (N = 74) involving three conditions for presentation of word meanings: (a) definitions in the L2 (English), (b) translation equivalents in the shared school and majority language (Swedish), and (c) translation equivalents in the shared school and majority language plus other prior languages among the learners (Swedish and other). Based on overall weighted mean effect sizes and mixed-effects modeling, the results showed that conditions that involved L1 translation equivalents yielded higher scores than did target language definitions in immediate posttests with a small effect size but no differences in delayed posttests.