Teacher talk and Science vocabulary: an example from an international school - Specialised vocabulary in secondary school/Middle School

Vocabulary and English for Specific Purposes Research - Averil Coxhead 2018

Teacher talk and Science vocabulary: an example from an international school
Specialised vocabulary in secondary school/Middle School

In recordings of teacher talk from a Science class in an international school (see Figure 5.5), we can see the teacher (in normal type) working with the class to elicit and discuss concepts related to distillation, by recalling previous classes, discussing concepts from everyday life, and talking about the materials in the classroom itself. In Figure 5.5, the students’ responses are in italics. The teacher explicitly focuses on vocabulary in class, for example, by asking the students to review the vocabulary and by pushing them to use the target language in context. There is a high level of interaction in this example, as the students and teacher work back and forwards in the extracts. Note the large amounts of vocabulary in these examples.



Figure 5.5 Two extracts on distillation from an international school Science class, year 6