Språkutvecklande ämnesundervisning – en läromedelsanalys : Läromedel som verktyg för språkutvecklande ämnesundervisning i naturorienterande ämnen i åk 4

Sammanfattning: Studies show that a quarter of the pupils in today's Swedish schools can be presumed to have a first language other than Swedish. Unfortunately, research also show that students with a foreign background and students with another first language than Swedish tend to get lower grades and lower test results. This is something that needs to be counteracted and the solution to this could be found in what can be described as language-developing content teaching which is when language instructions are integrated with content areas. Therefor this type of teaching has the possibility to meet both the linguistic and the academic needs of said students. This study aims to examine whether a selected teaching material for science studies in year 4 can support language-developing content teaching. The teaching material consists of a textbook, activity book and a teacher’s guide. To be able to study this, three questions have been posed which concern the extent to which context-rich situations, linguistic support and rich classroom interaction are promoted in the selected teaching material. To answer these questions, a qualitative content analysis has been performed where the teaching material has been compared with a modified version of a framework called the SIOP-model. The research-based model contains criteria which are intended to cater to the specific needs of second language learners. With this analysis, it can be made visible what shortcomings and strengths there are when it comes to the selected teaching material’s ability to support language-developing content teaching in order to discuss on the basis of these how the teaching material can be improved in this respect. The result from this study shows that the activities in the chosen teaching material, to a fairly large extent, provides substantial support for language-developing content teaching, but that some of the language barriers that have been shown to have the greatest significance for second language students' understanding in previous research are not supported. These regard the understanding of subject-neutral academic words, insufficient focus on awareness of learning strategies and clarification of the language's functions and structures. This is something that potential teachers who intend to work with the teaching material in their teaching need to plan for, but also something that teaching material publishers should take into account when creating future teaching materials.