Scaffolding the Wave: preparing teacher students to write their final exam through LCT and SFL

This paper demonstrates how LCT and SFL can cooperatively be used in a tertiary education setting as both content and pedagogic strategy to enable students’ success and development as teachers. To become a K-9 teacher in Denmark, students must successfully complete a number of competency area assessments. The assessment in the area of Teaching bilingual students requires students to apply relevant theory and knowledge from the fields of educational linguistics as well as more broadly from second language development and second language pedagogy to one of their main teaching subjects, followed by suggestions for pedagogical practice. It is the only written-only assessment of the students’ teaching degree, and as such can be cause of much student worry. Drawing on the LCT notion of semantic waves (Maton, 2014), students were taught to analyze highly successful assessments from earlier years, then asked to examine these for corresponding features from the perspective of discourse semantics and lexico-grammar (Martin & Rose, 2007; Derewianka, 2012) and how resources such as ie. the use of nominalization, process and participant types and instances of appraisal are leveraged to construct convincing analyses of pedagogic practices and/or materials. Explicit instruction in applying analytical tools from LCT and SFL together thus serves both as curriculum content as well as a methodology, teaching students to meet their own assessment requirements through these concepts while modelling their usefulness as strategies for scaffolding success – both their own and that of their future second-language students. References Derewianka, B. (2012). A New Grammar Companion for Teachers. Sydney: PETAA Martin, J. R., & Rose, D. (2007). Working With Discourse: Meaning Beyond the Clause (2nd ed.). London: Continuum. Maton, K. (2014). Knowledge and Knowers - Towards a realist sociology of education. Abingdon: Routledge.