Sprachförderliches Unterrichten im Sachunterricht der Grundschule

The close link between language and subject learning processes requires language-sensitive teaching in all subjects, which can be achieved through language scaffolding. As research shows, professional development for subject-integrated language support can improve teacher’s language-support skills, which include, among others, language-promoting questioning strategies. In this paper, we investigate which questioning strategies appropriately professionalized elementary school teachers implement in an inquiry-based science class compared to a control group without this professionalization, to what extent it is linked to the participation of students and how it contributes to the prediction of students’ content-specific language and content knowledge proficiency at the end of a teaching unit on the topic “Floating and Sinking”. Video and transcript analyses of classroom interactions show that the additionally professionalized teachers in the intervention group (IG, n = 8) ask more questions than teachers in the control group (CG, n = 17). In particular, they use more open-ended questions that explicitly promote academic and content-specific language in student’s answers as well as those that implicitly initiate more elaborate student utterances of higher-order thinking. The questioning behavior of differently professionalized teachers is not directly related to students’ immediate classroom participation. However, additional multilevel analyses indicate that IG students perform better in content-specific vocabulary and content knowledge at the end of the teaching unit if their teachers use language-promoting questions more frequently in their classes. Thus, the results support the effectiveness of professionalization in terms of teachers’ questioning strategies and give indications of its positive influence of students’ learning gains of content-specific language proficiency and content knowledge. Using the question categorization proposed in this paper, teacher professionalization can be targeted more specifically at this language-promoting questioning strategies.