Boel Englund & Birgitta Sandström: Language matters This paper focuses language use within teacher education. It presents some preliminary results from a research project financed by the Swedish Research Council pinpointing language, language use, and the ways in which language matters in teacher education. In 2001, Swedish teacher education went through a far-reaching reform creating an integrated programme characterized by a strong emphasis on scientifically based knowledge. Earlier specialized traditions were no longer held together as a stream preparing for becoming a teacher at a certain level of the school system. Research data (Calander 2005) indicate that the new organization involves the blurring of earlier core values and of educational fields of action, and may provoke clashes between different parts of teacher education such as general courses, orientation courses, school practice. Also, there is reason to believe that the languages used by the teacher educators within these separate parts differ, mainly due to their descent from academic/non academic traditions (Sandström 2005, Englund 2005, Englund & Linné 2005). Several substudies with different orientations and focus are in the project Language matters: language use in teacher education from a perspective of power and gender held together by questions like “How should language use within the new components resulting from the Swedish 2001 reform (general courses, orientation courses, school practice) be characterized?” “Do representatives of the components differ in their ways of using language(s)? How?” “What are the possible consequences of this language use/the differences in language use for the education given and for the possibilities of its representatives to exert power and influence?” Its theoretical framework draws on theories of language stressing the fundamental importance of language for thought and communication, but also for power. The focal point is the language of teacher educators within three traditions: the education of preschool teachers, of nursing teachers and teachers of textile craft. That is, three teacher educations traditionally relying on lived experience rather than verbalized and scientifically based knowledge, and involving a majority of female educators and students. The paper presents tentative results from one of the substudies. The empirical material consists of three lectures. One is given within the “general educational area”, one emanates from an orientation course preparing for work with younger children, and one from an orientation course preparing for work as a teacher of nursing and caring. Analytical instruments are fetched from the social semiotic and critical discourse analysis traditions (Halliday1978; Fairclough 1992, Fairclough 2003), from research on the oral-written literacy distinction (Goody 1968, Ong 1982, Goody 1987) and from research on the function of metaphors in language (Lakoff &Johnson 1980). These results point to differences as to the degree and kind of structuring of talk, in the “style” of the speaker in the sense of Norman Fairclough (2003), in a dimension which may be compared to the elaborated-restricted code distinction of Basil Bernstein, and as to the use of metaphors. In these respects, the lecture from the general course and from the orientation course preparing for work as a teacher of nursing and caring appear as opposites.

The preliminary results point to differences as to the degree and kind of structuring of talk, in the “style” of the speaker in the sense of Norman Fairclough (2003), in a dimension which may be compared to the elaborated-restricted code distinction of Basil Bernstein, and as to the use of metaphors. In these respects, the lecture from the general course and from the orientation course preparing for work as a teacher of nursing and caring appear as opposites.