General description and theoretical framework

Facilitating development of complex concepts from a naïve to an academic level and transformation of everyday language to an academic language sets a high demand to teachers in primary, secondary and tertiary education. (Boersma e.a. 2005; Cummins 1984; Mohan 1986; Hajer, 1996). Training this competences should be of great importance in teacher education. However this subject gets not the needed emphasis .

In this research we find ourselves on the crossroads of three disciplines of instructive approaches:

• Of  teaching and coaching pre-service teachers in their development of the necessary didactic/ instructional repertoire for the above  competencies where we will use the socio-cultural approach based on Vygotsky
• To teach and guide students in their development of academic knowledge and concepts (Romance & Vitale 2001, Novak 1998)
• Of teaching and guiding students in their acquisition  of Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (Cummins, 1984)  and content specific language proficiency (Mohan 1986, Lindberg 2008, Gibbons 2002, Schleppegrell 2004, Brown 2008)

Research Question and objectives

The main research question is: How can we develop the competences in pre-service teachers  for diagnosing and developing the use of biologically complex concepts and the thereto belonging content specific language?

This question includes different aspects in the fields of linguistics, instruction and education as well as the methods of teacher training.

The main objective following this question is to prepare our students better for their professional future by using an evidence based method. The other objective is to make a contribution to theory about teaching and learning complex concepts and language acquisition in a domain specific field by testing the practices with our students.

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