Who Knows What?: The teaching of knowledge and knowers in a fifth grade Danish as a second language classroom

The overarching focus of the thesis is to investigate why minority students, offered instruction labelled as Danish as a second language as a means of academic support, nonetheless seem to have more difficulty attaining school success than their majority peers. Based on a theoretically informed position that classroom discourse plays an important role in both student learning and the shaping of their consciousness (Bernstein, 2000; Christie, 2007; Maton, 2010), the research has investigated the implementation of the school subject Danish as a Second Language in History instruction through the analysis of teacher-student interactions with different teachers and at various points in the progression of an observed 5th grade unit of study about Denmark in the early 1900’s. Collected video observations and later transcriptions of teacher-student interactions served as the main source of data, supplemented by screen shots of the multi-media teaching materials used for the unit and teacher interviews. Using linguistic tools of analysis known as exchange structure analysis and based on Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics, as well as sociological tools of analysis based on Bernstein’s code theory, namely Legitimation Code Theory’s (Maton, forthcoming) tools of Semantics and Specialization analysis, the research explores connections between learning, language, knowledge and knowers in the observed classroom practice. The research findings are presented in four articles, which together provide insight into the importance and complexity of classroom discourse for shaping students’ understandings of the content being learned, and ultimately of the shaping of their consciousness in terms of what is and is not considered legitimate knowledge in the classroom.