Preparing graduate student teachers for advanced content-based instruction: Exploring content through grammatical matter

Abstract

The challenge of integrating language and content instruction, especially at the advanced proficiency levels, has been central for the profession and is described as such in the 2007 MLA Report and in other recent publications. Graduate students who, as practice shows, have not really experienced integrated instruction themselves need to be equipped with the knowledge and tools to implement it. This paper reports on the preparation of graduate student instructors to teach content- and language-integrated courses by introducing them to the notion of grammatical metaphor as particularly important for meaning making in advanced literacy texts. Specifically, this chapter presents materials for exploring the form and function of grammatical metaphor with graduate students and illustrates how they successfully utilize the concept in an independent materials development project for a unit on German history in an upper-level course.