Linguistic complexity in the classroom A computational-linguistic analysis of the spoken language of teachers and learners in science education in primary and secondary schools

We investigate the linguistic complexity of oral classroom interactions in late primary and early secondary school across German school types. The goal is to explore whether teachers and students align in terms of their use of the academic language register. We empirically base this investigation on transcriptions of teacher and student contributions during content matter lessons on the vaporisation and condensation of water. Across school types and grade levels, we compare the extent to which teachers offer language that is adaptively rich in linguistic constructs commonly associated with academic language, such as deagentivation, nominal style, and cohesive devices. Putting this in relation to the developing academic language competence of the students, we then compare the language offered by the teachers to the use of these academic language constructs in the students' spoken language contributions. We discuss the methodological challenges arising from analyzing oral classroom interactions and from applying automatic linguistic complexity analyses to such data.