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Who owns the words? Teaching vocabulary in a multicultural class
about words and events is concentrated on what happens in the book and scarcely
any other worlds of experience enter into the discussion.
Diversity not only refers to cultural and linguistic experiences among multilingual
pupils but also to the multitude of other experiences prevailing in a classroom. When
the words are presented personal experiences come to the surface on a few occasions,
for example when the teacher asks for the meaning of hail and Amila starts talking of
broken roofs, but soon enough she is interrupted by the teacher. When the teacher
explains the word air pockets, she starts by asking how many have flown before and
many hands are raised. Zenya opens her mouth and tells the class that air pockets
affected her hearing. This question causes a general buzz in the classroom and some
pupils turn to each other, start chatting excitedly and telling one another about their
experiences. However, they are soon enough silenced by the teacher who gives her
own explanation of air pockets, describing how nasty they can be. This situation thus
gives rise to some activity in the classroom, which tells of personal engagement on the
part of the pupils, and it could be said that taking diversity into consideration gave
greater opportunities for knowledge acquisition in this case, as air pockets turned out
to be one of the few words that reappeared, albeit to a limited extent, in the pupils’
writings. A contributory reason could be that this word also occurred on the mind map.
Access
Since the purpose behind the different work stages was that the pupils should increase
their cognitive development by picking up new words, I discuss whether this was
what they actually gained access to. The above discussion has primarily concerned
access to the classroom agenda, but the access concept can also be interpreted from
a narrower perspective, in this case as access to the intended knowledge acquisition.
During the first stage, the teacher thus worked with a number of words that may be
largely considered less frequent ordinary words, which are important for the pupils’
development of a school-related vocabulary. She wrote the words on the board, discussed
them in accordance with the IRF model and erased them again. Most of these
words were notably absent from the pupils’ own writings, except for a few words like
silhouette and air pockets, which had attracted greater attention in the discussion.
The words that occurred on the mind map had a much greater impact. Apart from
names, every word or expression occurred on average 14 times in the pupils’ texts, in
contrast to the words from the first stage, which on average appeared only 0.5 times.
When drawing the mind map, the teacher and the pupils discussed the events of
the story and the teacher drew up mind maps that consisted almost exclusively of
simple everyday words, all of which were already part of the pupils’ vocabulary. It
is true that the pupils were allowed to contribute in the joint designing of the mind
map, but no access was provided towards any increase in their cognitive development
since during this stage the teacher neither linked up with the pupils’ own world of
ideas and experiences nor led the discussion in a direction that could have entailed
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