THE LEXICON PROJECT

Project Overview

The international education community articulate their theories, their research and their instructional advocacy through the medium of the English language, which honours some aspects of the classroom with a distinctive name, but ignores many significant aspects named in other languages. With global trends to educational uniformity, the international community urgently needs to identify the pedagogical terms privileged in one language but not in another and utilize the insight represented by such terms to interrogate and inform our classroom practice, our classroom research, and our theorizing about classroom settings. The Lexicon project makes use of a unique set of international classroom videos and a network of research partners across ten countries to investigate non-English classroom-related terms to enrich classroom practice and educational research.

Project participants are given access to multi-camera video records of lessons from very different cultural settings (see Figure 1), selected because in combination they offered examples of a wide variety of instructional approaches. They record each observed classroom activity for which a name existed in their local language, the start and finish times for the activity, name the activity and generate a description in their local language of the key features of the activity. These descriptions form the focus of extended interviews leading to detailed descriptions of the named activities in English.


Fig. 1 Video stimulus layout (Key elements are: Three synchronized camera views -
Teacher camera, whole class camera, student camera; classroom dialogue in English subtitles; timecode

Sapir (1949) wrote of “the language habits” of a community, and it is precisely these language habits that the Lexicon Project aims to reveal.
We see and hear . . . very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation (Sapir, 1949).

In the context of education, our perceptions of the classroom are profoundly influenced by the language available to us. If an activity is named, it can be recognised and it becomes possible to ask "how well is it done?" and "how might it be done better?" An unnamed activity will be absent from any catalogue of desirable teacher actions and consequently denied specific promotion in any program of mathematics teacher education. Actions considered as essential components of the mathematics teacher’s repertoire in one country: for example, levantamento de dúvidas (Portuguese), pudian (China) or matome (Japan), may be entirely absent from any catalogue of accomplished teaching practices in English.

Levantamento de dúvidas (the surveying of doubts) – a whole-class activity in which the teacher elicits student questions to identify areas of conceptual uncertainty and to guide subsequent instruction.
Pudian – an introductory activity in which the teacher elicits student prior knowledge and experience for the purpose of constructing connections to the content to be covered in the lesson.

Matome – a teacher-orchestrated discussion, drawing together the major conceptual threads of a lesson or extended activity – most commonly a summative activity at the end of the lesson.

This project aims to systematically document, collate, illustrate and share the extensive variety of pedagogical terms in ten languages (including English), through the construction of an international lexicon of classroom-related terms. For reasons of cross-cultural comparability, lexical coherence and design pragmatics, the research project takes the mathematics classroom as its common referent and focus. The International Classroom Lexicon is intended to provide an analytical entry point into the cross-cultural analysis of valued classroom practices, the critical interrogation of established theory, and the activation of teacher reflection on practice.

Research Team
David Clarke, University of Melbourne, Australia
Caroline Bardini, University of Melbourne, Australia
Hilary Hollingsworth, University of Melbourne, Australia
Alena Hošpesová, University of South Bohemia, Czech Republic

Minoru Ohtani, Kanazawa University, Japan
Miriam Sherin, Northwestern University, USA