The construction of ‘academic language’ in German classrooms: Communicative practices and linguistic norms in ‘morning circles’

•Achieving Academic Language is more than learning a set of grammatical forms and lexical items.•The actualisation of linguistic norms is tied with the emergence of social norms.•In this context communicative practises are always situated practises.

In our paper, we take a constructivist approach to early forms of ‘academic language’, based on a conversation analytic framework. Adopting an interactional linguistic framework that is based on ethnomethodological and conversation analytic theoretical thinking, we aim to describe the social and linguistic norms that emerge in so-called ‘morning circles’, a highly ritualised interactional routine that transfers part of the interactional responsibility to the children and at the same time teaches the prerequisites for specific communicative practices. As morning circles are turned into language teaching lessons on a regular basis, we describe the linguistic features that emerge as learning objects, and some of the learning practices in which they are embedded. We will argue that language learning practices are situated practices, connecting the use of linguistic forms with ideologies of linguistic and social appropriateness. Our analysis is based on video recordings of three sessions in a first grade class in a primary school in a medium sized town in Germany, which have been transcribed and qualitatively analysed.