Operationalising plurilingual teaching approaches is a common interest and goal of educational linguists (Dooly and Vallejo, 2020). It requires close collaboration with language teachers and is likely to call for a change in their current teaching practices, given the still prevailing monolingual habitus (Gogolin et al., 2019). Nexus analysis (Scollon and Scollon, 2004) presents itself as a particularly apt methodology to instigate that change.
This project's aim is to explore ways in which language teachers can develop a common teaching approach to writing in their language classrooms. Given that the context are two secondary schools in Berlin, Germany, those languages are German as the language of schooling as well as English, French and Spanish as foreign languages. Prior to developing a common teaching approach, it was necessary to gain a deeper understanding of the teachers' current approaches to writing through classroom observations, interviews and regular informal conversations. In nexus analytical terms, the researcher engaged and navigated the nexus of practice, i.e., teachers' language classrooms and their teaching methods, before changing it. The project resulted in two different approaches to teaching writing in a cross-curricular manner: the Gymnasium, an academically oriented school, developed in a genre-based (Ivanic, 2004) direction while the approach of the Integrierte Sekundarschule, a comprehensive school, was more skills-based.
These two differing approaches emerged thanks to the nexus analytical focus on social action and entering a zone of identification. As an ethnographic discourse analysis, nexus analysis requires the researcher to enter a zone of identification, i.e., to become a legitimate part of the nexus of practice under scrutiny. Once accepted, the researcher engages and navigates the context with an ethnographic stance (Copland and Creese, 2015) which creates space for identifying, documenting and tracking the discourses circulating in the nexus. In combination with using social action as the unit of analysis, that space makes it possible to discern which discourses facilitate or hinder meaningful change. In the case of the study at hand, the change involved various language teachers negotiating a customised, cross-curricular teaching approach among each other and the researcher. Even though this study also uses nexus analysis as an analytical framework, the proposed presentation will focus on its methodological aspects and argue that nexus analysis is particularly effective in instigating meaningful change because it requires an understanding of the local and active collaboration with individuals engaging in the social actions of interest.
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