Establishing Scientific Classroom Discourse Communities

Multiple Voices of Teaching and Learning Research

Randy K. Yerrick, Wolff-Michael Roth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135627980
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Establishing Scientific Classroom Discourse Communities: Multiple Voices of Teaching and Learning Research is designed to encourage discussion of issues surrounding the reform of classroom science discourse among teachers, teacher educators, and researchers. The contributors--some of the top educational researchers, linguists, and science educators in the world--represent a variety of perspectives pertaining to teaching, assessment, research, learning, and reform. As a whole the book explores the variety, complexity, and interconnectivity of issues associated with changing classroom learning communities and transforming science classroom discourse to be more representative of the discourse of scientific communities. The intent is to expand debate among educators regarding what constitutes exemplary scientific speaking, thinking, and acting. This book is unparalleled in discussing current reform issues from sociolinguistic and sociocultural perspectives. The need for a revised perspective on enduring science teaching and learning issues is established and a theoretical framework and methodology for interpreting the critique of classroom and science discourses is presented. To model and scaffold this ongoing debate, each chapter is followed by a "metalogue" in which the chapter authors and volume editors critique the issues traversed in the chapter by opening up the neatly argued issues. These "metalogues" challenge, extend, and deepen the arguments made. Central questions addressed include: *Why is a sociolinguistic interpretation essential in examining science education reform? *What are key similarities and differences between classroom and scientific communities? *How can the utility of common knowledge and existing classroom discourse be balanced toward alternative outcomes? *What curricular issues are associated with transforming classroom talk? *What other perspectives can assist in creating multiple access to science through redefining classroom discourse? Whether this volume improves readers' science teaching, assists their research, or helps them to better prepare tomorrow's science teachers, the goal is to engage them in considering the challenges faced by educators as they navigate the seas of reform and strive to improve science education for all.

CHAPTER ONE


Language in the Science Classroom:
Academic Social Languages as the
Heart of School-Based Literacy

James Paul Gee

University of Wisconsin–Madison

There are different “ways with printed words” embedded in different social and cultural groups, in different institutions, and in different social practices. Literacy is, in that sense, multiple. Furthermore, literacy viewed in terms of the different sorts of social practices in which it is embedded, is almost always integrally involved with oral language and with ways of acting, interacting, and thinking, and not just reading and writing. In regard to schooling we need to focus on the acquisition of academic sorts of language within specific social practices and not on literacy as a general thing or as only reading and writing. In school, especially as one moves beyond the first couple of years, reading and writing become (or most certainly should be) fully embedded in and integrated with learning, using, and talking about specific content.

No domain represents academic sorts of language better than science. Science makes demands on students to use language, orally and in print, as well as other sorts of symbol systems, that epitomize the sorts of representational systems and practices that are at the heart of higher levels of school success. They are at the heart, too, of living in and thinking critically about modern societies.

In this chapter, I make six claims about the connections between language and learning science, although I construe language in a particular way, that is, as integrally involved with identities and social practices. The connections, however, are the same for all school subjects. In much of science education, language is moved to the background or ignored, while thinking or doing are foregrounded as if these had little to do with language. I do not think this is true. Each of my claims implies a particular property that science instruction ought to have, though little work on science instruction that I am aware of speaks directly to these properties.

ACADEMIC LANGUAGE AND
THE SOCIAL LANGUAGE CODE

Claim 1: Success in school is primarily contingent on willingness and ability to cope with academic language.

In the recent debates over early reading, the alphabetic code has been given pride of place (Gee, 1999a; National Reading Panel, 2000; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). However, more children fail in school, in the long run, because they cannot cope with “academic language” than because they cannot decode print. Academic language is a related family of what I will call “social languages.” English, like any human language is not a single language, but is composed of a myriad of different “social languages,” some of which are forms of academic language (Gee, 1996, 1999b).

A social language is a way of using language so as to enact a particular socially situated identity and carry out a particular socially situated activity. For example, there are ways of speaking and acting like a (specific type of) doctor, street—gang member, postmodern literary critic, football fanatic, neoliberal economist, working—class male, adaptationist biologist, and so on, through an endless array of identities. Often, of course, we can recognize a particular socially situated “kind of person” engaged in a particularly characteristic sort of activity through his or her use of a given social language without ourselves actually being able to enact that kind of person or actually being able to carry out that activity. We can be producers or consumers of particular social languages, or we can be both.

Recognizing a particular social language is also a matter of a code. Let us call it the “social language code.” Different patterns or co—relations of grammatical elements (at the levels of phonology/graphology, morphology, words, syntax, discourse relations, and pragmatics) are associated with or map to particular social languages (specific styles of oral and/or written language) associated with specific socially situated identities and activities. So here the code is not between sounds and letters, but between grammatical patterns and styles of language (and their associated identities and activities). For example, the following text is taken from a school science textbook:

The destruction of a land surface by the combined effects of abrasion and removal of weathered material by transporting agents is called erosion…. The production of rock waste by mechanical processes and chemical changes is called weathering. (Martin, 1990, p. 93)

A whole bevy of co—related grammatical features (i.e., features that hang together or pattern together in oral and/or written texts) mark these sentences as part of a distinctive social language or style of (in this case, academic) language. Some of these features are: “heavy subjects” (e.g., “the production of rock waste by mechanical processes and chemical changes”); processes and actions named by nouns or nominalizations, rather than verbs (e.g., “production”); passive main verbs (“is called”) and passives inside nominalizations (e.g., “production by mechanical means”); modifiers which are more contentful than the nouns they modify (e.g., “transporting agents”); and complex embedding (e.g., “weathered material by transporting agents” is a nominalization embedded inside “the combined effects of …” and this more complex nominalization is embedded inside a yet larger nominalization, “the destruction of …”).

This style of language also incorporates a great many distinctive discourse markers, that is, linguistic features that characterize larger stretches of text and give them unity and coherence as a certain type of text or “genre.” For example, the genre here is explanatory definitionand it is characterized by classificatory languageof a certain sort. Such language leads adept readers to form a classificatory schemein their heads something like this: There are two kinds of change—erosion and weathering— and two kinds of weathering—mechanical and chemical.

Academic social languages constitute a large family of related (but, of course, different) social languages. Academic social languages are not primarily associated with things as big as whole disciplines, but with particular ways of being—doing intellectual inquiry, ways that are sometimes subdomains of a discipline, but, especially today, often cross—disciplinary boundaries. For example, different sorts of biologists talk, write, and act in different ways, and in some cases they share these ways more closely with some people outside biology (e.g., certain sorts of physicists) than they do with certain other biologists. The same can be said of almost any other discipline.

ACQUISITION AND IDENTITY: LIFEWORLD
VERSUS SPECIALIST WORLDS

Claim 2: To acquire an academic social language, students must be willing to accept certain losses and see the acquisition of the academic social language as a gain.

When one comes to the acquisition of an academic social language—most especially one associated with science—there are both significant lossesand gains(Halliday & Martin, 1993). To see this, consider the two sentences below. The first is in the social language of the “lifeworld” and the second is in an academic social language. By the “lifeworld” I mean that domain where we speak and act as ordinary, everyday, nonspecialist people. Of course, different social and cultural groups have different life—worlds and different lifeworld social languages, though such lifeworld languages do share a good many features that cause linguists to refer to them as “vernacular language.”

1. Hornworms sure vary a lot in how well they grow.
2. Hornworm growth exhibits a significant amount of variation.

Subjects of sentences name what a sentence is about (its “topic”) and (when they are initial in the sentence) the perspective from which we are viewing the claims we want to make (the sentence's “theme”). The lifeworld sentence (1) is about hornworms (cute little green worms) and launches off from the perspective of the hornworm. The presence of “sure” helps to cause the subject here (hornworms) also to be taken as naming a thing with which we are empathizing. The specialist sentence (2) is not about hornworms, but about a trait or feature of hornworms (in particular one that can be quantified) and launches off from this perspective. The hornworm disappears.

The lifeworld sentence involves dynamic processes (changes) named by verbs (“vary,” “grow”). People tend to care a good deal about changes and transformations, especially in things with which they empathize. The specialist sentence turns these dynamic processes into abstract things (“variation,” “growth”). The dynamic changes disappear. We can also mention that the lifeworld sentence has a contentful verb (“vary”), while the specialist one has a verb of appearance (“exhibit”), a class of verbs that is similar to copulas and are not as deeply or richly contentful as verbs like vary.Such verbs are basically just ways to relate things (in this case, abstract things, to boot).

The lifeworld sentence has a quantity term (how well) that is not just about amount or degree, but is also “telically evaluative,” if I may be allowed to coin a term. “How well” is about both a quantity and evaluates this amount in terms of an end—point or “telos” germane to the hornworm, that is, in terms of a point of good or proper or full growth toward which hornworms are meantto move. Some hornworms reach the telos and others fall short. The specialist sentence replaces this “telically evaluative” term with a more precise measurement term that is “Discourse evaluative” (significant amount). Significant amountis about an amount that is evaluated in terms of the goals, procedures (even telos, if you like) of a Discourse (here a type of biology), not a hornworm. It is a particular area of biology that determines what amounts to significant and what does not. All our hornworms could be stunted or untypical of well—grown horn—worms (“well grown” from a lifeworld, nonspecialist perspective) and still display a significant amount of variation in their sizes.

This last difference is related to another one: The lifeworld sentence contains an appreciative marker (“sure”), while the specialist sentence leaves out such markers. The appreciative marker communicates the attitude, interest, and even values of the speaker/writer. Attitude, interest, and values, in this sense, are left out of the specialist sentence.

So, when one has to leave the lifeworld to acquire and then use the specialist language above, these are some of the things that are lost: concrete things like hornworms and empathy for them; changes and transformations as dynamic on—going processes; and telos and appreciation. What is gained are: abstract things and relations among them; traits and quantification and categorization of traits; evaluation from within a specialized domain. The crucial question, then, is this: Why wouldanyone—most especially a child in school—accept this loss?

My view is that people will accept this loss only if they see the gain as a gain. So a crucial question in science education ought to be: What would make someone see acquiring a scientific social language as a gain?Social languages are tied to socially situated identities and activities, as we have seen earlier. People can only see a new social language as a gain if they recognize and understand the sorts of socially situated identities and activities that recruit the social language; if they value them or, at least, understand why they are valued; and if they believe they (will) have real access to them or, at least (will) have access to meaningful versions of them.

Thus, acquisition is heavily tied at the outset to identity issues. It is tied to the learner's willingness and trust to leave (for a time and place) the lifeworld and participate in another identity, one that, for everyone, represents a certain loss. For some people, as we all know, it represents a more significant loss in terms of a disassociation from, and even opposition to, their lifeworlds, because their lifeworlds are not rooted in the sort of middle—class lifeworlds that have historically built up some sense of shared interests and values with some academic specialist domains.

SITUATED MEANING

Claim 3: One does not know what a social language means in any sense useful for action unless one can situate the meanings of the social language's words and phrases in terms of embodied experiences.

Recent debates over reading have pointed out that although one's first (“native”) oral language is acquired by immersion in practice (socialization as part of a social group), literacy often requires some degree of overt instruction (e.g., Gee, 1994). So, then, what can we say about the acquisition of an academic social language? The language of adaptationist biology, for example, is no one's “native language.” Are these acquired largely through immersion in practice or do they require a good deal of overt instruction, as well? In reality—given that scientists tend to ignore language as a relevant factor—many a scientist has picked up a scientific social language through immersion in practice, with little or no overt instruction in regard to the language.

Although I advocate overt instruction in regard to academic social languages, both in the midst of practice and outside it, what I want to point out here is this: Social languages can be understood in two different ways, either as largely verbal or as situated. I can understand a piece of a scientific social language largely as a set of verbal definitions or rather general meanings for words and phrases and, in turn, relate words and phrases to each other in terms of these definitions or general meanings and general knowledge about grammatical patterns in the language. However, such an understanding is not all that useful when one has to engage in any activity using a specialist language.

Words and phrases in use in any social language, including life—world social languages, have not only relatively general meanings (which basically define their meaning potential), but situated meaningsas well. Words and phrases are associated with different situated meanings in different contexts, in different social languages, and in different Discourses. For example, consider what happens in your head when I say, “The coffee spilled, get a mop” versus “The coffee spilled, get a broom” versus “The coffee spilled, can you restack it.” In each case, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction: The Role of Language in Science Learning and Teaching
• 1 Language in the Science Classroom: Academic Social Languages as the Heart of School-Based Literacy
• 2 Telling in Purposeful Activity and the Emergence of Scientific Language
• 3 Discourse, Description, and Science Education
• 4 Essential Similarities and Differences Between Classroom and Scientific Communities
• 5 Dialogic Inquiry in an Urban Second-Grade Classroom: How Intertextuality Shapes and Is Shaped by Social Interactions and Scientific Understandings
• 6 Meaning and Context: Studying Words in Motion
• 7 Science for All: A Discursive Analysis Examining Teacher Support of Student Thinking in Inclusive Classrooms
• 8 Playing the Game of Science: Overcoming Obstacles in Re-negotiating Science Classroom Discourse
• 9 Teaching Science in Urban High Schools: When the Rubber Hits the Road
• 10 When the Classroom Isn't in School: The Construction of Scientific Knowledge in an After-School Setting
• Author Index
• Subject Index