Semantic waves for helping science teachers teach middle school science

Description

Students learning science can have a hard time learning to do, talk and write scientifically. For second language students, these challenges are multiplied as they are learning both new scientific concepts and learning to use the language of instruction at the same time. When teachers don’t see knowledge and language as fundamentally connected, they may not provide the necessary language support in their lessons. In this roundtable talk, I will show examples of how we worked with science teachers using semantic gravity to increase their awareness of different ‘kinds of knowledge’ their lessons include.

Together with teachers we ‘roughly’ analysed videoed recordings of their own science lessons using three strengths of semantic gravity. This helped the teachers see the different kinds of knowledge with which they and their students engage in various activities throughout a unit of study and that these pose very different language requirements for the students. Together with the concept of semantic waves this provided a common framework for discussing lessons and students’ learning in a principled way. It allowed the teachers to see the differences between the ostensively learned knowledge of doing science (i.e., when engaging in hands-on activities and doing experiments) and the scientific concepts that inform science knowledge in textbooks.

Findings from this project suggest that introducing teachers to semantic waves while also helping them develop knowledge about language, allows them to better support their students in making shifts ‘up the wave’. Interview data with students and teachers suggest that integrating language work in middle-school science lessons supports students’ development of scientific understandings and allows them to ‘sound smart’.

Period	14 Mar 2024
Held at	Legitimation Code Theory Centre, Australia
Degree of Recognition	International