The Fifth International Legitimation Code Theory Conference

Description

Individual paper presentation: Semantic waves for helping teachers teach science to second language students

Students learning science have a hard time learning to do, talk and write scientifically. For students who are learning in a different language, these challenges are multiplied as they are learning both new scientific concepts, and to use the language of instruction. When teachers don’t see knowledge and language as fundamentally connected, they may not provide the necessary language support in their lessons. This study shows how semantic waves have helped science teachers to build both students’ scientific understandings and help them acquire the subject discourse together.

A research and professional development project called “Semantic Waves and Linguistic Snails” was done with middle school teachers in Denmark. Teachers from three different schools worked collaboratively with teacher-educators to plan and reflect on their science lessons. Data from the project includes video of classroom observations, voice-recorded interviews and planning/reflection meetings with teachers before, during and after interventions, as well as group interviews with students after each intervention.

Shifting of semantic gravity provided a common framework for discussing lessons in a principled way. By ‘roughly’ analyzing excerpts from the teachers’ own science lessons together with the involved teacher-educators, the participating teachers became aware of the different kinds of knowledge (using three strengths of semantic gravity) with which they and their students engage in various activities throughout a unit of study. The concept of semantic waves turned out to be immediately useful for helping teachers 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 principled knowledge in textbooks.

Developing teachers’ understanding of semantic waves helped them to determine how to plan shifts with science knowledge in their lessons. The ‘rough’ semantic gravity analyses also provided the teachers with evidence for the need to include a more explicit focus on scientific language and to highlight for their students how scientific language differs from everyday language, allowing them to plan activities throughout their science lessons on a macro-scaffolding level. Using the systemic functional linguistics pedagogic model known in Denmark as the Snail Model (the register-model of language) as a point of departure, the teachers were inspired to include meaningful science-language lessons, allowing their students to become aware of and practice using scientific language. As such, the rough semantic gravity analyses lay the foundation for teachers to redesign their lesson-plans to support students with more written language work, while also helping them to support students’ scientific language production in group activities and classroom conversations.

Findings 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’. Semantic waves proved to be a powerful tool for increasing teachers’ awareness of the epistemology of science, making it clearer for them why doing an experiment is often insufficient in ensuring students’ ability to demonstrate scientific understandings. With semantic waves, the participating teachers developed a mutual language for communicating about what knowledge is valued in science while providing them with new perspectives on teaching middle-school science lessons. This combined with growing knowledge of a functional model of language provides ideas for instructional approaches integrating reading and writing activities in science lessons without losing focus of the content knowledge being taught. Results from the project will be a collection of inspirational cases and examples of activities that demonstrate how integrating a focus on ‘science-language’ in middle-school science lessons serves to develop all students’ scientific understandings.

Period	15 Jan 2024 → 18 Nov 2024
Event type	Conference
Conference number	5
Location	Johannesburg, South AfricaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International