The Discourse of Physics

Building Knowledge through Language, Mathematics and Image

Y. J. Doran

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351721417
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book provides a detailed model of both the discourse and knowledge of physics and offers insights toward developing pedagogy that improves how physics is taught and learned. Building on a rich history of applying a Systemic Functional Linguistics approach to scientific discourse, the book uses an SFL framework, here extended to encompass the more recently developed Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis approach, to explore the field's multimodal nature and offer detailed descriptions of three of its key semiotic resources – language, image, and mathematics. To complement the book's SFL underpinnings, Doran draws on the sociological framework of Legitimation Code Theory, which offers tools for understanding the principles of how knowledge is developed and valued, to explore the manifestation of knowledge in physics specifically and its relationship with discourse. Through its detailed descriptions of the key semiotic resources and its analysis of the knowledge structure of physics, this book is an invaluable resource for graduate students and researchers in multimodality, discourse analysis, educational linguistics, and science education.

1
Physics, Knowledge and Semiosis

‘Physics is hard.’ Remarks such as these have been heard by teachers and students of physics innumerable times. Physics of course has its own object of study, its own ways of organising its knowledge and its own ways of expressing its knowledge. In this sense, it is its own unique discipline. But this does not mark physics as different from any other academic subject; every discipline has its intricacies and idiosyncrasies, and every subject has its detractors and its devotees. Nonetheless, physics seems to be regularly positioned as an exceptional case in the academic world. It is often said to be the most fundamental of the sciences, one upon which all others are based (e.g. Feynman et al. 1964, Young and Freedman 2012); this perhaps can be taken to mean that it shares many of the characteristics of the others sciences, but also maintains its own distinctive features. Biglan (1973), for example, classifies physics as a pure science, along with geology, chemistry and botany, but he positions it as the ‘hardest’ of the pure sciences. Kolb (1981) characterises it as a reflective (non-applied) discipline, like geography, bacteriology and biochemistry, but he portrays it as the most ‘abstract’ of the reflective disciplines. And those following Bernstein (1999) identify it with other natural sciences as a discipline that develops generalised theories and integrates empirical phenomena, but they regularly use physics as the exemplar of such a discipline (Maton and Muller 2007, O’Halloran 2007, Martin 2011).

There is thus a sense that physics is both a natural science, and as such shares many of the features of the natural sciences; but at the same time physics is in some sense the most ‘sciencey’ of the natural sciences. Exactly how this recurrent characterisation of physics arises, however, is not clear. We might even ask whether it is truly the case that physics maintains a special position within the sciences? And if so, what gives rise to this special position? Questions such as these go to the heart of the disciplinary organisation of physics and so are not born of idle curiosity. They hold strong significance for the development of educational programs that acknowledge and target disciplinary knowledge. If disciplines vary in the way they organise their knowledge, vary in the discourse they use to construe this knowledge and vary in the means of judging and comparing competing knowledges, the pedagogic approach for teaching these disciplines must take this into account.

1.1 Knowledge and Education

In response to the disciplinary nature of knowledge, the last few decades have seen the development of an influential educational linguistics program, known as ‘Sydney School’ genre pedagogy. This approach arises from the linguistic theory generally referred to as Systemic Functional Linguistics (hereafter SFL) and specifically targets knowledge differences across the disciplinary spectrum. The program develops explicit pedagogy across all areas of schooling and aims to ensure access for all students regardless of their background. In order to do this, it addresses the specialised ways each subject organises its knowledge, as well as the literacy practices that are associated with it; this is instead of offering a generic pedagogy that generalises across disciplinary differences (Rose and Martin 2012).

Sydney school genre pedagogy developed out of research into the types of texts students need to read and write across subject areas in primary (elementary) and high school. These projects were known as the Writing Project, Language and Social Power, and Write it Right projects (for an overview of these projects, see Veel 2008 and Rose and Martin 2012; for a collection of foundational papers in SFL educational linguistics, see Martin and Doran 2015). This research showed that each subject regularly utilised only a small set of text types to organise their disciplinary knowledge. Science, for example, involved factual texts known as reports and explanations that were geared toward ‘content’ knowledge. These genres built taxonomies that organise phenomena in terms of classification and composition, and established sequences of processes these phenomena were involved with (Martin and Rose 2008, Met. East DSP 1995a). Visual arts, on the other hand, more commonly required texts that gave a student’s response to or evaluation, interpretation or critique of an artwork (Met. East DSP 1994, 1995b). This necessitated students develop the ability to judge a pre-existing artwork or the process that led to its creation. With the difference in text type came concomitant differences in the language used. For example, where visual art’s evaluative responses required students to marshal a broad range of evaluative language to appreciate the artwork, judge the artist or express their emotional responses, scientific texts were relatively non-evaluative (see Martin and White 2005 for a detailed exploration of the evaluative resources in English, and Hood 2010 for a discussion of evaluation in science). Over time, research in this tradition has expanded its breadth to include a large range of subject areas, and in doing so has progressively elaborated a picture of the varying literacy demands placed on students across the curriculum.

With significant variation in each subject’s literacy requirements comes differences in each discipline’s knowledge itself. What is accepted as valid knowledge and the means for judging competing knowledges in one discipline is typically very different to that of another discipline. In developing a discipline-sensitive pedagogy these variations need to be carefully considered. However, as Maton (2014) argues, despite knowledge building being at first sight the raison d’être of education, educational research tends to have a blind spot when it comes to actually seeing knowledge; like language, knowledge is often taken for granted. This ‘knowledge-blindness’ means that the principles underpinning the various educational and literacy practices of disciplines have frequently not been made explicit for teachers and students.

Rather than considering knowledge as an object of study, Maton argues that education tends to reduce knowledge to knowing. In physics education (and science education in general), for example, this tends to be grounded in cognitive models of student understanding that foreground the varying ways students conceptualise and frame the knowledge of physics (see diSessa 2006 for an overview of research of this kind). These models have been important in drawing attention to the fact that students do not come into physics (or indeed any discipline) with a clean slate, but rather maintain intuitive conceptions of much of the phenomena physics aims to teach more technically. However, by focussing primarily on the student as the framer of knowledge, this tradition of research often obscures how knowledge is structured in the discipline in general (Maton 2014, Georgiou et al. 2014). These models thus fail to formulate the underlying principles that underpin why a discipline is how it is, how it can progress and what forms of knowledge need to be taught to students for them to be successful.

If we wish to develop a discipline-sensitive pedagogy these structuring principles of knowledge must be understood. We need a way of answering, for example, why it is that the type of writing in English literature is not appropriate in science, or why the methods of investigation of science are not utilised in English literature. Moreover, if we wish this pedagogy to inform the reading students do to learn the knowledge and the writing they produce to show they have this knowledge, we need a method for understanding this knowledge in terms of the language and other resources used in each discipline. That is, we need to understand knowledge semiotically.

This book takes a step toward interpreting knowledge in physics from a semiotic perspective. It considers how physics is organised to develop a coherent and multifaceted knowledge structure, and how this knowledge is construed and distributed across language and other semiotic resources such as mathematics and image. Not only does this give insights into how physics works for the sake of physics education, but given physics’ nominally special position within the academic world, it allows an understanding of one of the ‘poles’ in the cline from science to the humanities. It thus broadens our understanding of academic knowledge in general.

1.2 Language, Mathematics and Images in Physics

To investigate how physics manages its apparently special knowledge structure, this book examines its discourse in classrooms, in textbooks and in student work. What is immediately apparent when considering this discourse is the large emphasis on mathematics and images throughout almost all contexts. Figure 1.1 shows a typical page from a senior high school exam paper and marked student response involving two graphs, multiple equations and a number of stretches of language.

This page is typical of physics texts throughout the data set used for this study (described in Appendix C). Indeed Parodi (2012), in his quantitative study of textbooks across multiple academic disciplines, suggests that of the basic sciences, physics is by far the most reliant on mathematics, while still utilising to a large degree images such as graphs and diagrams to present information. Based on these findings, Parodi suggests that physics is the most predominately graphic-mathematical of the disciplines he studied. This amplifies the characterisation of physics by Biglan as the ‘hardest’ of the pure sciences and by Kolb as the most abstract of the non-applied disciplines, and reinforces its exceptional form. Parodi’s study also reinforces the findings of Lemke’s (1998) survey of articles in the prestigious physics research journal Physical Review Letters. Within this corpus, Lemke found that on average, around four images and equations occurred per page (2.7 equations, 1.2 images); this is significantly higher than the rate of images and equations in the corresponding journal for the biological, earth and space sciences, Science, or for medicine, Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine (Lemke 1998: 89).¹ Images and equations are thus clearly regular features of physics’ discourse.

In order to understand the discourse of physics, then, it is necessary to comprehend the full range of resources involved—language, mathematics and images, as well as gesture, demonstration apparatus, various symbolic formalisms and numerous others. This book moves in this direction by considering mathematics, images and language as crucial components of the discourse and knowledge of physics. It thus offers a more exhaustive analysis of physics texts than would be possible if our gaze was restricted solely to language. In addition, a detailed study of each resource makes it possible to understand why each is used. The pervasiveness of each resource throughout physics across a broad range of levels in schooling and in research suggests that each plays a crucial rol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Physics, Knowledge and Semiosis
• 2 Language, Knowledge and Description
• 3 Mathematical Statements and Expressions
• 4 Mathematical Symbols and the Architecture of the Grammar of Mathematics
• 5 Genres of Language and Mathematics
• 6 Images and the Knowledge of Physics
• 7 Physics and Semiotics
• Appendix A System Network Conventions
• Appendix B Full System Networks for Mathematics
• Appendix C Details of Corpus
• Index