Discourse Strategies for Science Teaching and Learning

Research and Practice

Kok-Sing Tang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367369811
• eBook ISBN: 9781000209402
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This engaging and practical volume looks at discourse strategies and how they can be used to facilitate and enhance science teaching and learning within the classroom context, offering a synthesis of research on classroom discourse in science education as well as practical discourse strategies that can be applied to the classroom.

Focusing on the connection between research and practice, this comprehensive guide unpacks and illustrates key concepts on the role of discourse in students' thinking and learning based on empirical analysis of real conversations in a number of science classrooms. Using real-life classroom examples to extend the scope of research into science classroom discourse begun during the 1990s, Kok-Sing Tang offers original discourse strategies as explicit methods of using discourse to engage in meaning-making and work towards a specific instructional goal. This volume covers new and informative topics including how to use discourse to:

• Establish classroom activity and interaction
• Build and assess scientific content knowledge
• Organize and evaluate scientific narrative
• Enact scientific practices
• Coordinate the use of multimodal representations

Building on more than ten years of research on classroom discourse, Discourse Strategies for Science Teaching and Learning is an ideal text for science teacher educators, pre-service science teachers, scholars, and researchers.

1

Introduction to Classroom Discourse

In most classrooms, one would often find a lot of talk and action going on inside. It can be a teacher giving a lecture or students responding to the teacher’s questions and instructions. It can also be students talking among themselves as they are doing some written work, setting up an experiment, or exploring a computer simulation. Whatever the activities, talk – together with gestures and visual aids – is often the primary mechanism through which the teaching and learning of every subject matter takes place. This is true not only in a language classroom, but also in every content area classroom, and the science classroom is no exception.

No doubt most people will agree that classroom talk is critical to effective teaching. However, there is a general tendency to equate talk with just “communication.” This has the unfortunate result of implying that there is something existing (e.g., content knowledge, social norms) that needs to be communicated, and talk is merely a vehicle to transmit this knowledge or practice. Consequently, this creates a narrow view particularly among content area teachers that classroom talk and interaction is auxiliary to the “main” knowledge and practice of the discipline they are teaching.

This book is not about communication in that narrow sense of information exchange or helping students to speak or write properly. It is primarily about discourse which is central to the ways of thinking, acting, seeing, believing, and feeling that are associated with a cultural community of people, such as scientists. Without discourse, there is no science. Thus, rather than an auxiliary objective, discourse is indispensable to enabling students to gain access to the knowledge and practice of science. In other words, this book is really about science teaching and learning. In particular, this book is about how science teaching and learning is constructed through the most fundamental resource that all science teachers have in the classroom – discourse strategies.

Discourse strategies are methods that people from all walks of life use to strategically engage in a meaningful interaction and direct it toward a specific goal. They can range from something as simple as opening and closing a conversation to more subtle techniques involved in various activities, such as bargaining or interviewing. When employed effectively, discourse strategies can be used in science classrooms to: (a) structure conversation to engage students in scientific thinking and inquiry, (b) build content knowledge by linking words, images, and other resources used to represent ideas of the natural world, and (c) equip students with the skills to participate in the social practices of science. Mastering these strategies is key to becoming a skillful teacher of science.

Many of the discourse strategies that will be introduced in this book originated from classroom-based research where researchers, including myself, have observed and subsequently refined the techniques used by experienced science teachers. Some researchers acted as silent observers to record the events that transpired in the classroom, while others were more involved in working with teachers to develop and test new teaching methods and materials. Either way, researchers spent a great deal of time analyzing classroom events in great detail in order to understand how the organization and shared knowledge of classroom life are constructed through talk. Through this research process, experienced teachers’ tacit knowledge and experiences were codified and transformed into an explicit form of knowledge that is more teachable and measurable. This iterative process between research and practice formed by the partnership between researchers and teachers plays an important part in advancing our knowledge of classroom discourse and discourse strategies in the science classroom.

Drawing on this research-practice nexus, there are two mutually reinforcing objectives in this book. The first objective is to present a synthesis of the research on classroom discourse in science education in a way that is accessible to non-specialists. This objective will focus on various aspects (or patterns) of discourse and how these patterns shape classroom activities and science learning. The second objective of this book is to present several practical discourse strategies corresponding to each discourse pattern that could be applied by science teachers into their own classroom practices. This iterative relationship between discourse (as research) and discourse strategies (as practice) will form the backbone of this book. This research-practice connection is reflected in most of the chapters as having the first half focusing on a particular classroom discourse pattern and the second half focusing on a corresponding set of discourse strategies.

Discourse Patterns and Discourse Strategies

To concretize what is meant by discourse and discourse strategy, we will begin by examining an actual dialogue that took place between two people in a classroom:

Excerpt 1.1

1	Ramona	Okay, why don’t you try writing it out? Just now you said when it is rolling … it has kinetic energy right?
2	Jason	Uh-huh
3	Ramona	So you have kinetic energy
4	Jason	Half m v square
5	Ramona	Okay, so kinetic energy is used tooo … ?
6	Jason	Produce heat
7	Ramona	Okay
8	Jason	Or sound
9	Ramona	Heat energy due tooo … ?
10	Jason	Friction
11	Ramona	Okay, very goood … okay, so now, so K E … so in other words, when I want to put this into equation, it becomes?

More than Words: Patterns of Science Classroom Talk

From this transcript, two people are obviously talking to each other. However, what I am going to show is that talk is more than just speaking between two people using a common language (i.e., English). Based on certain characteristics shown in this transcript, we can tell that Ramona is a teacher and Jason is a student, as well as what is being taught through the conversation. How do we know these if we were not there during the conversation nor watch a video of it? We know these because we can recognize several characteristic patterns that are visible in this conversation. Similarly, Ramona and Jason themselves also intuitively recognized these patterns, which explains how they were able to participate sensibly and smoothly in this conversation.

So what are these patterns that can be found in classroom conversation? The first indicative pattern is based on who is saying what and how. In this exchange, Ramona was asking a lot of questions with a clear intention to elicit some kind of anticipated response from Jason. Jason, on the other hand, was obligingly responding to what he thought Ramona, as the teacher, wanted to hear. Some of Jason’s responses were also evaluated by Ramona in the form of “okay” and “very good” (lines 5, 7, and 11). This is the classic Initiate-Response-Evaluate (IRE) interaction pattern where a teacher initiates a question, a student gives a response, and then the teacher evaluates the response. Researchers have long ago found and documented this interaction pattern in almost every classroom (e.g., Mehan, 1979; Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975). While a dialogue based on question-and-answer is common in many other situations (e.g., job interview, panel discussion), this kind of IRE interaction is unique and mostly found in classroom talk. It is precisely due to such interactions that define (and are defined by) the roles and identities of the participants (e.g., teacher, student) as well as the normative rules and expectations found in schools and classrooms. This is one particular aspect of classroom talk and it is defined by the pattern of interaction among the classroom participants, or simply interaction pattern. Chapter 3 of this book will further elaborate on the IRE and other interaction patterns.

Another visible pattern that can be seen here is based on what the participants were talking about, and this is related to the content matter of the conversation. Most readers can probably identify the conversation was about physics and energy by looking at several key vocabulary such as kinetic energy, heat energy, and friction. However, readers with a good background in physics will further recognize that Ramona and Jason were talking about a particular physics concept called conservation of energy (or work-energy theorem at a higher curricular grade level). This recognition goes beyond just identifying the key words like energy, heat, and friction. It also involves examining the connections among these words. Linguists call these connections semantic relationships. There are two important semantic relationships in this conversation. The first relationship is jointly made by both Ramona and Jason in this conversation: KINETIC ENERGY – produce – HEAT or SOUND – due to – FRICTION. The second relationship is an implicit one where KINETIC ENERGY, HEAT, and SOUND are all sub-categories of ENERGY. This relationship is not stated anywhere in the conversation but it is assumed to be known to both Ramona and Jason, who had some prior knowledge in secondary school physics. Now, what makes the concept of energy conservation recognizable to many physics readers in this particular conversation is that those two semantic relationships form a characteristic pattern that is repeated over and over again in many other physics classrooms. It is this pattern that determines whether Jason is correct in his understanding of physics. This is the second aspect of classroom talk and it is defined by the pattern of semantic relationships among the uttered words, or simply thematic pattern (Lemke, 1990). See Chapter 4 for more details on semantic relationships and thematic patterns.

There are several other patterns that are characteristic to classroom discourse, but for now, I will briefly mention a multimodal pattern. Although spoken language is a key mode of communication here, this conversation would not be possible without the coordinating use of other semiotic (or meaning-making) modes. While this may not be obvious from the transcript, it is only because of the limitation of transcription in foregrounding written words in the expense of other modes. However, from the video that generated this transcript, it is visible that the participants’ gazes played an important role in the dialogue. When Jason was responding to Ramona’s questions, he was frequently looking at Ramona and his groupmates for some kind of cues to confirm whether he was saying the right thing. At the same time, some of his groupmates (there were four other students sitting at Jason’s table) were looking at their laptops which were showing some websites related to the physics concept of energy conservation. Another non-verbal mode that is important here is the use of a mathematical equation to coordinate the conversation. This was seen in Ramona’s instructions to “try writing it out” (line 1) and “put this into equation” (line 11), as well as Jason’s response to equate kinetic energy as “half m v square” (line 4). The use of these semiotic modes were not incidental; rather they were coordinated with a characteristic pattern. This multimodal coordination pattern complements the interaction pattern and thematic pattern we saw earlier to aid the participants’ meaning-making in science. See Chapters 7 and 8 for more details on multimodal patterns.

What Is Discourse?

These examples of discourse patterns illustrate that classroom talk is not just a string of words that is communicated between two or more people, but it involves much more than that. For this reason, the term discourse is more appropriate than talk in capturing the complex social activity occurring in the classroom, which we have seen three particular patterns of. First, discourse always involves social norms, expectations, and identities that are discursively fulfilled through the moment-by-moment interactions made by the participants. Second, discourse always involves a particular way of interpreting and talking about our experience and knowledge, which is manifested as the thematic content constructed through the use of our words and actions. Third, discourse is always multimodal as it involves a range of semiotic modes to coordinate and complement the meaning-making process.

Gee (2011) defines discourse as the combination of language with other sociocultural practices such as actions, values, beliefs, attitude, and identities within a specific social community. Discourses are deeply embedded in our membership and participation in various communities, and learned through our habitual ways of interacting with people in those communities. They are also manifested in characteristic patterns in the way we speak, write, think, act, and use various tools. A classroom is a kind of social community (meshed within a larger community involving schools and other socio-political entities). As such, classroom (as a collective entity) has historically developed a unique discourse that governs how participants interact with one another, what counts as disciplinary knowledge, and what values and perspectives are preferred over alternative discourses. Central to the theme of this book, the unique discourse in science classrooms can be analyzed and subsequently m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Foreword by Jay Lemke
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction to Classroom Discourse
• 2. Theories of Classroom Discourse
• 3. Using Discourse To: Establish Classroom Activity and Interaction
• 4. Using Discourse To: Build and Assess Scientific Content Knowledge
• 5. Using Discourse To: Organize and Evaluate Scientific Narratives
• 6. Using Discourse To: Enact Scientific Practices
• 7. Using Discourse To: Coordinate Multimodal Translation of Representations
• 8. Using Discourse To: Coordinate Multimodal Integration of Representations
• 9. Conclusion
• References
• Appendix
• Index