Discourse Strategies for Science Teaching and Learning

Tang, Kok‐Sing

doi:10.4324/9780429352171

Cited by 34 publications

(44 citation statements)

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“…Negotiating with peers elicits consideration of the interrelationships between disparate or seemingly disparate ideas, and it establishes a consensus among individuals that experience uncertainty or hold contradictory ideas (Berland & Lee, 2012). Teachers must create space for students to discuss, debate, defend, support, and evaluate each other's ideas (Chen et al, 2017; Tang, 2021). Students need to work cooperatively as a community to find solutions that reduce their uncertainty and reach mutually acceptable consensus.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developing deep learning in science classrooms: Tactics to manage epistemic uncertainty during whole‐class discussion

Chen

Techawitthayachinda

2021

J Res Sci Teach

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Science teachers usually view students' uncertainty as a barrier to overcome, a negative experience to be avoided, a deficiency in need of remedy. Building on the theory of deep learning in science as a generative and sensemaking process, the purpose of this design‐based study is to identify tactics for teachers to manage their students' epistemic uncertainty as a pedagogical resource to develop student conceptual understanding during whole‐class discussion. Classroom observations of whole‐class discussion were collected from six teachers' classes ranging from third to eighth grade. A total of 18 whole‐class discussions were collected, transcribed, and analyzed. A storyline talk to manage uncertainty during whole‐class discussion was developed and consisted of three stages: (1) Raise epistemic uncertainty through creating ambiguous conditions; (2) Maintain epistemic uncertainty through preventing immature disclosure and discussing alternative explanations or conflicting ideas; and (3) Reduce epistemic uncertainty through making coherent connections among current uncertainty, prior knowledge, and familiar phenomena. Seven nuanced tactics used by teachers to achieve each stage of uncertainty management were identified. The results suggest that managing uncertainty goes beyond asking questions and problematizing phenomena. When engaging students in storyline‐based whole‐class discussion, teachers should focus on one specific uncertainty and establish a coherent, consistent storyline that raises, maintains, and reduces student uncertainty to horizontally and vertically construct a collective knowledge among students. The horizontal nature occurs within a stage of management, and the vertical nature of a storyline talk is related to moving along from stage to stage. Through the storyline talk focusing on students' epistemic uncertainty, students can truly become agents in the learning process when the lesson is centered on and driven by students' uncertainty.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developing deep learning in science classrooms: Tactics to manage epistemic uncertainty during whole‐class discussion

Chen

Techawitthayachinda

2021

J Res Sci Teach

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“…Common semantic relationships include hyponym (type-of relationship, e.g., solid is one of the states of matter), meronym (part-whole relationship, e.g., matter is made of atoms), and transitivity (object-verb relationship, e.g., ice melts). See Tang (2020) for further elaboration of this method for analyzing both verbal and visual modes. The participants' gestures and gazes were also considered in the micro-discursive analysis, but they were not analyzed as detailed as the verbal and visual modes.…”

Section: Data Sources and Analytical Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The first one is inclusion where the red circles are drawn inside the square, which signify a meronym relationship where a container holds a solid, liquid, and gas, which are themselves made of particles. The second relationship is spacing which shows the relative distance between the red circles, and this corresponds to the "tightly packed" attribute mentioned in lines 8 to 10 (see Tang (2020) for a range of such visual semantic relationships).…”

Section: Genre Of Information Report (Episode 1)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Multimodal Genre of Science Classroom Discourse: Mutual Contextualization Between Genre and Representation Construction

2021

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This paper argues that meaning-making with multimodal representations in science learning is always contextualized within a genre and, conversely, what constitutes an ongoing genre also depends on a multimodal coordination of speech, gesture, diagrams, symbols, and material objects. In social semiotics, a genre is a culturally evolved way of doing things with language (including non-verbal representations). Genre provides a useful lens to understand how a community’s cultural norms and practices shape the use of language in various human activities. Despite this understanding, researchers have seldom considered the role of scientific genres (e.g., experimental account, information report, explanation) to understand how students in science classrooms make meanings as they use and construct multimodal representations. This study is based on an enactment of a drawing-to-learn approach in a primary school classroom in Australia, with data generated from classroom videos and students’ artifacts. Using multimodal discourse analysis informed by social semiotics, we analyze how the semantic variations in students’ representations correspond to the recurring genres they were enacting. We found a general pattern in the use and creation of representations across different scientific genres that support the theory of a mutual contextualization between genre and representation construction.

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“…Recent research has emphasised the significance of the interaction of gesture and language in strategic interpolations of teacher-focussed explication of visualisations as representation in teaching sequences shifts from enactive (action-based) to iconic (image-based) to abstract and symbolic representations (Tang, 2016(Tang, , 2020. The incorporation into such orchestrations of a metalanguage describing the meaning-making affordances of different kinds of visualisations is advocated by Tang (2020, p. 174); however, the studies drawn upon to support this are overwhelmingly located in primary and middle schools.…”

Section: Implications For Research and Teacher Professional Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Teacher Orchestration of Language and Gesture in Explaining Science Concepts in Images

2021

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Students’ difficulties interpreting diagrams remain a concern in science education. Research about improving diagram comprehension has included few studies of teachers’ orchestration of language and gesture in explaining diagrams—and very few in senior high schools. Research with younger students and studies of research scientists’ practice indicate the significance of the interaction of teachers’ gesture and language in explaining visualisations. The strategic deployment of such teacher-focussed authoritative explanations has been observed in facilitating progression to more complex and symbolic representations in classroom work. However, the paucity of such research in senior high school leaves open the question of how these teachers use gesture and language in managing the challenges of explaining the intricate sub-microscopic and abstract visualisations senior high school students need to negotiate. In this paper, we outline existing studies of teachers’ use of gesture and language to explain complex images in senior high school and investigate how it is managed by two biology teachers with images of different types and complexity representing the activity of certain cell components in the early phase of cell duplication. Implications are drawn for foci of further research including the role of a metalanguage describing different types of visualisations and their affordances.

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Discourse Strategies for Science Teaching and Learning

Cited by 34 publications

References 0 publications

Developing deep learning in science classrooms: Tactics to manage epistemic uncertainty during whole‐class discussion

Developing deep learning in science classrooms: Tactics to manage epistemic uncertainty during whole‐class discussion

Multimodal Genre of Science Classroom Discourse: Mutual Contextualization Between Genre and Representation Construction

Teacher Orchestration of Language and Gesture in Explaining Science Concepts in Images

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