Exploring Semantic Discontinuity in Middle School Science Texts: Implications for Science Literacy Development

• In Event: Roundtable Session 20
  In Roundtable Session: Literacy, Texts, and Language Arts: Connections to Science Education

Abstract

The recent advent of the Common Core State Standards has ignited the interest of educators in developing science-specific literacy strategies. Researchers, however, have only started to look at the linguistic features of the science register. To address this need, this study presents a preliminary quantitative description of the variability of discourse markers (DM’s) across grade levels in middle school science texts. Our results show that DM’s are fairly rare, appearing in fewer than 15% of utterances overall. However, DM’s are significantly more frequent (p<0.01) in 8th grade texts than 7th grade or 6th grade. Moreover, contrastive and elaborative DM’s seem to appear in intersentential positions, thus, lowering semantic discontinuity while aiming to present the content in a more concrete way.

Authors

• Diego Roman, Stanford University

• Hannah Rohde, Stanford University

• Stephanie Hironaka, Stanford University