An Image-to-Writing Approach to Learning the Language of Scientific Concepts

• In Event: Teachers' Knowledge of the Role of Language in Content Pedagogy

Abstract

Learning scientific concepts is difficult for primary school students because of the highly technical, abstract and lexically-dense language used to name and define them. As such, understanding scientific concepts must necessarily entail comprehending how linguistics resources are used to bring across the semantic meanings of scientific concepts. However, this does not mean that science teachers should start teaching grammar or focus on the learning of the textual mode. Rather, we take a multimodal perspective of learning and advocate the transformative use of multimodal resources for making meaning in science. The perspective of multimodality further highlights the disciplinary and pedagogical affordances of modes to consider when designing supports for students’ meaning-making. In this presentation, we describe an Image-to-Writing (I2W) approach devised to help teachers think about how they can engage students in the transformation of multimodal resources as students are socialized into the language of science and illustrate its application to teach the concept of “pollination”.

Extending the notion of pedagogical content knowledge to the types of multimodal-related knowledge that teachers need to enact I2W in a science classroom, we introduce the concept of pedagogical-representational-content knowledge (P-R-C-K). We identify some of these P-R-C-K by examining a teacher’s enactment of I2W for the concept of “pollination” from his whole-class talk with his elementary students in a Singapore classroom.

Through a combination of discourse analysis of the talk and multimodal analysis of the teacher’s gestures and inscriptions on the white board, the following knowledge bases related to the content and pedagogy that influenced a Singapore teacher’s P-R-C-K were identified: (1) Knowledge about the use of nouns as naming words, (2) Knowledge about the non-content words used in everyday language, (3) Knowledge of genres (e.g., personal recount) and their related grammatical features, (4) Knowledge of technicality and their meanings (e.g., transfer and carry), (5) Knowledge of the complementary function of the disciplinary and pedagogical affordances of different semiotic modes. The identified representational knowledge had helped him to better select and use the appropriate modes in disciplinary and pedagogical appropriate ways such as reframing some of the representational tasks appropriate for his students and the content, specifying the language boundaries for each task, and discussing the meanings/alternatives of technical terms with the students.

These language-related knowledge bases were found to influence the teacher’s choice of representations for pedagogical and disciplinary purposes. Further, the knowledge of the complementary roles of semiotic modes for both disciplinary and pedagogical purposes in science meaning-making, suggests the value of considering PRCK as a unique professional knowledge, separate from PCK. These knowledge bases suggest the necessity to consider them as part of teachers’ professional knowledge in addition to PCK and its components.

Authors

• Ai Choo Jennifer Yeo, Nanyang Technological University

• Daniel Tan, National Institute of Education - Nanyang Technological University