What is time? Multilingual students’ meaning-making in school physics
2015 (English)In: NoFa5: Nordic Conference on Subject Education: Book of Abstracts, Helsinki: University of Helsinki , 2015, p. 11-12Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
Scientific discourse comprises a specialized, lexically dense and abstract language, with a need for students to handle multiple resources for meaning making in parallel, e.g. verbal language, graphs, gestures, models, and symbolic language (Halliday & Martin, 1993; Lemke, 1998). This puts high demands on the learner, in particular for multilingual students as they learn science in their second language. We will present results from an interdisciplinary project on interaction in science classrooms, focusing on how science content is elaborated and negotiated through various semiotic resources. The project draws on i) social semiotics (Kress, 2010), including systemic functional linguistics (SFL) (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004), and ii) practical epistemology (Wickman & Östman, 2002). Data (video/audio recordings, digital photographs and texts collected in the classrooms) is analyzed through SFL-analyses, multimodal analyses and practical epistemology. We will concentrate on findings from a primary school classroom working with "time". Here, the teacher uses a variety of semiotic resources in different semiotic modes, and students are engaged in small group work and whole class discussions. Our analyses, made from different perspectives, reveal a need for interdisciplinary cooperation for researchers to be able to give a broader picture of what learning opportunities are given the students.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Helsinki: University of Helsinki , 2015. p. 11-12
Keywords [en]
multimodality, practical epistemology, systemic functional linguistics, meaning making, multilingual classrooms
National Category
Didactics
Research subject
Science Education; Language Education
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:hb:diva-22994OAI: oai:DiVA.org:hb-22994DiVA, id: diva2:1414144
Conference
NoFa5, 5th Nordic Conference on Subject Education, Helsinki, Finland, May 27-29, 2015.
Projects
Flerspråkiga elevers meningsskapande i skolämnena biologi och fysik - en tvärvetenskaplig studie av ämne och språk
Funder
Swedish Research Council, 2013-42867-99966-132016-02-222020-03-122020-04-15Bibliographically approved