The roles of teachers’ science talk in revealing language demands within diverse elementary school classrooms: a study of teaching heat and temperature in Singapore

ABSTRACT

This study of three science teachers’ lessons on heat and temperature seeks to characterise classroom talk that highlighted the ways language is used and to examine the nature of the language demands revealed in constructing, negotiating, arguing and communicating science ideas. The transcripts from the entire instructional units for these teachers’ four culturally and linguistically diverse Grade 4 classes (10 years old) with English as the language of instruction constitute the data for this investigation. Analysis of these transcripts focused on teachers’ talk that made explicit reference to the form or function of the language of science and led to the inductive development of the ‘Attending to Language Demands in Science’ analytical framework. This framework in turn revealed that the major foregrounding purposes of teachers’ talk include labelling, explaining, differentiating, selecting and constructing. Further classification of the instances within these categories revealed the extensive and contextualised nature of the language demands. The results challenge the conventional assumption that basic literacy skills dominate over disciplinary literacy skills in primary school science. Potential uses of the analytical framework that could further expand our understanding of the forms, functions and demands of language used in elementary school science are also discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Disciplinary literacy
• language demands
• language functions
• teacher talk

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the teachers and students who participated in this study and would also like to acknowledge the contribution of Ms Teresa Ong and Ms Gracelyn Tan Yen Leng for their help with the analysis.

Disclosure statement

Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position, policy or endorsement of the funding agency.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute of Education (Singapore) [grant OER 65/12 SLH].