Greek primary school teachers’ awareness of the special features of scientific language: implications for science curricula and teachers’ professional development

ABSTRACT

This exploratory study aims at investigating first the extent to which Greek primary school teachers recognize the features of scientific language (an archetype for the academic language employed in all school disciplines), and second and most importantly the functional role they attribute to these features in the construction of scientific discourse. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 teachers. Two versions of a one-page extract, varying in linguistic specialization, were used as stimuli-materials. Teachers correctly recognized the linguistically highly specialized version, but they were less able to spontaneously mention specific features (mainly syntactic complexity and terminology) contributing to this specialization. Worse still, they failed to recognize syntactic complexity as a feature of the specialized extract even after they were explicitly probed to do so. Moreover, teachers were found to only be partially aware of the functional role these features play in constructing the scientific world-view. Specifically, teachers seem to put emphasis on the communicative rather than the epistemological role of the corresponding linguistic features. These findings stress the need for certain interventions both at initial and in-service level of teacher education as well as at the level of science curricula.

KEYWORDS:

• Primary school teachers
• scientific language
• systemic functional linguistics
• awareness
• implications
• science curricula
• teachers’ professional development

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Spyridon Sagiannis

Spyridon Sagiannis is a primary teacher who has recently received the PhD degree on teachers’ awareness of the norms and conventions of scientific language in school in the Department of Social and Education Policy of the University of Peloponnese.

Kostas Dimopoulos

Kostas Dimopoulos is a professor of learning materials in the Department of Social and Educational Policy (University of Peloponnese). His current research interests concern the analysis of scientific ‘texts’, as well as evaluating the impact of science communication and education materials on non-experts (students, teachers, and the general public).