Students’ language use when talking about the evolution of life - negotiating the meaning of key terms and their semantic relationships
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5617/nordina.272Abstract
In this paper, we explore an idea from Vygotsky about the meaning and sense of words, and how it manifests itself in students’ talk. This is done by analysing the discussions of 15-year old Swedish students participating in teaching activities concerning biological evolution. It turned out that the students seldom articulated the scientific terms. Instead, they contextualised by using three strategies – paralleling, transferring, and delimiting. All three of these strategies have merits and drawbacks in connection with ‘meaning’ of single terms. However, when combining the terms into thematic patterns, the students formed rather sound and coherent scientific explanations. This is understood as relying on the students’ use of an interlanguage where colloquial expressions serve as an asset in sense-making. The verbalisation of an explanation in an interlanguage is advantageous when communicating in social life outside the science classroom, and thus the possibility of further sense making is enhanced.Downloads
Issue
Section
Articles
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).