“Doing science” through discourse‐in‐interaction: Young children's science investigations at the early childhood level

Abstract

This research investigates the interconnectedness of scientific inquiring at the early childhood level, as we explore the discourse-in-interaction processes occurring within small inquiry groups of 5-and 6-year-old children. The rationale behind this research is to explore the nature of science-related discourse, and to that end, this work focuses on student-to-student interactions as they collaboratively investigate water. As we document the nature of children's ways of explaining, imagining, and representing the properties of water, we demonstrate the constructions of understandings as displayed and emergent from these interactions. The study has generated outcomes about the discursive ways of young children's enacting of knowledge about science, as the analysis reveals that by positioning scientific inquiry as a fluid process children were able to enact science collaboratively and through multimodal means. As such, the study reveals a wide range of indicators to children's understandings about water and to the processes in which students worked together to construct science within discourse-in-interaction.

International Perspectives on ELT Classroom Interaction

“…Siry et al (2012) posit the distinction between 'general' and 'specific' talk formats in the 'science' area. The general is 'science-specific talk as conducted in every-day interactions' or 'exploratory talk around science' and the specific is 'science as discourse' or theorisation of the 'observations of scientific phenomena' (Siry et al 2012: 314).…”

“…Latin, Chemistry), which go beyond the ELT language classroom. Interestingly, some symbolic resources come from a 'science'-related area (Siry et al 2012). In terms of prosodic alignment, we observed: lengthening of sounds (Extract 11.2), sound-sequence relationship (Sacks 1992, Vol.…”

Interaction rituals and inquiry‐based science instruction: Analysis of student participation in small‐group investigations in a multilingual classroom

“…A second layer of video analysis examined group interactions in each of the triads Teo worked within across both micro‐ and mesotimescales. This involved the construction of multimodal transcripts from video sources (Siry, Ziegler, & Max, ) documenting Teo and his groupmates' interactions in order to identify the content and purpose of verbalizations, and language resources employed, first at the mesolevel in real time, and then at the microlevel (one tenth of one second). Viewing video footage frame by frame allowed for identification of the presence and form of interaction ritual ingredients including, bodily copresence, mutual focus, barriers to outsiders, and shared mood (Collins, ; Table ).…”

¿Cómo utilizan los conocimientos en ciencias los futuros maestros de educación infantil ante una información escrita?

“…Aunque durante mucho tiempo se focalizó hacia lo que han de saber y saber hacer los profesores de ciencias de la educación secundaria, en los últimos años han aparecido investigaciones sobre la formación de los maestros y maestras en las primeras etapas escolares: Educación Infantil y Educación Primaria (Palmer, 2006;Pérez, 2008;Pro y Rodríguez, 2011;Siry, Ziegler y Max, 2012;Riviero et al, 2013;Martinez-Chico, Lopez-Gay, Jiménez, 2014;Cantó, Pro y Solbes, 2016;McNerney y Hall, 2017;Cantó, Pro y Solbes, 2017).…”