Understanding Middle School Students’ Difficulties in Explaining Density Differences from a Language Perspective

Abstract

This study examines how a class of Grade 7 students employed linguistic resources to explain density differences. Drawing from the same data-set as a previous study by, we take a language perspective to investigate the challenges students face in learning the concept of density. Our study thus complements previous research on learning about density which has mostly focussed on the conceptual challenges. The data consist of transcripts of lessons on density and students' written assignments. Using selected analytical categories from the Systemic Functional Linguistics framework, we first examined students' use of linguistic resources in their written reports of a practical activity. We then compared the language employed by the students with the instructional language, identifying possible links. Our analysis identified specific aspects of language that the students need to appropriate in order to express an understanding of density that aligns with a scientific perspective. The findings from this study illuminate ways by which teachers could assist students in overcoming the linguistic challenges in explaining density differences, which complement those made by existing studies that focus on conceptual challenges.

A Review of Students’ Common Misconceptions in Science and Their Diagnostic Assessment Tools

“…(2) choices do not provide insight and understanding to students regarding their ideas; (3) students are forced to have one correct answer from various answers that can limit the ability to construct, organize, and interpret their understanding; and (4) writing an excellent multiple-choice test is Density (Seah et al, 2015) General physics concept (Armağan, 2017).…”

To integrate a language focus in a linguistically diverse physics classroom

“…Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) has also been used by science education researchers to further explore the language demands of science, and how these can be made explicit in the classroom (e.g. Cheng, Danielsson, and Lin 2020;Seah, Clarke, and Hart 2015;Tang 2016). Through intervention studies, research has shown how the use of a functional metalanguage can help second language learners to gain control of how language works in science instruction (e.g.…”

Discourse Analysis and Multimodal Meaning Making in a Science Classroom: Meta-Methodological Insights from Three Theoretical Perspectives

“…These three different views can be characterised as conceptual, representational and interpersonal. In this article, distributed cognition (DCog) (Xu and Clarke 2012), systemic functional linguistics (SFL) (Seah et al 2015), and discursive psychology (DP) (Martin 2016) respectively offer these views. Reflections upon the partiality and complementarity of the research approaches for understanding meaning making in a science classroom has been discussed elsewhere (Clarke et al 2012).…”