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From image-to-writing: A teacher's PCK in supporting primary school students in making sense of the specialised language of science
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Type
Book chapter
Citation
Yeo, J., & Tan, K. C. D. (2022). From image-to-writing: A teacher's PCK in supporting primary school students in making sense of the specialised language of science. In L. H. Seah, R. E. Silver, & M. C. Baildon (Eds.), The role of language in content pedagogy: A framework of teachers' knowledge (pp. 115-136). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5351-4_6
Abstract
Learning scientific concepts is difficult for primary school students because of the highly technical, abstract and lexically dense language used to name and define entities and processes. Understanding scientific concepts entails comprehending how linguistic resources are used to bring across the semantic meanings of scientific concepts. However, this does not mean that science teachers should start teaching grammar. In this chapter, we advocate the transformative use of multimodal resources for making meaning in science. The perspective of multimodality highlights the disciplinary and pedagogical affordances of ‘modes’ which teachers can consider when designing supports for students’ meaning-making. Specifically, we introduce an Image-to-Writing (I2W) approach devised to help teachers think about how they can engage students in the transformation of multimodal resources and socialize students into the language of science. We illustrate its application in teaching the concept of “pollination”. We also extend the notion of pedagogical content knowledge to the types of multimodal-related knowledge that teachers need in order to enact I2W in a science classroom, introduce the concept of pedagogical-representational-content-knowledge (P-R-C-K) and identify components of P-R-C-K by examining a teacher’s enactment of I2W for the concept of “pollination”.
Date Issued
2022
ISBN
9789811953507 (print)
9789811953514 (online)
Publisher
Springer
DOI
10.1007/978-981-19-5351-4_6
Project
AFR 02/15JY
Funding Agency
Ministry of Education, Singapore