Discourse Analytic Perspectives On Stem Education

This volume explores the nature of discourse in secondary and upper elementary mathematics and science classrooms. Chapters examine conditions that support or hinder teachers and students, in particular language learners, in employing language as a tool for learning. The volume provides rich oral and written language examples from a range of classroom contexts to illustrate how linguistic practices affect students’ appropriation and display of disciplinary specific knowledge. Chapters further explore linguistic practices through with the support of discourse analytic models that foreground the authentic classroom data with the aim of understanding the dynamics of the classroom. The authors investigate the intersection between discourse and learning from a range of perspectives, including an examination of key concepts such as intertextuality, interaction, mediation, scaffolding, appropriation, and adaptations. This volume offers concrete suggestions on how teachers might benefit from a discourse approach to teaching in the areas of mathematics and science.

This edited book is an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of applied linguistics/literacies studies in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). It brings together a host of experts involved in actual research projects on STEM practice and education. The book presents a range of projects covering the areas of science, engineering, and mathematics and provides a conceptualization of the concepts and methodologies that underpin these projects. A range of epistemologies, approaches, and methodologies including discourse/conversation analysis, ethnographic/content analysis and text linguistic analysis is exemplified and explained in relation to specific interdisciplinary studies in STEM. This book provides a much-needed introduction to the ways in which applied linguists can work in the areas of STEM and the ways in which function in these professions and academic disciplines can benefit from the research and educational knowledge of applied linguists.

This edited volume explores diverse translanguaging practices in multilingual science classrooms in Hong Kong, Lebanon, Luxembourg, South Africa, Sweden and the United States. It presents novel opportunities for using students’ home, first or minority languages as meaning-making tools in science education. It also invites to explore the use of language resources and other multimodal resources, such as gestures and body language. In addition, it discusses and problematizes contingent hindrances and obstacles that may arise from these practices within various contexts around the world. This includes reviewing different theoretical starting points that may be challenged by such an approach. These issues are explored from different perspectives and methodological focus, as well as in several educational contexts, including primary, middle, secondary levels, higher education, as well as in after-school programs for refugee teenagers. Within these contexts, the book highlights and shares a range of educational tools and activities in science education, such as teacher-led classroom-talk, language-focused teaching, teachers’ use of meta-language, teachers’ scaffolding strategies, small-group interactions, and computer-supported collaborative learning.

This book presents an overview of the methodological innovations and developments present in the field of STEM education research as well as providing a practically orientated resource on research method design more broadly. Featuring a range of international contributors in the field, the book provides a compendium of exemplary innovative methodological designs, implementations, and analyses that answer a variety of research questions relating to STEM education disciplines. Charting the thinking behind the design and implementation of successful research investigations, the book’s two parts present an accessible and pragmatically framed set of chapters that cover a range of important methodological areas presented by active researchers in the field. Ultimately, this book presents a comprehensive resource that explores the act of educational research as related to STEM. By showcasing key methodological principles with guidance on practical approaches underpinned by theory, the book offers scholarly research-informed suggestions for practice. It will be of great interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of STEM education and education research methods, as well as educational research more broadly.

This edited book attempts to foreground how challenges and complexities between policy and practice intertwine in the teaching and learning of the STEM subjects in multilingual settings, and how they (policy and practice) impact on educational processes, developments and outcomes. The unique feature of this book, thus, lies in its combination of not just language issues in the teaching and learning of the STEM subjects, but also in how these issues relate to policy and practice in multilingual contexts and how STEM research and practice may inform and shape language policies and their implementation in multilingual contexts. This book is of interest to stakeholders involved in STEM education such as researchers, undergraduate and graduate students, tertiary level teachers, teacher educators, curriculum developers as well as other professionals with responsibilities in STEM education subjects. The book is written in a way that is accessible to a wide range of backgrounds, including those who are in language education.

The development of students’ conceptual understanding of the world is vital to their academic success at all grade levels (preschool through high school) and across content areas. This professional resource and course text presents expert perspectives on building conceptual knowledge and vocabulary through reading, writing, and classroom discussion. Topics include the importance of word study and informational texts in early literacy, discussion practices that boost comprehension, the use of multimodal and appropriately complex texts, engaging digital literacies, and discipline-specific writing. Ways to strengthen English learners’ conceptual skills are highlighted. Each chapter describes current research, explains how to plan and scaffold instruction, distills Implications for Professional Learning, and offers Questions for Discussion.

The purpose of Transforming Schooling for Second Language Learners: Theoretical Insights, Policies, Pedagogies, and Practices is to bring together educational researchers and practitioners who have implemented, documented, or examined policies, pedagogies, and practices in and out of classrooms and in real and virtual contexts that are in some way transforming what we know about the extent to which emergent bilinguals (EBs) learn and achieve in educational settings. In the following chapters, scholars and researchers identify both (1) the current state of schooling for EBs, from their perspective, and (2) the particular ways that policies, pedagogies, and/or practices transform schooling as it currently exists for EBs in discernible ways based on their scholarship and research. Drawing on current and seminal research in fields including second language acquisition, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and educational linguistics, contributing authors draw on complementary theoretical, methodological, and philosophical frameworks that attend to the social, cultural, political, and ideological dimensions of being and becoming bi/multilingual and bi/multiliterate in schools and in the United States. In sum, we are deeply committed to asserting hope, possibility, and potential to discussions and discourses about bi/multilingual students. We value the urgency around improving the conditions, experiences, and circumstances in which they are learning languages and academic content. Our aim is to highlight perspectives, conceptualizations, orientations, and ideologies that disrupt and contest legacies of deficit thinking, linguistic purism, language standardization, and racism and the racialization of ethnolinguistic minorities.

Over the past decade, integrated STEM education research has emerged as an international concern, creating around it an imperative for technological and disciplinary innovation and a global resurgence of interest in teaching and learning to code at the K-16 levels. At the same time, issues of democratization, equity, power and access, including recent decolonizing efforts in public education, are also beginning to be acknowledged as legitimate issues in STEM education. Taking a reflexive approach to the intersection of these concerns, this book presents a collection of papers making new theoretical advances addressing two broad themes: Transdisciplinary Approaches in STEM Education and Bodies, Hegemony and Decolonization in STEM Education. Within each theme, praxis is of central concern including analyses of teaching and learning that re-imagines disciplinary boundaries and domains, the relationship between Art and STEM, and the design of learning technologies, spaces and environments. In addition to graduate research seminars at the Masters and PhD levels in Learning Sciences, Science Education, Educational Technology and STEM education, this book could also serve as a textbook for graduate and pre-service teacher education courses.