Discourse Strategies for Science Teaching and Learning

Book excerpt: This engaging and practical volume looks at discourse strategies and how they can be used to facilitate and enhance science teaching and learning within the classroom context, offering a synthesis of research on classroom discourse in science education as well as practical discourse strategies that can be applied to the classroom. Focusing on the connection between research and practice, this comprehensive guide unpacks and illustrates key concepts on the role of discourse in students' thinking and learning based on empirical analysis of real conversations in a number of science classrooms. Using real-life classroom examples to extend the scope of research into science classroom discourse begun during the 1990s, Kok-Sing Tang offers original discourse strategies as explicit methods of using discourse to engage in meaning-making and work towards a specific instructional goal. This volume covers new and informative topics including how to use discourse to: Establish classroom activity and interaction Build and assess scientific content knowledge Organize and evaluate scientific narrative Enact scientific practices Coordinate the use of multimodal representations Building on more than 10 years of research on classroom discourse, Discourse Strategies for Science Teaching and Learning is an ideal text for science teacher educators, preservice science teachers, scholars, and researchers. Kok-Sing Tang is Associate Professor at the School of Education and the Discipline Lead of the STEM Education Research Group at Curtin University, Australia. He received a BA and MSc in Physics from the University of Cambridge and a MA and PhD in Education from the University of Michigan.