This study examines the classroom talk about models and modelling of two secondary science teachers implementing a model-based inquiry instructional unit. The goal was to better understand the opportunities for explicit metamodeling talk in the science classroom. The findings revealed the ways in which they used language to frame the modelling…

Helping preservice teachers use hybrid language representations in science is important if they are to become scientifically literate and able to engage in the discourse for understanding scientifiyc issues. Using hybrid language representations based on the framework of computer-supported collaborative learning, the teacher educator applied the…

This paper reports on a multimodal teaching approach delivered to grade 5 elementary students in a bilingual school in Hong Kong, as part of a larger research study aimed at supporting English Language Learners (ELLs) in science class. As language demands of reading, writing and talking science place additional challenges on ELLs, there is much…

This study identified the accumulated distributions of the enacted discursive moves during classroom inquiry to demonstrate how a science teacher reacted to the existence of two mutually exclusive social languages: everyday social languages of the students vs. social languages of school science. The participants were a science teacher and 26…

The aim of this article is to investigate students' meaning-making processes of multiple representations during a teaching sequence about the human body in lower secondary school. Two main influences are brought together to accomplish the analysis: on the one hand, theories on signs and representations as scaffoldings for learning and, on the…

This study explored the interplay between science teachers' pedagogical beliefs, scientific evidence, and diversity. This study adopts a sociocultural view of science that views science as a cultural way of knowing, and acknowledges that it is laden with cultural understandings, interpretations, and a language of its own. This paper reports…

Teachers play a critical role in promoting dialogic interaction in their students. The purpose of this case study was to investigate how one very effective teacher taught two, cooperative, inquiry-based science units to her Year 6 class. In particular, the case study focused on how she used different discourses to capture students' curiosity in…

The study sought to determine the effects of teacher-introduced multimodal representations and discourse on students' task engagement and scientific language during cooperative, inquiry-based science. The study involved eight Year 6 teachers in two conditions (four very effective teachers and four effective teachers) who taught two units of…

At Education Development Center, the authors developed professional learning for teachers that reflects the vision of the "Next Generation Science Standards" ("NGSS") and makes explicit connections between science and language. In the authors' recent project, Literacy and Academic Success for English Learners through Science…

Limited studies investigate the high school teachers' challenges and strategies while teaching science and mathematics in English as the target language through the content and language integrated learning (CLIL) approach. Hence, this study aimed to investigate the challenges that science and math teachers encounter and the strategies they employ…

The authors' rural community experienced an explosion of young learners moving into their schools who did not have English as their primary language. To help their teachers meet these challenges, they began to partner with a program that provides grant-funded support for migrant learners (see Internet Resources) to find ways to address these…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent of implementation of inquiry-based science teaching and learning in Ghanaian junior high schools. We sampled 503 students, 18 integrated science teachers, and 23 educational administrators from rural and urban areas of four districts and municipalities in the Central Region of Ghana. We used…

The study in this article examines and illustrates the intertextual meanings made by a group of high school science students as they embarked on a knowledge building discourse to solve a physics problem. This study is situated in a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment designed to support student learning through a science…

As a professor teaching general core science courses to non-science majors, I designed a learner-centered, inquiry-based course in order to potentially positively influence science-related attitudes of my students. Through the lens of action research with mixed methodology, I analyzed student attitudes regarding science through the Test of…

There has been increased interest in the transformation of post-secondary level instructional practices in STEM from more traditional to evidence-based practices that are more aligned with how learning occurs. Research has shown that instructional practices are linked to student learning outcomes even when content is unchanged; therefore,…