Multilingual youth, from nondominant communities, are often denied critical opportunities for engagement in robust sensemaking due to deficit-based perspectives and linguistic hierarchies. To advance equity, it is important to recognize all youth as epistemic agents and facilitate opportunities to take on intellectual positions. Drawing on…

This case study demonstrates teaching and learning activities in the school laboratory, and employs talk moves for the direct assessment of practical task effectiveness. By adopting a sociocultural linguistic approach (SCLA), learning chemistry is understood to be a discursive process in which knowledge is constructed through social interaction…

Educational standards and instructional frameworks aim to foster students' scientific literacy, especially their conceptual knowledge. Previous research has examined several instructional approaches to foster students' conceptual learning. Reliable and adequate use of technical terms in science instruction is also essential for fostering students'…

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 abstract nature of energy encourages metaphorical language. In educational settings, teachers and students use conceptual metaphors subconsciously to express their ideas about what energy is or how it functions in particular scenarios. However, research on scientific analogies and metaphors has predominantly focused on explicit instructional…

This study aims to characterize a group of students' preliminary oral explanations of a scientific phenomenon produced as part of their learning process. The students were encouraged to use their own wordings to test out their own interpretation of observations when conducting practical activities. They presented their explanations orally in the…

We developed a teacher professionalisation intervention, called "Language as a Tool for Learning Science", that focuses on language use during early elementary science lessons, based on video feedback coaching. The aim of this study was to investigate possible changes in teacher student behaviour during this intervention, by analysing…

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…

In this article we examine a teacher's and multilingual students' use of multiple resources and their potential for students' meaning-making of sound and sound transmission. Students were 14-15 years old, Swedish grade 8, speaking Swedish as a second language. We examine how different strategies and multiple resources interact in creating thematic…

This study describes multilingual students' authentic use of their first and second languages in a "translanguaging science classroom," from a sociocultural perspective. The study is ethnographic, and has followed some lessons each month in a translanguaging science classroom at a primary school for three years. The observed lessons were…

This case study examines how three science teachers in a secondary school attended to the language demands of science through oral interactions in classes of multilingual students with diverse English proficiencies. It specifically unpacks the intricate role of language in science education, where teachers must address disciplinary-specific…

In the telling case presented here, the instructional practices an exemplary teacher used to scaffold fourth-grade emergent bilinguals' comprehension of a challenging informational science text are identified, analyzed, and discussed. Data sources included observation field notes, video and audio recording of 11 hours of instruction, the teacher's…

This case describes an observational video study of an upper elementary science classroom. Through our study, we explored the ways in which the role of a good science student is portrayed in the language used by students and their teacher. The analysis focused on probing how pronouns were used by students and teacher to position each other and…

This paper aims to gain insight into language production and academic language of 4- and 5-year-old students and their teachers in the course of a teacher intervention during kindergarten science education. The study is based on videotaped classroom observations, and specifically focuses on the academic language use of students (N[subscript…

Iconic gestures that are ubiquitous in speech are integral to human meaning-making. However, few studies have attempted to map out the role of these gestures in science teaching. This paper provides a review of existing literature in everyday communication and education to articulate potential contributions of iconic gestures for science teaching.…