Brian Donovan

Education Department, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

The Language of Secondary School Science: A Lexicogrammatical and Semantic Comparison of Textbooks with Student Writing in a Specific Content Area.

This presentation will draw from the extensive work from within Systemic Functional Linguistics and compare the language found in second-level science textbooks with student writing, in a specific science content area. The content area researched, which was selected by the teachers in schools, was Carbon Dioxide (CO2) and included the introduction of its properties, preparation and use. The data is part of doctoral research looking at the language of school science semantically, and will focus on the writing from the textbooks as well as from students. The students were given a questionnaire before a set of classes, and were then videotaped in the content classes. Following the taped classes, and a short interval of time, students were given a second questionnaire and select students were interviewed on the subject under review. This presentation will present the findings of the research in two ways: first, by examining comparisons of the lexicogrammatical resources used by textbooks and student writing in articulating the particular content area; and second, by moving from the lexicogrammatical analysis to a semantic one by presenting the initial semantic networks of the language under review. The presentation will rely on two software programmes for output: Systemic Coder and Systemics.