Abstract

TAMAYO, Oscar Eugenio  and  SANMARTI, Neus. Características del discurso escrito de los estudiantes en clases de ciencias. Rev.latinoam.cienc.soc.niñez juv [online]. 2005, vol.3, n.2, pp.85-110. ISSN 1692-715X.

At present, the importance for Science Education of studies about language resides in a wide range of aspects, from which the authors highlight two of them: its function as privileged communication channel in teaching and learning, and as mediator and regulator of the development of students' thinking. For this purpose, they initially focus on some aspects of the communicative function of language. Then, they focus on the study of elements related to the semiotic function of language and to its function as a regulator of different central processes in Science Education. Next, the authors present partial results on the analysis of school texts in the conceptual field of respiration, written by students of the first year of the high school level called "bachillerato" in the Spanish school system (16-17 years-old). The central purposes of this analysis are to characterize the language used by those students, to assess discursive coherence and linguistic representation types in their texts, and to identify possible linguistic obstacles to learning. Among the main results, they found that those texts showed only local coherence; they also found frequent sequences of sentences related by causal connectors from which there is no clear function assignable to each sentence in the complete text. Low global structuring of students' texts was found, and a mixture of different explicative models of respiration.

Keywords : Science education; natural sciences; discourse; language; teaching; learning.

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