Abstract
Recent research on science education has increasingly focused on the literacy challenges posed by multimodality. While students are required by government mandated syllabi to make a successful translation between different semiotic resources, there still remains a lack of research on the grammars and functionality of the specialized modalities to develop explicit instructions to improve literacy practices. This paper analyses the semiotic resource of chemical symbolism in secondary school chemistry textbooks with a Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis approach (SF-MDA). It is argued that chemical symbolism is far from a jargon or mere shorthand for language. Instead, it develops unique grammatical devices to realize sub-microscopic meaning and topological meaning, which outstrips the meaning potential of language. The current study also discusses how the SF-MDA approach could develop a visible pedagogy and improve chemistry education.
Highlights
This paper aims to make a modest step towards a useful pedagogy to improve literacy practices in teaching and learning chemistry at secondary schools with the approach derived from systemic-functional grammar, which has inspired much productive research on science and mathematics education (e.g. Halliday & Martin, 1993; Halliday, 1998; Lemke, 1998; O’Halloran, 2000)
VOLUME 11, NUMBER 2, DECEMBER 2009: 128-141 study concentrates on functional specialization of chemical symbolism and is interested in how SFG can be extended to support the pedagogy for multiliteracies
In response to the contextual requirements of quantification and submicroscopic interpretation, chemical symbolism developed specialized grammatical strategies to construe topological meaning and sub-microscopic meaning at abstract levels, which may be transparent for expert chemists to understand, but constitute a serious challenge for novice learners in science education
Summary
This paper aims to make a modest step towards a useful pedagogy to improve literacy practices in teaching and learning chemistry at secondary schools with the approach derived from systemic-functional grammar (hereafter SFG, see Halliday, 1978, 1994), which has inspired much productive research on science and mathematics education The final part of this research discusses pedagogical implications informed by the social semiotic analysis
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