Literacy and the language of science in Year 1 classrooms: implications for children's learning.

Torr, Jane ; Harman, Jenni

In this article the authors report on the findings of a study which explores certain linguistic features in the discourse of two Year 1 teachers and their students. The study focusses on the teachers' use of grammatical metaphor, which is considered to be a significant feature in the construction of scientific and technical knowledge, including the disciplines of science and mathematics (Halliday, 1987; Martin 1993). Certain kinds of grammatical metaphor appear to be difficult for young children to use and interpret (Halliday, 1993b). The study found differences in the nature and extent of the grammatical metaphor used. One teacher's strategies for developing her students' understanding of scientific register are analysed.

Introduction

This article explores the nature of the language used during science-oriented lessons with Year 1 children. While language development in the first two years of life has been extensively studied by researchers, less attention has been devoted to the language learning which occurs in the later pre-school period and the early years of formal education. It is often assumed that certain kinds of language are too difficult for young children. Traditionally, early childhood discourses have focussed on the child's gradual development within various domains, and as a result, young children's learning capacity is frequently underestimated, and the crucial role played by the teacher's practice and intervention in the child's learning not fully recognised. Our researches look at the extent to which two teachers used grammatical constructions which are typical of scientific discourse (grammatical metaphor). We found that one teacher made frequent use of grammatical metaphor, and highlighted here are the strategies she used to orient her young students towards the patterns of scientific discourse.

The transition to school places many new linguistic demands on the young learner. The ability to access abstract knowledge -- knowledge not accessible from personal, concrete experiences -- is an essential aspect of language and literacy development after the commencement of formal schooling. Oral and written language both play a crucial role in the development of educational knowledge.

Official policy usually equates educational knowledge with the written mode and commonsense knowledge with the spoken; but teachers' actual practice goes deeper -- educational knowledge demands both, the two often relating to different aspects of the same phenomenon.

Our analysis of some of the linguistic features which characterise the science-oriented lessons of two Year 1 teachers and their students reveals that the linguistic choices made by the teachers appear to have important implications"for children's learning of scientific phenomena, that is, for constructing abstract educational knowledge. A number of assumptions about language and literacy have shaped the research question itself, and the methodology employed to address this question. First, there is an underlying assumption that there is, in fact, an inextricable connection between the language addressed to children and the nature of children's learning. Over the last twenty years, many researchers such as Bernstein (1987), Halliday (1975), Hasan (1991), Brice Heath (1983), Michaels (1981), Cook-Gumperz (1986) and Cloran (1989) have analysed the manner in which the everyday spontaneous talk between adults (usually parents) and children serves to orient children to certain ways of using language to interact with others and to interpret experience. This orientation varies according to factors such as social background, gender and ethnicity and has important implications for subsequent educational achievement.

A closely related assumption is that what is regarded as knowledge is constructed intersubjectively through language. Thus, cognitive development and linguistic development cannot be considered independently of each other, because `language is at the same time a part of reality, a shaper of reality, and a metaphor for reality' (Halliday, 1993a: p. 8). All phenomena experienced by a child are interpretable according to some theory of reality, which is primarily language-mediated and which shapes the child's subjectivity within a cultural context. Certain kinds of knowledge are highly valued in formal school contexts, and those students who can access this privileged knowledge are more likely to experience success during their formal schooling; `Valid knowledge is a creation of the society, its ideology of learning and of pedagogy' (Cook-gumperz, 1986: p. 15). In order to analyse the way in which `valid knowledge' is constructed differently in two Year 1 classrooms, it is first necessary to provide an explanation of the phenomenon of grammatical metaphor and its significance for language and literacy development.

Grammatical metaphor

Teachers, like all speakers, make certain linguistic choices when talking to other people. The choices they make will relate to the topic or subject of the discourse, and to the students whom they are addressing. In the example below, the teacher is introducing a science lesson to her students.

We're going to have a look today in much further depth, because you're going to actually observe the tadpoles and write some information about them. So now I'm just going to get you to quickly give me a summary of what each page is about; quickly sc"an the information.

It is perhaps surprising to learn that the children being addressed here are six and seven years old, as the teacher is using linguistic patterns which usually occur in academic discourse with older students and particularly in scientific discourse as opposed to everyday talk. We will examine how this teacher uses language during a science-oriented lesson, and the significance of this language for her students' language and literacy development, particularly in the construction of scientific knowledge. Comparisons will be made with the science lesson of another Year 1 teacher, who chooses different linguistic patterns in her discussion.

Specifically, this study focusses on teachers' use of grammatical metaphor (Halliday, 1994: ch.10). The term grammatical metaphor refers to a distinct way of using language which involves a transformation of some kind within the clause itself. Thus, grammatical metaphor differs from the kinds of lexical metaphor often found in poetic/figurative language. The nature of the transformation varies according to whether the grammatical metaphor is serving an interpersonal function for the speaker (negotiating with others, expressing a point of view), or an ideational function (representing an understanding of external reality). Each type of metaphor will be discussed briefly below.

Ideational metaphor -- nominalisation

According to Halliday `nominalizing is the single most powerful resource for creating grammatical metaphor' (1994: p. 352). An example of nominalisation can be seen in the following question, in which the teacher has used what is typically a verb move as a noun movement:

T: Use your hand to show me the sort of movement that they do. She could have said: T: Use your hand to show me how they move.

In this second example, there has been no transformation from verb to noun. These two examples are very close in meaning, but not identical. The second one is said to be congruent, in the sense that the action moving is expressed in the clause as a verb. The first example is non-congruent, because the action moving is expressed not as a verb, but as a noun, which can potentially be qualified and described by adjectives and other modifiers. This notion of congruence or typicality of certain expressions raises many issues concerning the criteria used to determine what is congruent and non-conguent in language, which are beyond our scope here (see Halliday, 1994: p. 343; Ravelli, 1988: p. 135; and Martin, 1993: pp. 237-38).

Why is ideational grammatical metaphor, particularly nominalisation, significant in a discussion of Year 1 teacher/child talk and children's literacy development? Its significance lies in the role it plays in the development of abstract understandings of phenomena and the construction of knowledge discussed in the introduction. According to Painter:

[Nominalisation) involves construing the world of happenings and events as things. In the language of the young child, events are interpreted by verbs and entities by nouns. But technical language uses nouns to represent the kind of phenomena previously encoded by verbs.

Clearly, then, the teachers' use of grammatical metaphor will have implications for children's learning, expecially in relation to technical concepts. The ability to produce and understand grammatical metaphor appears to be a highly significant feature in children's language and literacy development (Halliday & Martin, 1993).

Interpersonal metaphor

Whereas ideational metaphor constitutes a distinct way of representing experience (for example, events transformed into things in the grammar), interpersonal metaphor plays a role in the construction of relationships between interactants. Interpersonal metaphor provides speakers with a powerful resource for relating to others by influencing, negotiating and expressing a point of view. For a more detailed discussion, see Halliday (1994: pp. 354-67).

In the following utterance, for example, the teacher is not really conveying information about her thought processes (what she thinks), but is rather indirectly expressing her opinion as to the probability that the children are listening to her, and is instructing them to listen: T: I don't think you people are listening.

The teacher is using what is grammatically a statement declarative form, Subject followed by Finite) to express what is semantically a command. This incongruity between the grammatical form of a clause and its speech function has been widely discussed in speech act theory, the point here is that the language has the capacity to be used in this way, resulting in new ways of creating meaning.

In the following example, the teacher is expressing her opinion as to the probability of a certain state of affairs rather than communicating to students her cognitive processes: T: I think they might be shopping.

The use of such expressions in teacher/child discourse has implications for children's learning (see Hasan, 1988; Cloran, 1989; and Torr, 1993).

Grammatical metaphor -- a developmental perspective Relatively little is known about the development of grammatical metaphor, despite the fact that almost all adult discourse is metaphorical to some degree.

There is a great deal of variation among different registers in the degree and kind of metaphor that is encountered; but none will be entirely without it. The only examples of discourse without metaphor that we normally meet with are in young children's speech.

Data from a number of researchers suggest that some types of interpersonal metaphor appear very early in the child's own linguistic repertoire, and in the language of caregivers of small children (Derewianka, 1995). Almost as soon as the child has a functional Mood system (i.e. choices are possible from interrogative, declarative and imperative forms), metaphorical forms begin to appear in the child's system (Torr, 1987: p. 279). These forms provide the child with a resource for negotiating with others and enhance the child's ability to obtain desired goods and services. Some metaphors of modality also develop relatively early (Torr, 1987). By the time the child commences formal schooling, he/she has had extensive experience with many kinds of interpersonal metaphor.

Ideational grammatical metaphor, on the other hand, which is, crucially involved in the development of abstract reasoning, occurs much later. According to Halliday (1993b and elsewhere), children under approximately nine years of age are unable to interpret nominalised language, and as a consequence adults `demetaphorise' during their conversations with young children, intuitively avoiding the use of nominalisations and other ideational grammatical metaphors.

In talking to a 9-year-old, we would never say in times of engine failure; we would say whenever the engine failed. Notice that we have not had to simplify the vocabulary; there are no difficult words in the first version -- it is the grammar that is difficult for a child.

Thus the manner and extent to which the teacher uses grammatical metaphor will have important implications for children's ability to access and understand scientific and technical concepts.

This study

In the light of these two issues in recent research on grammatical metaphor, i.e. that grammatical metaphor is. a fundamental feature of scientific registers, and that young children below about nine years of age are unable to understand certain kinds of grammatically metaphorical language, the study on which this article is based has the following two aims:

1 To explore the presence and nature of grammatical metaphor in the discourse of two Year 1 teachers and their students, and

2 To determine the significance of grammatical metaphor in the construction of scientific technical language in these two early childhood classrooms.

The data

The data were collected from two Sydney public schools, as part of a larger study of semantic patterns in Year 1 classrooms. The data were recorded by audio tape recorder, while the researcher sat in the class taking textual notes and observing classroom activities. In both classes, parents and other adults were frequently present, so the researcher's presence was not an exceptional circumstance for the children. A range of situations were recorded and later transcribed, including small group work, large group work, individual conferences, maths, literacy experiences, science-type lessons, news, etc. For this particular study, we focussed on the teacher / child discourse during science lessons in the two classrooms. Context was quite loosely determined by the teachers' perceptions of what the lesson was about, and the natural beginnings an of the lesson (the notion of what constitutes a context is an important theoretical issue, beyond the scope of this study). The focus of the science-oriented lessons was natural phenomena (i.e. how seeds grow and the lifecycle of tadpoles respectively).

While the main focus of our attention was the scientific discourse, we also analysed two maths lessons, one from each teacher, in order to determine whether the patterns we observed in the science lessons also occurred in a related area. In total, four lessons were analysed for grammatical metaphor, one science and one maths lesson from each teacher. The focus of the maths lessons was addition and subtraction. Each of the four lessons analysed for this study lasted approximately 20-30 minutes. Only the science lessons are explored in detail in this article; the maths results in Table 1 are provided simply to demonstrate that each teacher was consistent in the manner in which she used grammatical metaphor across her two lessons.

In order to give some indication of the linguistic features of the data, the following two edited extracts from the science-oriented lessons are provided.

Classroom 1: science Tadpoles'

(Teacher and children have been discussing various aspects about frog lifecycles over a period of weeks. There is a tank of tadpoles in the classroom, and various books have been consulted and discussed by the children. The teacher holds up a book and questions the children about features of the text.) Teacher: What does the top of it say? Child: Contents. T: What's the contents? OK, Max, have a go. C: That it tells us all the stuff about tadpoles and things? T: Right, what do you mean by `stuff'? C: Things. T: Better word than `things'. What is the book actually telling us? It's giving us something. C: Frog lifecycles. T: Right, but what ... what's that called then, Julia? C: Information. T: Good girl. Information. C: Facts. T: We could have said facts. You could have said facts or information. That's wonderful. A lovely try from the other two though. Right, don't ever give up; the right answers will come.

T: What are the eggs surrounded in? C: The...tadpoles. T: No, what are the tadpole eggs surrounded in? We talked about that the other day ...to keep them safe. C: Bubbles. T: Not...well they look like bubbles, but it's more ... C: Egg,. T: It's a jelly, right. It's like...a jelly, that protects them, around the egg, till they... C: Bubbles, um, are squashy like that. [...] T: Can anyone tell me, what do you think a froglet might be eating at this stage? C: Um, rats and stuff. T: Think about that one, Julia. C: The grass under the water? T: What's that grass under the water called? Louis? Have a think about that one, Abdul. C: Um, they might eat weeds under water. T: Right. The substances that are on the weeds, right? All the stuff that's stuck to the weeds, that's right.

Classroom 2: science 'Seeds'

The (teacher and children have planted seeds in small pots on the classroom windowsill, and have been observing and discussing what plants need to grow. They have produced a book on their findings. The teacher is in front of class with book, leading discussion.) T: And what happened when we watered them [the seeds] every day? What happened, people? C: They grew. T: They grew. Charlie? C: (?name) done that. T: They do. Actually, I think our plants might have... (interruption as parent arrives) [...] T. and C: (reading) 'The roots grew down into the soil. Some little leaves grew up.' T: These are great illustrations. C: Me and...Me and Edward drew... T. and C: (reading) 'The plants grew bigger and bigger.' C: Anna did that page. T: Beautiful. C: There's a lot of it imagination though. T: There is a lot of imagination, Richard. What do you mean by that? C: There's a lot of plants that haven't flowered yet. T: Yes, a lot of people have just imagined that the flowers are already there; but they're not there yet; we're still waiting for the flowers to come. T. and C: (reading) 'Miss Martin took our plants home to care for them during the school holidays.' C: That was mine...but somebody thought I was drawing the door. T: Hmm? C: Somebody made it out of the table, and...and...there and when they put in that. T: But then you drew a door over there instead. Another door. And that's me, and I'm taking care of the flowers...or the plants.

Analysis of data

The data were transcribed by an experienced linguist and analysed in terms of the type and frequency of interpersonal and ideational metaphor. Each message was analysed in both class terms and functional terms. Class terms are traditional grammar terms, such as verb transforming to noun, or adverb transforming to adjective. Functional terms described, say, the transformation from a Process to a Thing. If two kinds of metaphor occurred in one message, this was counted twice. Further, each clause was analysed as a whole in terms of Subject, Finite Predicator, Complement and Adjunct, to determine how the displacement had effected the whole clause structure.

Findings

The teachers were found to vary greatly in terms of the extent and nature of the grammatical metaphor which they used. Table 1 provides raw frequency counts of teachers' use of ideational and interpersonal methaphor. These frequency counts are included to give an indication of the orientation of the discourse in the two classrooms (they are not, and are not intended to be, statistically significant).

Table 1: Teachers' use of ideational and interpersonal grammatical metaphors

Classroom 1: Science 'Tadpoles' Total no. of grammatical metaphors: 24 (5% of all messages) Total no. of grammatical metaphors by teacher: 21 (6% of all T's messages) Total no. of interpersonal grammatical metaphors: 8 (38% of all T's grammatical metaphors) Total no. of ideational grammatical metaphors: 13 (62% of all T's grammatical metaphors). Of these, 10 (77%) of ideational grammatical metaphors are nominalisations

Classroom 2: Science 'Seeds' Total no. of grammatical metaphors: 6 (3% of all messages) Total no. of grammatical metaphors by teacher: 5 (6% of all T's messages) Total no. of interpersonal grammatical metaphors: 3 (60% of total T's grammatical metaphors) Total no. of ideational grammatical metaphors: 2 'dead' metaphors (40% of total T's grammatical metaphors)

Classroom 1: Maths Total no. of grammatical metaphors: 21 (11% of all messages) Total no. of grammatical metaphors by T: 21 (13% of all T's messages) Total no. of interpersonal grammatical metaphors: 6 (29% of total T's grammatical metaphors) Total no. of ideational grammatical metaphors: 15 (71% of total T's grammatical metaphors). Of these 14 (93%) of ideational grammatical metaphors are nominalisations

Classroom 2: Maths Total no. of grammatical metaphors: 11 (8% of all messages) Total no. of grammatical metaphors by T: 10 (8% of all T's messages) Total no. of interpersonal grammatical metaphors: 8 (80% of all T's grammatical metaphors) Total no. of ideational grammatical metaphors: 1 'dead' metaphor (10% of all T's grammatical metaphors)

These figures illustrate a difference between the two teachers in their use of grammatical metaphor. In Classroom 1, the teacher used many more ideational metaphors (mostly nominalisations) than interpersonal metaphors. In Classroom 2, however, the situation was reversed. The teacher did not use any nominalised metaphors, other than three 'dead' ones (i.e. fixed expressions like have a look). She did, however, use many interpersonal metaphors. Given the crucial role played by ideational grammatical metaphor in the construction of scientific and technical discourse discussed above, we will now discuss in more detail the significance and effect of these results in terms of children's learning technical and scientific material. We will focus on the science-oriented lessons only, as the maths figures are provided simply to demonstrate that the patterns used by the teachers also occurred in other discourse they produced.

Discussion

In much of the material addressed to early childhood teachers, science is regarded as a technical subject which is difficult for young children to understand, and not surprisingly there are various approaches to the teaching of it. In most texts, 'talk' is recognised as a very important aspect of science learning in young children, with discussion of the difficulty of terminology and the importance of labelling; Harlan, for example, (1980) states that 'Children learn more effectively when events and objects are verbally labelled for them' (p. 3). Generally the discussion of the 'talk' aspects of science is limited to a consideration of appropriate questions to ask small children, and there is nothing that specifically addresses other aspects of the grammar, although Ward (1983) does agree that 'every teacher is a language teacher' (p. 48).

The present study is not concerned with determining how science should be taught, but rather with observing how it was taught, and appeared to be differentially successful, in these two classrooms. As stated in the introduction, certain kinds of metaphorical language may be difficult for children under the age of about nine years to access. It would appear at first sight, then, that the teacher of Classroom 1, with her frequent use of grammatically metaphorical expressions, was speaking inappropriately to her students and hindering their learning, whereas the teacher of Classroom 2, with no nominalisations, was facilitating her children's understanding of the concepts being discussed. Yet an analysis of the data made clear that the teacher of Classroom 1 was using her linguistic resources in such a way as to enhance the children's learning of scientific phenomena and the registerial features of the language of science, by constructing jointly with the children a kind of proto-scientific discourse.

Evidence for the construction of a proto-scientific discourse in Classroom 1 is as follows. (a) The presence in the discourse of lexical items signalling a scientific register, e.g. technical, concept, information, specific, observation, spiracle, sustenance, fluid. These terms are mostly abstract expressions not present in everyday discourse (see Martin, 1990). (b) The presence in the discourse of ideational grammatical metaphor, especially nominalisations.

The teacher of Classroom 1 used a variety of strategies to scaffold her use of these proto-scientific features in order to make them relatively accessible to the children. Her strategies are outlined below.

1 The teacher overtly signalled some of the characteristics of the text she was aiming for, for example: C: They eat lots of things. T: Oh well, come on, be more specific. What do they eat? Her use of the word specific here signals the value, in adult terms, placed on the discursive technique of moving from the general to the specific, which is a typical feature of expository scientific text. The texts produced were jointly constructed by the teacher and the children.

2 The teacher juxtaposes two messages, which are virtually parallel semantically, but one of which is more congruent, like the children's own speech, and one of which is more scientific in adult terms. T: Right. The substances that are on the weed, right? All the stuff that's stuck to the weeds, that's right. [...] You have to observe that. Alex, you saw that the day, so keep looking at the tank.

She is thus continually shifting between the children's commonsense knowledge of the world and the educational knowledge of formal schooling. This helps make visible and explicit the relationship between that which is familiar to the children and the more technical constructions, thus providing a 'translation' which in some senses is parallel to the processes observed in scientific writing.

3 The teacher constructs lexical taxonomies which become more and more scientific, and then makes these the basis of a metaphor, e.g. sustenance and description in the following examples. T: See how they're sort of, like, attaching themselves to that bit of dirt area? It's really their food and nutrients and sustenance in there. T: Could someone give me a description of the tadpoles -- if I asked you what they - t - to describe the tadpoles.

4 The teacher provides the children with experiences in which they are required to represent knowledge diagrammatically, an important feature of scientific literacy. She insists that children draw exactly what they have observed; for example, if the children drew smiling mouths or whiskers on the tadpoles, they were sent back to observe the tadpoles in the tank and to draw again. T: Show me in your diagram, your drawing, what you thought the flippers were. (looking) Nuh, so they're legs. Go back and look at the tank again. T: Now you've drawn a mouth on him, Daniel, did you actually see that? D: I forget. T: No, you don't, tell me, don't forget. Now, this is important! What -- the whole idea of us doing frogs is to improve our observations. Right, to actually draw and write down what we see with our eyes. OK, not what we think is there.

The children responded enthusiastically to the scientific work they were required to do and produced schematic drawings of a standard usually expected of much older children.

5 The teacher frequently foregrounded the linguistic and registerial features of the text she was aiming for, making visible and overt the linguistic features of the proto-scientific register, thus encouraging conscious reflection on the language used in different registers. T: What else can you tell me about the way the story had been written? Children kept saying to me 'this' and 'this' and 'this' - Samia? C: Um, the pond is peaceful and they never get much noise. T: That's not quite what I wanted -- the wording. How did I read the story? There is a special way this story is written. [...] T: (holding up book) Well, inside it tells you who illustrated it, but most of the illustrations in this book are from photographs, in this particular book, because it -- is it fiction or Non-fiction? C: (several) Non-fiction. T: Who can tell me the difference?

The teacher of Classroom 1 was focussing on the process of finding out, of how to know, rather than on the actual facts about tadpoles, and the children were learning the scientific register as much as they were learning about tadpole development. The teacher was orienting the learners towards the scientific process itself, rather than towards the end product. She was teaching the children how to talk science. Just as adults do with small children learning their first language, so this teacher was scaffolding the use of grammatical metaphor in a supportive oral context, guiding the children towards new, abstract meanings in the ways indicated above.

The science-oriented lesson of Classroom 2 provided a contrast in terms of the linguistic features present in the discourse, and the implications for children's learning. The seed-planting experience was represented in the discourse in narrative/recount form (see sample text above). There was virtually no ideational grammatical metaphor or technical lexis typical of scientific discourse. In this particular lesson, the discussion of seed planting was linguistically indistinguishable from all other 'stories' in this classroom. The children's knowledge and observations that seeds grow into plants and produce flowers were expressed in the same way that all other aspects of personal experience are expressed, in the narrative/recount mode. There was no expectation that children should draw accurately what they observed, and indeed one child (using the only nominalisation in the lesson) used grammatically metaphorical language to challenge the teacher's acceptance of a drawing which included elements which had not been directly observed. C: [ ] did that page. T: Beautiful. C: There's a lot of it imagination, though. T: There is a lot of imagination. What do you mean by that? C: There's a lot of plants that haven't already flowered yet. T: Yes, a lot of people have just imagined that the flowers are already there; but they're not there yet; we're still waiting for the flowers to come.

Clearly, this is one lesson only; however, if such patterns are typical of the discourse in which many young children regularly engage, they are not gaining experience in the discourse features of scientific and technical disciplines discussed in the introductory section.

What potential does each lesson offer for children's learning? From the analysis of the discourse in the two classrooms it appears that two different world views are being constructed. In Classroom 1, children are learning that the language of science constructs reality differently from the language of story telling. The teacher made explicit at every opportunity that science is different from story, not just at the lexical level but by demonstrating in the grammar itself (particularly through her use of grammatical metaphor) that this scientific reality is constructed in a distinct way which is unlike the expression of personal experience. The children in this classroom are learning to adopt an empirical approach to the phenomena they perceive, as the teacher consistently orients them towards the ways of academic discourse.

In Classroom 2, an analysis of the data indicated that no distinction was being made in the language between the manner in which we represent facts about the natural world, and our own imaginative creations; no distinction was being made in this lesson between the personal on the one hand and the empirical on the other. There may be an an assumption (shared by many texts addressed to early childhood teachers) that scientific facts speak for themselves, and that the children will learn scientific information intuitively and unconsciously.

The implications of the differences between the two classrooms are profound -- while both lessons may be entered into classroom records in very similar terms (science: aims, objectives, etc.), one lesson may construct sophisticated contexts, drawing on adult-valued speech registers, while the other lesson constructs circumscribed contexts, which have no relevance beyond the immediate classroom. As Martin (1990) points out: 'it is clear that common-sense understandings differ from scientific ones and that schools have a crucial responsibility to induct students into the alternative scientific world views' (p. 84). Given the centrality of language in the learning of literacy, teachers play a crucial role in making explicit (both overtly and within their own linguistic constructions) the features of different types of text.

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