Two Streams of Literacy in Science: A Look at First Year Laboratory Manuals  

Oleh:

Parkinson, Jean ; Adendorff, Ralph

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Language and Education (Full Text) vol. 11 no. 3 (1997), page 200-221.
Fulltext: Vol. 11, No. 2, p 200-221.pdf (259.56KB)

Isi artikel

This article reports on one aspect of an ethnographic study of laboratory sessions in the departments of Physics and Chemistry at the University of Natal in Durban, South Africa, namely, a comparison of the functions of verbs in three first year laboratory manuals: one Chemistry and two Physics manuals. The Chemistry manual and one of the Physics manuals is framed in the ‘cookbook’ mode; the other Physics manual is framed in the ‘investigative’ mode. Based largely on this analysis, this article argues for at least two distinct streams of literacy in mainstream academic scientific discourse. The first of these, associated with the ‘cookbook’ manual, is oriented to industry and technology and the second, associated with the ‘investigative’ manual, is oriented to experimental research. The technological stream stresses learning how to act (for example how to perform a procedure such as a distillation), while the research stream stresses cognitive processes: learning how to think, predict and draw inferences. These different streams of literacy reflect different values for what it means to be a scientist, different concepts of the purpose of science and different destinies envisaged for students at whom the laboratory sessions are aimed: industry or research. Several pedagogical implications are discussed.

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