This study examines how a class of Grade 7 students employed linguistic resources to explain density differences. Drawing from the same data-set as a previous study by, we take a language perspective to investigate the challenges students face in learning the concept of density. Our study thus complements previous research on learning about…

This case study of a science lesson, on the topic thermal expansion, examines the language demands on students from an integrated science and language perspective. The data were generated during a sequence of 9 lessons on the topic of "States of Matter" in a Grade 7 classroom (12-13 years old students). We identify the language demands…

This article demonstrates one particular difficulty of interpreting students' use of language in science classrooms: determining whether a student's writing indicates a misconception or a misrepresentation. Students' written assignments from a case study are used to illustrate instances where multiple interpretations are possible. These examples…

This study attends to the possibilities of analyzing students' writings at a lexicogrammatical level in terms of their use of linguistic resources, and the insights afforded by this approach into the challenges students faced when they employed the language of school science related to the phenomenon of expansion. For the purpose of this study,…