Academic writing in a corpus of 4th grade science notebooks: an analysis of student language use and adult expectations of the genres of school science

UnrestrictedThis is a study of language use in the context of an inquiry-based science curriculum in which conceptual understanding ratings are used split texts into groups of "successful" and "unsuccessful" texts. "Successful" texts could include known features of science language. 420 texts generated by students in 14 classrooms from three school districts, culled from a prior study on the effectiveness of science notebooks to assess understanding, in addition to the aforementioned ratings are the data sources. In science notebooks, students write in the process of learning (here, a unit on electricity). The analytical framework is systemic functional linguistics (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004; Eggins, 2004), specifically the concepts of genre, register and nominalization. Genre classification involves an analysis of the purpose and register features in the text (Schleppegrell, 2004). The use of features of the scientific academic register, namely the use relational processes and nominalization (Halliday and Martin, 1993), requires transitivity analysis and noun analysis. Transitivity analysis, consisting of the identification of the process type, is conducted on 4737 ranking clauses. A manual count of each noun used in the corpus allows for a typology of nouns. Four school science genres, procedures, procedural recounts reports and explanations, are found. Most texts (85.4%) are factual, and 14.1% are classified as explanations, the analytical genre. Logistic regression analysis indicates that there is no significant probability that the texts classified as explanation are placed in the group of "successful" texts. In addition, material process clauses predominate in the corpus, followed by relational process clauses. Results of a logistic regression analysis indicate that there is a significant probability (Chi square =15.23, p <.0001) that texts with a high rate of relational processes are placed in the group of "successful" texts. In addition, 59.5% of 6511 nouns are re