ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the book Discourse Strategies for Science Teaching and Learning and illustrates the book’s central ideas on discourse, discourse patterns, and discourse strategies. Using actual classroom examples, the chapter highlights that classroom discourse is more than just two or more people communicating in a classroom. Instead, it involves several characteristic and recurring patterns in the use of language that shape and are shaped by the way people think, act, and make meanings according to the social norms and practices of a community. Five discourse patterns, namely interaction, thematic, narrative, genre, and multimodal pattern, are introduced in the book. For each of these discourse patterns, there is an associated range of discourse strategies that teachers and students employ to understand one another in order to achieve a particular goal. These discourse strategies can be implicit (unconscious) or explicit (deliberate). This chapter argues the need for more explicit forms of discourse strategies that can enable teachers and students to consciously learn and participate in science classroom discourse.
