ABSTRACT
Among the distinguishing rituals of school science, there is nothing quite so familiar as the lab ‘experiment’ and the lab book formula of Aim, Apparatus, Method, Results and Conclusion. As much as students are expected to learn from the practical activity, they also are expected to learn to reproduce the structure of the lab report, to mirror its passive voice and third person, and adopt its tone of studied certainty. Learning these language conventions has long been an essential part of school science, but in recent years teachers and researchers have taken issue with this tradition. For some, the objective language of lab reports obscures the radically interpretive nature of knowledge in science. As Sutton (1992) has argued, figurative language is central to scientific theorising. Scientific language is always already theory laden, so it is epistemologically inauthentic to stress the objectivity of the language of lab reports. For this reason, it is argued that school science should make more use of personal language and contingent text forms.
