ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the narrative discourse pattern that examines how teachers shape science content into a “narrative” and provide an ongoing commentary on the unfolding narrative. There are two types of narrative pattern: (a) an organizational pattern of opening, closing, framing, sequencing, and linking classroom activities and (b) an evaluative pattern characterized by a preferred ideological stance toward the content matter. These two narrative patterns are seldom explicitly mentioned or discussed in the science classroom. However, they are always present and occasionally revealed when teachers and students use metadiscourse (or meta-talk) to talk about their own discourse. This chapter provides a review of metadiscourse strategies and explains how they create and accentuate the underlying narrative patterns of classroom discourse. This is followed by a discussion of how metadiscourse can be more consciously developed and used to explicitly support students in following the narration of a science lesson, highlighting several discourse strategies such as narrative framing, heteroglossic projection, epistemological marker, and metacognitive modeling.
