ABSTRACT
This chapter emphasizes the genre discourse pattern that is connected to scientific practices. A genre is a culturally evolved way of doing things with language and it is used to refer to the predictable patterns and conventions that are associated with and partly realize the repetitive activities that people do in their social life. There are four major genres in scientific discourse – experimental report, explanation, argument, and information report. These genres roughly correspond to the following scientific practices outlined in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS): planning and carrying out investigations; constructing explanations; engaging in argument from evidence; and obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information. Although these scientific genres are frequently enacted in science classroom discourse, they are seldom explicitly taught and discussed. To do so would require a metalanguage to describe the language used in these genres. This chapter illustrates the usefulness of a metalanguage to describe and reflect on our enactment of scientific practices, focusing on two particular metalanguage strategies, premise-reasoning-outcome (PRO) and claim-data-warrant (CDW), that are used to enable students in explanation construction and argumentation respectively.
