ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a review of literature on the language of science teaching and analysis of polysemy in the Key Stage 2 (KS2) and Key Stage 3 (KS3) science sub-corpora. Understanding the language of science is valuable for education, but also for participation in civil life. Scientific language allows for efficient and precise thought and talk about very specific objects and phenomena and the complex relationships between them. However, many students – and possibly many adults – find the language of science alienating and inaccessible. Like mathematics, science is multisemiotic, so requires students to be able to ‘translate’ information between modalities. Previous research has focused on the unfamiliar, technical and polysemous vocabulary of science, and on how grammar and discourse structure is used to create informationally dense texts and talk that have a sense of authority and objectivity. The analyses presented here show that there is a very large increase in the number of new words and meanings encountered in KS3 compared with KS2. Polysemy with everyday meanings of words varies in degree but is extremely common overall.
