About SIG6

This Special Interest Group serves as an international network linking researchers with an interest on how the languages of science (including non-verbal representations), and their associated literacies, afford, mediate, support or hinder science teaching and learning. The idea for this SIG was initiated following several symposia held during ESERA 2017 at Dublin and a follow up symposium at Stockholm on ‘Future Directions for Literacy Research in Science Education’ on 28 & 29 August 2017. Approved by the ESERA Board in March 2018, the SIG is open for all ESERA members to join and participate. Reflecting a contemporary view of languages and literacies in the plural, the SIG examines 3 broad areas of research on language issues within science education: (a) the languages of students’ cultures and communities, including their local vernaculars, standardized national languages, and everyday terms and registers, (b) the languages of specific disciplines that have unique ontological, epistemological, linguistic and pedagogical characteristics and (c) the languages of multimodal representations consisting of speech, written words, images, symbols, graphs and gestures that are essential to scientific meaning making. Each of these cultural, disciplinary and representational languages requires a different set of literacy skills and instructions in order for students to become successful in science. As these 3 areas of language and literacy are overlapping and intertwined, there is an increasing convergence among researchers working together in this common space, which therefore calls for the necessity of this SIG. Our Aims & Scope The aims of the SIG are to: Establish and maintain a network of researchers in Europe and beyond with an interest in languages and literacies in science education Facilitate contact and collaboration among researchers working across institutions, countries and disciplinary areas Disseminate and discuss research findings and ongoing research through regular meetings and communications Disseminate and coordinate invitations and calls to joint symposia, seminars, conferences, special issues or book projects Support new and early researchers with a community of established and experienced scholars The SIG is open to a range of theoretical perspectives and methodologies drawing from cognitive, linguistic, semiotic, sociocultural, anthropological, and pragmatist traditions. Besides science education researchers, the SIG includes and welcomes researchers from language and literacy education, applied linguistics and the learning sciences. The range of topics explored in the SIG includes, but is not limited to, the language of science, classroom discourse, representation, multimodality, disciplinary literacy, content and language integrated learning (CLIL), bi/multilingualism, reading/writing-to-learn, academic language, visual literacy, text/discourse analysis.