Reading nominalizations in senior science

Abstract

The paper examines the challenges faced by senior Biology students in reading 'nominalizations' in textbook materials and illustrates how the challenges can be addressed through pedagogical activities. The study draws on emerging descriptions of field and discourse semantics in Systemic Functional Linguistics that are inspired by Halliday's distinction between 'live' and 'dead' grammatical metaphors. It first presents a metalanguage to discriminate functions of nominalization. Two different kinds of 'mismatches' of meaning are discussed, including how field activities are reconstrued through discourse semantic resources, and how discourse semantic resources are remapped as lexicogrammatical resources. The paper attends to nominalization from the perspective of the knowledge that is at stake in its use. In addition to providing linguistic metalanguage, the paper demonstrates pedagogic practices designed to support teachers to make this knowledge visible. These pedagogic practices include cross-mode redescription and Detailed Reading from SFL-informed Reading to Learn pedagogy. (c) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.