| In this study, a functional linguistic approach to characterizing scientific concepts and conceptual learning in high school science was developed. It was suggested that such an approach provides a way of integrating sociocultural and cognitive approaches to concept learning in science. Thus, the analysis of language use---seen as a specialized cultural artifact---was treated as the appropriate methodological starting point for the study of scientific conceptualization. Drawing on research from a number of functional linguistic perspectives, categories of nominal constructions, verb classes, and options for grounding a finite clause were specified. These provided a way of examining the conceptual content of a clause, and how that content is situated, from a linguistic point of view.; With this framework in place, the use of key nouns in the domain of thermal physics was analyzed. The first source of data was the use of the nouns heat, temperature, energy, and pressure in the thermal physics unit of the introductory college physic textbook used by a high school physics class. The second source of linguistic data was the use of the nouns heat and temperature by 15 eleventh grade students and their lead and assistant teachers, while they covered the unit on thermal physics as part of their physics class in an urban high school in Massachusetts, USA. The distribution of the target nouns over the nominal construction categories, verb classes, and grounding options were described using proportional and correspondence analysis.; The findings indicated that the target nouns do not distribute randomly over each set of linguistic categories. The patterns identified for the different nouns were discussed in terms of the conceptual significance of the different linguistic units, and what these patterns reveal about the contrasting roles of the corresponding concepts in the domain of thermal physics. Moreover, contrasting patterns of use by students, their teachers and in the text were interpreted in terms of what they suggest about how conceptual learning may be viewed from an integrated sociocultural and cognitive perspective, with a functional view of language at its core. |
