CEFR-aligned discourse descriptors for evaluating pre-service chemistry teachers’ written texts: an exploratory study connecting concept-comprehension and discourse-quality

Abstract

Since discipline-specific concepts are embedded in discipline-specific discourse, mastery of the latter becomes foundational to understanding and successfully communicating the former. While subject teachers are adept at evaluating and developing students’ concept-comprehension, they rarely gauge whether learner-discourse is developing alongside learner-comprehension of increasingly more complex content. To date, subject teachers lack language-progression frameworks for monitoring and thus planning and providing disciplinary discourse pedagogy when necessary. Collaborating through a cross-country COST Action (CLILNetLE), language and science experts developed a framework for evaluating science-discourse quality, intersecting the CEFR-framework with Cognitive Discourse Functions (CDFs) to logically bridge discipline-specific concepts with associated discourses. Working as a transdisciplinary team of language and science educators, we applied the CDF-linked CEFR-aligned framework in its current state (see Lorenzo et al. this issue) to evaluate the discourse-quality of texts which 40 pre-service chemistry teachers wrote on the topic of particle theory of matter before and after the multimodal inquiry-based instruction. The iterative process that ensued indicated how the current framework can be further improved to accommodate and integrate the perspectives and objectives of both language and science education. We describe the iterative process and provide suggestions for fine-tuning the Science-Discourse-Descriptors framework so that, by prioritising content while valuing discourse, it becomes a tool that science teachers can easily relate to and thus use for integrating the evaluation of discourse into science instruction.