The Discourse of Physics This book provides a detailed model of both the discourse and knowledge of physics, and offers insights toward developing pedagogy that improves how physics is taught and learned. Building on a rich history of applying a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) approach to scientific discourse, the book uses an SFL framework, here extended to encompass the more recently developed Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis approach to explore the field’s multimodal nature and offer detailed descriptions of three of its key semiotic resources—language, image and mathematics. To complement the book’s SFL underpinnings, Doran draws on the sociological framework of Legitimation Code Theory, which offers tools for understand- ing the principles of how knowledge is developed and valued, to explore the manifestation of knowledge in physics specifically and its relationship with discourse. Through its detailed descriptions of the key semiotic resources and its analysis of the knowledge structure of physics, this book is an invaluable resource for graduate students and researchers in multimodality, discourse analysis, educational linguistics and science education.
Doran is a Researcher in the LCT Centre for Knowledge-Building and the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney, who focuses on Systemic Functional Linguistic theory and description, Legitimation Code Theory and their contribution to the interdisciplinary fields of educational linguistics, multimodality and identity. Routledge Studies in Multimodality Edited by Kay L. O’Halloran Curtin University For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.com 11 Multimodal Epistemologies Towards an Integrated Framework Edited by Arianna Maiorani and Christine Christie 12 Multimodal Analysis in Academic Settings From Research to Teaching Edited by Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli and Inmaculada Fortanet- Gómez 13 The Structure of Multimodal Documents An Empirical Approach Tuomo Hiippala 14 Multimodality in the Built Environment Spatial Discourse Analysis Louise J. Ravelli and Robert J.
McMurtrie 15 The Discourse of YouTube Multimodal Text in a Global Context Phil Benson 16 The Semiotics of Movement in Space A User’s Perspective Robert James McMurtrie 17 Mapping Multimodality Performance Spaces Edited by Maria Grazia Sindoni, Janina Wildfeuer, and Kay L. O’Halloran 18 The Discourse of Physics Building Knowledge Through Language, Mathematics and Image Y. Doran The Discourse of Physics Building Knowledge Through Language, Mathematics and Image Y. Doran First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of Y.
Doran to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-74431-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-18113-4 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC To my mum, Sue, and my dad, Carl. Contents List of Figures viii List of Tables x Acknowledgements xi 1 Physics, Knowledge and Semiosis 1 2 Language, Knowledge and Description 21 3 Mathematical Statements and Expressions 54 4 Mathematical Symbols and the Architecture of the Grammar of Mathematics 99 5 Genres of Language and Mathematics 131 6 Images and the Knowledge of Physics 181 7 Physics and Semiotics 206 Appendix A System Network Conventions229 Appendix B Full System Networks for Mathematics 233 Appendix C Details of Corpus 237 Index 241 Figures 1.1 Mathematics, image and language in a high school exam 5 1.2 Language and context in SFL, adapted from Martin (1999) 9 1.3 Metafunctions in language and context, adapted from Martin (1999) 10 1.4 Types of structure for each metafunction 11 1.5 Types of structure and their associated metafunction 13 1.6 Simplified system network of mood, adapted from Halliday and Matthiessen (2014) 15 1.7 Simultaneous systems of mood, transitivity and theme16 1.8 Recursive system, adapted from Halliday and Matthiessen (2014) 17 2.1 Classification taxonomy of elementary particles 26 2.2 Compositional taxonomy of a hydrogen atom 27 2.3 Simplified network of nominal groups in English 44 3.1 Simplified system of expression type61 3.2 Network of arithmetic operations 66 3.3 Full system of expression type68 3.4 Network of symmetric statements 85 3.5 Network of magnitudinal statements 86 3.6 Partial network of statement 87 3.7 Systems of proportionality and directionality91 3.8 Network of covariate relations 95 3.9 Network of statement 96 4.2 Network of symbol 108 4.3 Nesting scale of mathematics 111 4.4 System of element type116 4.5 Levels in mathematics 117 5.1 Network of elemental mathematical genres 148 5.2 Full network of mathematical genres 155 5.3 Full network of genre 160 6.1 Image with a single activity 189 6.2 Activity sequence in image 189 Figures ix 6.3 Long activity sequence (Marsden 2003: 15) 190 6.4 Activities not in sequence 191 6.5 Compositional taxonomy in an image 192 6.6 Experimental apparatus diagram 193 6.7 One-dimensional graph 197 6.8 Solar radiation spectrum graph (Rohde 2007) 198 6.9 Energy level diagram for a hydrogen atom 200 7.1 Single system with two choices 221 7.2 Single system with three choices 221 7.3 Single system with five choices 222 7.4 Two sets of dependent systems 222 7.5 Three simultaneous systems 223 A.1 System network conventions, adapted from Matthiessen and Halliday (2009) 229 B.1 Full network of genre 233 B.2 Full network of mathematical statements 234 B.3 Full network of mathematical symbols 235 B.4 Full network of mathematical elements 236 Tables 2.1 mood versus transitivity in English 41 4.1 Types of layering 111 4.2 Obligatory nesting and optional layering in an equation 113 4.3 Nesting, layering and rank in an equation 118 4.4 Function-level matrix for the grammar of mathematics 127 5.1 Stages and typical features of quantifications 143 5.2 Stages and typical features of derivations 149 7.1 Field affordances of language, mathematics and image for physics 210 7.2 Hierarchies in mathematics, nuclear equations and system networks 224 Acknowledgements This book is largely derived from my doctoral thesis written in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. Working in this department and the broader Sydney community of linguists has been a won- derful and horizon-broadening experience. In particular, working on the PhD and other projects with my two super- visors, Jim Martin and Karl Maton, who each have given me so much time and so much thought, has been extraordinary.
So to you both, thank you for constantly pushing, for being genuinely interested, for genuinely caring and for teaching me more in the last few years than I thought I could know. The thoughts and ideas discussed in this book have been bandied about and developed in a number of forums and with a range of groups. The big- gest and most regular of these are the wonderfully generous and welcom- ing SFL and LCT communities centred on the Sydney SFL Friday Seminar and the LCT Roundtable, and the more student-centred workshops of the Tuesday night SFL PhD student seminars and the LCT S-Club. It was only once I began to look outside these communities and seminar series that I realised how unusually welcoming and thought provoking they are.
In addition, I have been welcomed into other fields and other communi- ties with open arms, each of which have offered me new insights and new perspectives. In particular, I would like to thank Cedric Linder, Anne Linder, John Airey, Tobias Fredlund, Urban Eriksson and the rest of the Uppsala University Physics Education Research group for helping me bridge Social Semiotics and physics education, and for the time I spent in Uppsala. Also thank you to Ibu Emi and your colleagues at UPI for having me at Bandung and giving me the opportunity to spend time with people who genuinely wanted to solve problems. And thank you also to Helen Georgiou, Christine Lindstrøm and Manjula Sharma for always being available at the beginning of the PhD when I was trying to get my head around physics education.
Finally, thank you to Qingli Zhao and Shi Wen Chen for sharing with me your corpora of textbooks, and to my anonymous high school teacher and university lecturer, for letting me step into your classroom and put a video camera in your face. It was while trying to grapple with how you both taught that sparked just about everything here. 1 Physics, Knowledge and Semiosis ‘Physics is hard.’ Remarks such as these have been heard by teachers and students of physics innumerable times. Physics of course has its own object of study, its own ways of organising its knowledge and its own ways of expressing its knowledge.
In this sense, it is its own unique discipline. But this does not mark physics as different from any other academic subject; every discipline has its intricacies and idiosyncrasies, and every subject has its detractors and its devotees. Nonetheless, physics seems to be regularly positioned as an exceptional case in the academic world. It is often said to be the most fundamental of the sciences, one upon which all others are based (e.
Feynman et al. 1964, Young and Freedman 2012); this perhaps can be taken to mean that it shares many of the characteristics of the others sciences, but also maintains its own distinctive features. Biglan (1973), for example, classifies physics as a pure science, along with geology, chemistry and botany, but he positions it as the ‘hardest’ of the pure sciences. Kolb (1981) characterises it as a reflective (non-applied) discipline, like geogra- phy, bacteriology and biochemistry, but he portrays it as the most ‘abstract’ of the reflective disciplines.
And those following Bernstein (1999) identify it with other natural sciences as a discipline that develops generalised theories and integrates empirical phenomena, but they regularly use physics as the exemplar of such a discipline (Maton and Muller 2007, O’Halloran 2007, Martin 2011). There is thus a sense that physics is both a natural science, and as such shares many of the features of the natural sciences; but at the same time physics is in some sense the most ‘sciencey’ of the natural sciences. Exactly how this recurrent characterisation of physics arises, however, is not clear. We might even ask whether it is truly the case that physics maintains a spe- cial position within the sciences? And if so, what gives rise to this special position? Questions such as these go to the heart of the disciplinary organ- isation of physics and so are not born of idle curiosity.
They hold strong significance for the development of educational programs that acknowl- edge and target disciplinary knowledge. If disciplines vary in the way they organise their knowledge, vary in the discourse they use to construe this knowledge and vary in the means of judging and comparing competing 2 Physics, Knowledge and Semiosis knowledges, the pedagogic approach for teaching these disciplines must take this into account.1 Knowledge and Education In response to the disciplinary nature of knowledge, the last few decades have seen the development of an influential educational linguistics program, known as ‘Sydney School’ genre pedagogy. This approach arises from the linguistic theory generally referred to as Systemic Functional Linguistics (hereafter SFL) and specifically targets knowledge differences across the dis- ciplinary spectrum. The program develops explicit pedagogy across all areas of schooling and aims to ensure access for all students regardless of their background.
In order to do this, it addresses the specialised ways each sub- ject organises its knowledge, as well as the literacy practices that are associ- ated with it; this is instead of offering a generic pedagogy that generalises across disciplinary differences (Rose and Martin 2012).