Abstract

BLANCO, Mercedes Isabel; CASTRO FOX, Guillermina; GONZALEZ, Nora  and  PALMUCCI, Daniela. Las representaciones de la ciencia y su lenguaje: el primer paso hacia la alfabetización científica. Cuad.Sur, Let. [online]. 2007, n.37, pp. 15-40. ISSN 1668-7426.

Speaking about scientific literacy in school means referring to the acquisition of a specialized language through which science confers sense to the world and constructs its ideational meanings. Within this process, the addressees of science are faced with the need to incorporate and appropriate the different linguistic (lexical and grammatical options) and rethorical (genre structures) features that convey those meanings. Our interest is to find out to what extent do representations about and attitudes toward science and its language have influence on the acquisition of scientific language in different educational levels. In this article, we describe and compare the representations about science and scientific language held by two groups of students, one of them still in high school, and the other attending their first college year, in order to verify if these representations have changed during the last school years. We consider that the model of the transitivity grammar in the systemic functional linguistics (Halliday, 1982) constitutes a new and interesting approach to explain such representations.

Keywords : Scientific literacy; Representation; Transitivity.