Greek primary school teachers’ awareness of the special features of scientific language: implications for science curricula and teachers’ professional development

This exploratory study aims at investigating first the extent to which Greek primary school teachers recognize the features of scientific language (an archetype for the academic language employed in all school disciplines), and second and most importantly the functional role they attribute to these features in the construction of scientific discourse. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 30 teachers. Two versions of a one‐page extract, varying in linguistic specialization, were used as stimuli‐materials. Teachers correctly recognized the linguistically highly specialized version, but they were less able to spontaneously mention specific features (mainly syntactic complexity and terminology) contributing to this specialization. Worse still, they failed to recognize syntactic complexity as a feature of the specialized extract even after they were explicitly probed to do so. Moreover, teachers were found to only be partially aware of the functional role these features play in constructing the scientific world‐view. Specifically, teachers seem to put emphasis on the communicative rather than the epistemological role of the corresponding linguistic features. These findings stress the need for certain interventions both at initial and in‐service level of teacher education as well as at the level of science curricula.