A Satellite View of Language: Some Lessons from Science Classrooms

The paper proposes that Language Awareness cannot be fully developed if it rests on a view of language from within. The proposal made here is that language is always one of a number of semiotic (communication/representational) modes in use in any act of communication, and that language may not be the central mode. The relations which language contracts have effect language ‘itself’. The fact that a number of semiotic modes are available for the communicational purposes of the maker(s) of a text means that there can be a specialisation of communicational and representational functions of the different modes. This specialisation may derive, on the one hand, from the ‘aptness’ of a mode for particular purposes of the maker of the text. In a learning and teaching interaction, specific modes will make certain aspects of the curriculum seem evidently so, and the uses of different modes for specific purposes can therefore have epistemological motivation, and effects. This complex set of interactions needs to be seen, always, in the social and historical context in which those who make texts are interacting.