An Analysis of Science Lessons by Speech Action

Abstract

It is a majer object of science education to cultivate pupils' attitude and ability to find out questions in and learn from nature as they live with and observe it. This will be attained when pupils not only observe nature well but also transmit others the information obtained by their five senses with their own diction. For pupils to listen to others enough and to have correct understanding of nature are also important. Recently it has been considered that to form linguistic recognition of nature is significant in science education. In this paper, we propose a method for estimation laying emphasis on speech as a means to improve science lessons, which might precede the problem of linguistic recognition in scienee education. For the estimation, all the speeches in the science lessons recorded on tape were divided into three classes; utterances of the teacher (T) and those of the learners which are audible (S) or inaudible noise (N), and the appearance of each class of the utterance in cour2e of time was expressed on chart by use of a dual-channel recorder. From these charts, the total number of minutes about each class of the speech, T, S or N, in each science lesson could be measured and, further, the recorded patterns on the chart were classified according to their frequency into five types; e. g., type A stands for keeping on speaking, type D stands for taciturnity and type E corresponds with inaudible noise of the learners, N. Then science lessons could be characterized by nine kinds of "dual types" as AD, BB and so on which were formed by pairing the types of recorded patterns for teacher's utterances with that for the learner's utterances. It was found that when changes of these "dual types" in the whole lesson were traced in course of time, these "dual types" provided useful measures to e5timate the lesson and to -compare it with other lessons. This method can be applied saving labor and time and must be effective for the analysis of science lessons particulaly inside schools.