Work

A semantic classification of nominal technical terms in secondary school biology textbooks

Year: 2024

Type: article

Abstract: Nominal technical terms (NTTs), as crucial builders for disciplinary knowledge, can cause difficulties for students. However, previous studies have rarely associated NTTs with disciplinary knowledge construction. Apart from that, scholars of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) have mainly focused on making wordlists for one specific discipline based on corpora rather than on meanings. Moreover, the current categorization of technical terms cannot reveal their role in constructing disciplinary knowledge. Against this backdrop, we carried out a corpus-based study to classify NTTs in secondary school biology textbooks and to unveil the knowledge constructed by different types of those NTTs. As a result, we found that NTTs in those textbooks could fall into five major categories: Thing, Activity, Semiotic, Place, and Time. We also found intra-disciplinary differences in NTT distributions. The lexicogrammatical analysis indicates that the five types of NTTs can construct different knowledge. With the findings, we put forward implications for teaching biology in secondary schools.

Source: PLoS ONE

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0312040

Authors: Rurong Le, Sheng Yu, Xianhe Zhang

Institutions: Guangzhou University, Xiamen University Tan Kah Kee College

Language: English

Topic: linguistics and terminology studies

Subfield: Language and Linguistics

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Quality education

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,290