Science teachers and science education researchers report that teaching and learning about, e.g., force is a content area that is demanding (Reiner, Slotta, Chi & Resnick, 2000), due to the impossibility of experiencing force itself sensitively. In addition, meaning making in school subjects is related both to the disciplinary content, such as force, and to using language and other resources to communicate the content in a disciplinary appropriate way (e.g., Schleppegrell 2004). Hence, a central issue for educational research in science is the analysis of the design of teaching towards the aim of enabling students meaning making in science in terms of disciplinary content and text structures relevant for communicating the disciplinary content orally and in written texts. Previous research about students meaning making about force, has mainly had a cognitive focus (e.g., Reiner, Slotta, Chi, & Resnick, 2000; Ioannides & Vosniadou, 2002;  Clement, 1993; Savinainen, Scott, and Viiri 2005), without taking into consideration the social context in which the concept is used. To our knowledge there is a dearth of studies about communicating about force in primary school teaching, based on social theories. Therefore, we have followed the teaching and learning practice in a primary science classroom, 5th grade, focusing on force, in this case, Newton’s third law, during altogether seven lessons, where students got bodily physical experiences in a number of experiments performed in small groups. The lessons also included teacher lead classroom discussions and students’ writing about the experiments.

The data used in this study comprises video and audio recordings from the lessons and from a final interview with a focus group of students. The audio recordings have been transcribed.

The aim of this study is to describe the progression, regarding disciplinary content as well as text structures and semiotic resources relevant to the discipline in the teaching practice, as it appears throughout the series of lessons about force. The analysis is guided by the following research questions:

1.     How are aspects of content, text structures and semiotic resources of relevance for writing about force communicated in the physics classroom?

2.     What characterizes the teaching practice in terms of teaching towards the aim of supporting the students’ learning about force and ways of writing about their meaning making about force?

Drawing on social semiotics, including multimodal perspectives, (Halliday 2014; Kress 2010; jfr Bergh Nestlog 2020), legitimation code theory (cf. Maton & Howard 2021) and a theoretical perspective on scientific descriptions and explanations of force as part of disciplinary literacy (cf. Yeo & Gilbert 2021), we are further developing analytical tools to study the progress of the teaching practice and how the practice supports students’ opportunities to develop knowledge concerning force and how to communicate about force in written texts. The analytical models developed focus on 1) the disciplinary content (DC), expressed through processes and participants (cf. transitivity analysis according to SFL) at different disciplinary levels, from DC- to DC+++, 2) disciplinary relevant text structures (DT), related to different semiotic resources and acts of writing (Matre et al. 2021) at different disciplinary levels, from DT- to DT+++ and 3) teaching towards the aim of supporting students’ learning (TA) of DC and DT at different levels, from TA- to TA++. The analysis is operationalized by coding the teacher’s and the students’ expressions in teaching practice, and thence the codes are put into two 2x2 matrix (DC & TA) and (DT & TA). By analyzing the data that way, a pathway can be drawn showing the progression through the serial of lessons.

The preliminary results show that the disciplinary content is mainly communicated in terms of the embodied experiences (DC+) and the teaching practice is directed towards the aim of supporting students’ learning implicitly (TA+). On some occasions the communication is about disciplinary relevant text structures (DT+ and DT++) in terms of predictions, descriptions, and explanations with verbal and pictorial (arrows) resources. When finally, the concepts force and counter force are introduced (DC++) and the teaching practice is directed towards the aim of supporting students’ learning explicitly (TA++), the students seem to make meaning and produce explanations at a higher scientific level, using disciplinary relevant verbal, pictorial (early symbols) and gestural resources in oral and written texts.