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The Physical Science Textbook Since 1800: a Study of Its Language, Structure and Rhetorical Style

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The Physical Science Textbook Since 1800: a Study of Its Language, Structure and Rhetorical Style THE PHYSICAL SCIENCE TEXTBOOK SINCE 1800: A STUDY OF ITS LANGUAGE, STRUCTURE AND RHETORICAL STYLE by PAUL STRUBE A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of Tasmania. August-, 1985. This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other higher degree or graduate diploma in any other university, and to the best of my knowledge and belief contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference is made. This thesis is my own work. CONTENTS Page Acknowledgements Abstract ii List of Figures iv Introduction 1 SECTION A Chapter 1. General Hi s tory of Science Education 17 Chapter 2. History of the Science Textbook 52 Chapter 3. Purposes Found in the Textbook Prefaces 85 SECTION B Chapter 4. Textbooks and Genre Theory 120 Chapter 5. Textbook Language and Style 134 SECTION C Chapter 6. Explanatory Structures in 172 Science Textbooks Chapter 7. The Instructional Language of Science Textbooks 227 Chapter 8. Content Analysis 262 CONCLUSION Chapter 9. The Physical Science Text Since 1800: An Overview 309 References and Bibliography 342 Appendix I: The Textbook Collection 361 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis owes a great deal to the enthusiasm and constructive supervision of my supervisor, Dr. P.P. Lynch, who gave generously of his time and knowledge. Our discussions were always fruitful. I was also fortunate enough to have the comments of members of staff of the Centre for Education at the University of Tasmania. Their assistance was valuable and very much appreciated. I would also like to thank the staff at the Morris Miller Library at the University for their helpful service. Special thanks to the Curriculum Resource Centre at the Centre for Education for invaluable assistance with the collection and cataloging of the science textbooks. I would like to dedicate this thesis to Ms. H. Webster, for the many sacrifices she made to ensure the completion of this work, and for her encouragement and patient assistance with proofreading. ABSTRACT Since the 19th century, when books for instruction in science became available in significant numbers, their place in the science curriculum has been contentious. The defenders of textbooks have tended to point out their informative or instructional role, generally failing to respond to criticisms of the quality of the text as a prose work. Recent concern with readability, and the place of reading in the science curriculum, has made more urgent the analysis of the textbook and its place in science education. This thesis examines physical science textbooks for answers to questions dealng with the language of science textbooks as it relates to the history and purpose of science education. It is based on the premise that such language can be characterised not only by structural factors (such as sentence length and vocabulary) but also by what the language attempts to achieve. The latter is dependent on the purposes for which the text is written, and these are shaped by contemporary beliefs about the nature of science and science education, the particular science written about, and the intended readers of the book. Science textbooks emerge as prose works with a history that has shaped their characteristics. The thesis explores the history of physical science texts since 1800, and uses that history to develop both a classification system for textbooks, and a framework against which to view the changing purposes of science textbook authors. It is based on a III large collection of such textbooks published in Great Britain, Australia, and the United States. Textbook characteristics are explored using three levels of analysis. Level 1 is historical, placing the texts in a context of contemporary opinion on the purposes of science and science education. It uses that context to develop a first order classification of textbook types. Level 2 uses techniques from literary criticism (notably genre-theory and stylistics) and rhetoric (the nature of argument and exposition) to match the first order classification in Level I to established theoretical results. This results in a second order classification of greater depth and power. Level 3 examines the textbooks for prose structures which are designed to meet the purposes of providing explanations for phenomena and instructing. These two purposes allow a third order classification to be developed, which can then be used to make judgements about the language of the text and its suitability for meeting the varied purposes of science education. Such an analysis provides information about the development of the modern science text, uses past and present texts as mirrors of the long-standing debate about the place of the textbook in science education, and provides the classification and characterisation of textbooks needed for any further rhetorical consideration of the textbook as prose. iv FIGURES Following Page i. A time-line indicating the chronological setting 54 of the four textbook types 2. A page from Turner's Arts and Sciences, 1832 59 3. A page from Rollo's Fire, 1855 65 4. A page from Stewart's Physics, 1891 71 5. A page from Noakes' New Intermediate Physics, 1970 80 6. A comparison of the percentages of the seven prose structures appearing in the four 282 textbook types Books and experiments do well together, but separately they betray an imperfection, for the illiterate is anticipated unwillingly by the labours of the ancients, and the man of authors deceived by story instead of science. Edward Bernard (1671) 1 INTRODUCTION PURPOSE AND METHOD OF ANALYSIS This thesis is concerned with the relationships between the language of physical science textbooks and changing viewpoints regarding the nature of science and science education. It arose out of a professional concern as a teacher of senior level physics in Tasmanian schools, and from a research interest in figurative language and the communication of ideas. From the former came a common student complaint about the difficulty of reading the assigned texts; from the latter came an awareness of the lack of research attention paid to the critical analysis of non-fictional language. In fact, little attention has been paid to the textbook as a work of prose, though considerable research has been done on finding ways of improving learning from textual material. The latter work has mainly been done by psychologists looking for ways of changing or adding specific structures (e.g., advance organisers) to improve comprehension. (Rothkopf, 1964, 1965, 1968, 1976; Ausubel, 1963; Ausubel and Robinson, 1969; Waller, 1977; Rickards and Denner,1978; Annett, 1969; Frase, 1972; and Freedle and Carroll, 1972). What has not been done by any of the researchers listed above, however, is a systematic study of textbook language and how that language is related to the purposes of the authors; instead, researchers have tended to 2 concentrate on the readers. More specifically, what has not been recognised is the possibility of using the language of the physical science textbook as a mirror of changing views of the nature of science and science education; nor has the science textbook been classified and characterised with respect to those views. This thesis begins the task of just such a classification and characterisation. It is concerned with three central issues. 1. What are the characteristics of textbook language? 2. How did they develop? 3. What can they reveal about science and science education as they are presented to readers at school? These three issues demand an inter-disciplinary approach, seeking insights from the history of science education and from the area of rhetoric. From such insights an analysis emerged in the form of a multi-layered structure, one that is seen to be analogous to the traditional development of an empirical study. The response of the author is to present this thesis as three layers (or levels) of analysis as follows. SECTION A, the first layer (Chapters 1, 2 and 3), is modelled on the empiricists' first order of analysis--sensory observation. It is historical, placing the textbooks in a context of time and opinion. Chapter 1 is a general history of science education from 1800 to the present. A more comprehensive treatment of the history of science education in that period has been ably done by others, notably Layton (1973) and Jenkins (1979). What Chapter 1 does, in contrast to the latter works, is to relate the major movements in ideas about the nature and purpose of 3 science education with debates about textbooks and the perceived importance of reading for learning science. This is followed in Chapter 2 by a more detailed history of the physical science textbook itself. Such an history is used to generate a classification of textbooks based, as a first approximation, on stylistic differences. This is, again, analogous to a first order taxonomic classification based on visible surface appearances. Chapter 3 supplements this historical analysis by examining the prefaces of the textbooks for evidence of authorial purposes. Thus the text is not only placed in a context of historical purpose, but the views of the authors explicitly reveal the varying purposes for which they wrote. These varying purposes are seen to be strong determinants of language choice and text structure. SECTION B, the second layer (Chapters 4 and 5), takes the historical analysis a step further. Given the first order stylistic classification of textbooks generated by Section A, it becomes necessary to fine-tune the defining characteristics, relating them if possible to rigorously established results in the area of language studies (e.g., linguistics, rhetoric, grammar, or literary criticism). Continuing the empiricist analogy, this level of analysis seeks relationships between initial, sensory observation and the established results of the discipline; i.e., how does Sectin A's classification fit in with current understanding? The classification system developed in Section A is unique to this thesis, and therefore needs to be linked to a second order of analysis.
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