The sound of music: Constructing science as sociocultural practices through oral and written discourse

In this article, we examine the oral and written discourse processes in a h igh school physics class and how these discourse processes are related to s ociocultural practices in scientific communities. Our theoretical framework is based on sociological and anthropological studies of scientific communi ties and ethnographies of classroom life. We review the use of discourse an alysis as a methodological orientation in science education and provide a l ogic-of-inquiry framing how we used discourse analysis in our ethnographic research. Our ethnographic analysis showed that, through students' particip ation in creating scientific papers on the physics of sound, their appropri ation of scientific discourse was related to the framing activities of the teachers and the social practices established over time in the classroom. O ur textual analysis of the student papers focused on how they used evidence to make claims. We explore the lessons learned from participating in the c lassroom of these students. (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.