Literacy Professional Learning Resource – Key Concepts
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VELS level 4 – Commonsense versus specialised/technical language
This section contains information on the differences between commonsense and technical language, its importance in teaching and learning, and practical exercises which demonstrate these differences.
Summary: to communicate with established knowledge in the various domains of the Victorian Essential Learning Standards, it is essential that students are able to both understand and produce technical terms. In these ways, students are required to learn to use language in new ways as they master the registers and text types of the subjects they are learning.
- Defining commonsense and technical language
- Commonsense versus technical: in depth
- Professional learning activities and resources
Defining commonsense and technical language
Commonsense language
Commonsense language is language based on directly observable experience.
Technical language
Technical language is expert knowledge that goes beyond observable experience. Technical terms are the direct result of the kinds of knowledge scientists, geographers and other specialists are involved in developing as they study, classify and reclassify the world into taxonomies.
Essential for learning
Commonsense knowledge and understandings are therefore based on observable, everyday criteria while technical knowledge goes beyond the observable.
Technical knowledge and understandings help explain why scientists, geographers, environmentalists, mathematicians and other specialists in their disciplines may be hard to understand. The words they use in their speech and their writing are difficult for someone outside of their field to understand.
In order to communicate with established knowledge in the various domains of the Victorian Essential Learning Standards, it is essential that students are able to both understand and produce technical terms. Students are required to learn to use language in new ways as they master the registers and text types of the subjects they are learning.
Literacy development in the middle years draws heavily on increasingly technical language. The vocabulary that is needed can either be technical or specialised. Understanding these terms is crucial to students developing competence in comprehension.
Commonsense versus technical: in depth
How would you group the following: an apple, a pear and a pumpkin?
What criteria would you use?
Did you put them all into one group? Why or why not?
There are essentially two different ways of grouping things: commonsense and non-commonsense.
Commonsense
A commonsense grouping of the three items might be apple, pear (fruit because they are sweet) versus pumpkin (a vegetable). Such commonsense criteria tend to come from directly observable experience: sweet versus not sweet, grow in trees versus grow in the ground, eaten raw versus eaten cooked.
Commonsense knowledge tends to be based on careful observation using the senses and the naked eye.
Technical
In contrast, technical criteria go beyond such directly observable experience. If we asked a biologist to group these items, their criteria for grouping would be whether or not they come from a pollinated flower. As apples, pears and pumpkins all come from pollinated flowers, all three would be grouped as ‘fruit’ including the pumpkin.
Scientists draw on knowledge gained from technology, as well as experiments, to produce a different picture of the world. Neither view is correct: they are merely different perspectives on reality – different ways of observing and classifying the world. Each approach sees the same three organic things but they see them differently.
For example, some common technical terms used by geographers interested in the climate are: solar radiation; wind and pressure systems, atmospheric moisture, precipitation and air fronts.
Technical terms are the direct result of the kinds of knowledge scientists, geographers and other specialists are involved in developing as they study, classify and reclassify the world into taxonomies. This may be illustrated by drawing up a simple taxonomy of rocks.
Scientists have grouped rocks into three main types according to the way they have been formed. Metamorphic rocks, for example, have been changed by heat and pressure, and formed deep inside the earth. Sedimentary rocks are formed when small particles of sand, mud or weathered rock are deposited in layers and compressed over millions of years. Igneous rocks are produced when a molten mass of white, hot material (known as magma) rises to the surface from deep inside the earth.
A technical term can be a single noun such as ‘herbivore’, ‘carnivore’, ‘environment’ or ‘climate’. It may also be a noun group with a classifier, e.g. metamorphic (classifier) rock (thing).
An important part of activities such as observing and grouping (or classifying) involves giving things a name (metamorphic rock). These names are considered technical because they have a field specific meaning. A field specific meaning refers to the distinct and particular meaning that is assumed when technical terms such as ‘metamorphic’ are used in a subject like science or geography.
An important part of learning in the upper primary years involves learning the technical terms that are used in each discipline. These terms tend to be defined by teachers during classroom discussions and are commonly defined in written texts.
In the written mode, technical terms are visually signalled to the reader through the use of italics, bold, capital letters or parentheses. These conventions draw the reader’s attention to the term, signal that it is important and that the term will be defined in the accompanying text.
Once a term has been defined, it will no longer be highlighted – it is then considered to be part of the assumed knowledge of the student. These are vital things to draw to students’ attention before you ask them to research information in textbooks and reference books.
Technical terms do not just name the parts of the world that are significant to scientists, geographers or mathematicians. By naming a rock ‘sedimentary’, scientists are placing that rock into a set of oppositions with other kinds of rocks, in this instance, metamorphic and igneous rocks. In other words, technical terms come from taxonomies in which they have oppositional relationships with other technical terms. This means that knowing the definitions of technical terms is not enough for literacy success. Students also need to know how the terms are related to one another.
Professional learning activities and resources
Commonsense versus technical language
This activity is designed to illustrate the differences between commonsense and technical language. To complete this activity you will need to download the following transcript:
Uranium mining
discussion (PDF - 18Kb)
This transcript is a text produced by an upper primary
student involved in a unit of work on uranium mining that the teacher and
class were engaged in for a period of three weeks.
Activity
Sort this series of words and phrases, taken from this text, into these categories: commonsense versus technical.
Half a billion dollars
Coal
Fossil fuels
Power
A nuclear power
station
Radioactive waste materials
Gas
Uranium
Some people
A
fossil fired power station
Radioactivity
Oil
Nuclear waste
Radiation
Both
sides
A fossil-fuelled power station
Other people
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Commonsense terms |
Technical terms |
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Most terms divide easily into commonsense or technical. However, there may be some discussion about some of the words such as ‘power’. We have a commonsense understanding of it that includes both: the capacity to direct or influence the behaviour of others and ‘power’ as a form of energy.
It is the latter definition that scientists and geographers are concerned with and classify according to the means by which the energy is produced. Such classification generates technical terms such as nuclear power and fossil-fuelled power.
When exploring these meanings, note that a very useful starting point for building up technical understandings is commonsense knowledge because it allows teachers to start with existing understandings and then build the necessary bridges across to theoretical knowledge.
A very important part of unit planning, that is, designed in scaffolding, involves deciding the points at which students’ attention will be directed to the language choices and patterns that are central to constructing educational knowledge such as technical terms in science and geography and the bridging strategies that the teacher will use.
For example, in this unit, careful scaffolding involved defining the meanings of crucial technical terms with the class, providing opportunities for students to clarify their understandings as well as providing opportunities for them to rehearse using these terms appropriately. The teacher’s involvement in building shared understandings was greatest initially and then she was able to withdraw her support once students understood what the terms meant.
By helping the class learn a new technical and specialised vocabulary in this way, the teacher was able to help them both comprehend and interpret texts from their research, which dealt with controversial and competing points of view.
Consider the Four Resources Model described by Freebody and Luke and which of the following roles the class had to take on during their research:
- code breakers (decode the conventions of text technology)
- text participants (comprehension of the main ideas or arguments)
- text users (comparing and analysing different perspectives on the same issue)
- text analysts (developing a critical stance leading to their own position)
For more information read The Four Resources Model
All four were required and the technical language the teacher built up played a vital role in enabling students to analyse and ‘weigh up’ texts written from two completely different perspectives.
It also helped them to adopt their own critical stance on the issue, a stance that was articulated in the final stage of their written discussion and the recommendation stage. In these ways, moving from familiarisation to the (tentative) command of new technical terms is a key aspect of literacy development for all students in the middle years and it involves speaking, listening, reading and writing.
Related Materials
Previous key concept - Genre teaching and learning cycle for writing
Next key concept - Increased technicality: Compressing information
Teaching strategies - Writing strategies all domains (continuum)