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The Role of Language in Learning Physics David Brookes, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Click name for speaker's biography) How do physicists communicate the concepts of physics to students? We use multiple representational modes, including graphs, diagrams, equations, and words. Students are then expected to make sense of those representations in order to create a coherent understanding of the physics they are learning. Making meaning out of representations is complex and there are certain necessary (but insufficient) criteria for successful communication. My talk will examine the role of spoken and written language in how physicists communicate their ideas to students, and how students interact with and make sense of that language. If we agree that language serves as a representation of a physicist's model just like equations, graphs, or diagrams, then there should be a relationship between our language choices in teaching physics and students' subsequent understanding of those ideas. I will show how remarkably systematic, yet flexible we are in using language to model the physical world around us. With this understanding, seemingly inexplicable student reasoning in quantum mechanics can easily be illuminated by linguistics. For example, many quantum mechanics students conceptualize the potential energy graph as a physical object or geographical feature. A careful examination of language can give us clear insights into the cognitive processes that underpin some of students' reasoning in physics.
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