What Tendency for "Inquiry" and "Language": Examining Key Journals in Science Education

Conducting a review of the literature can provide a foundation for understanding research trajectories in a given field, and this proposed presentation will explore one literature review mapping that has been conducted to guide a PhD research project relating primary science education and multilingual learning contexts. A first generic search with the terms “teacher education”, “primary education”, “science education”, “inquiry” and “language” led to an overwhelmingly high number of publications to be gathered and analyzed. So, the path of searching articles in the main scope of the research (science education) was chosen, towards the elaboration of an analytic review map. This mapping consists of a database that was built with articles retrieved from six key journals’ official website (identified through JCR/Scimago ranking), funneling the scope to “teacher education” in primary level (and elementary, for the USA context), and focusing on how the words “inquiry” and “language” emerge in these publications starting from 2008 (after the Rocard report, from 2007). This type of data is presented by the frequency of occurrences and analyzed by theme cluster for tendency construct, using content analysis. The first set of data extracted from one journal (CSSE) shows that “language” and “inquiry” appear in 35 documents, but the number of appearances in titles decreases to three occurrences, narrowed to two titles (one title overlaps both terms); serving as an example of an area to be potentially explored. In order to tackle how the implications and overlaps between language learning and science education (focusing on the inquiry-based method) are presented in published articles, the qualitative analysis exposes two set of results: 1. Occurrence and thematic mapping from a social-cultural perspective; 2. A set of meanings and its relevance to the topics as relations between the use of the words “inquiry” and “language” are drawn.