Teaching the language of technology: Toward a research agenda

Abstract

At all levels of technology education, language plays an important role. This chapter combines insights from applied linguistics, the philosophy of technology, and the pedagogy of technology to explore characteristics of the specific language requirements of technology and the way in which students can be guided in the intertwined development of subject and language. More than traditional grammar, Systemic Functional Linguistics offers tools to describe the language of technology as a multimodal resource for meaning making, including textual (oral and written) and graphical modes. Elaboration of writing tasks that are closely related to “designing” and “systems thinking” reveals that language demands can only be understood from a content perspective. These demands depend on choices for pedagogy and orientations to technology education: vocational skills training could ask for writing tasks describing procedures, while orientations toward technological literacy could result in texts that discuss the impact of technologies on societies. The chapter further outlines content and language integrated approaches and discusses their potential for teaching technology, taking into account the specific position of learning at the edge of school and workplace. What these approaches have in common is that technology and engineering teachers need knowledge about language that can be considered part of pedagogical content knowledge. The chapter concludes with a broad outline for further multidisciplinary research and development.