creating an artificial language of their own, a constrained ‘natural’ lan-
guage. This constrained natural language is a very small sub-set of any
natural language in which science is communicated.
Since communication of science is often done in a natural language
(most commonly in English) we fail to explicitly realize that the grammar
of this scientific language is distinct from those of natural languages. Con-
sequently when we teach science we fail to communicate its grammar. We
think that the practice of science teaching also suffers due to a lack of ex-
plicit teaching program to introduce the grammar of science. With this as-
sumption in mind we began exploring to create a teaching program based
on a grammar of scientific language borrowed mostly from the area of
knowledge representation in computer science and logic. What we present
here are some preliminary results.
In one preliminary study we found that students encounter about 4000
concepts of biology (excluding the names of all the species of plants and
animals) up to higher secondary level of education (equivalent to K12) in a
typical Indian school[20]. Complexity of biological science is well known,
and describing such a phenomena obviously requires a richer language.
Added to this is the fact that most of biological terms are derivatives of Latin
or Greek. When confronted with such a large and ‘remote’ vocabulary, bi-
ology teachers often explain the etymology and explain the formation rules
of such terms explaining in terms of suffix and prefix derivatives. Another
very interesting recourse that biology teachers take is the abundant use of
diagrams. This does help to a large extent. Carefully illustrated diagrams
communicate the precision required in science, sometimes more success-
fully than written words. Apart from these normally followed methods,
we think, it is important to add to it an explicit teaching of the grammar
of scientific knowledge. This approach, in addition to enhancing precision
in science communication, will also help in improving conceptual under-
standing of the subject.
A grammar of a scientific language consists of a finite (not necessarily
known) set of possible relations between the concepts. For example, in the
statements “Ribosomes are part of a cell.”, “A cell is a structure.”, and “Rab-
bit is a mammal.”, we employed the relation types, ‘part of’, and ‘is a’, be-
tween the terms. Our hypothesis is that though the terms are numerous the