Linguistic Analysis of Science Teachers' Narratives Using AntConc Software

Abstract

This chapter presents the linguistic analysis of science teachers' narratives regarding their worldviews in the digital age and their views of technology. The analysis was performed using Laurence Anthony's software AntConc, which is suitable for analyzing large data corpora. The language behavior of the following groups of teachers was analyzed by exploring three distinctive linguistic markers: personal pronouns to study participants' foci of attention; emotion words, to measure the extent of their emotional immersion in the discourse; and semantic fields of specific word collocations. The results, based on the variations in the language behavior, indicated differences between the three groups of teachers' worldviews. In addition, the examination of the degree of descriptive elaboration, expressed through the use of sense, motion, and exclusion words, revealed similar levels of truthfulness in all three groups. The linguistic analysis, enhanced by various computational linguistic technologies available through the AntConc software, made it possible to identify implicitly conveyed thoughts and feelings, thereby affording a better understanding of complex education-related processes and phenomena.