The co-evolution of situated language and physics knowing

This study focuses on the evolutionary changes in students' language concerning animated objects and associated vector diagrams in a computer-based Newtonian microworld. Emergence, convergence, and interpretive flexibility are introduced as analytical notions to describe and explain changes in student discourse. The present analysis documents how new ways of taling emerge and how the convergence of meaning within student groups and towards scientific meanings arises from the affordances provided by the interpretive flexibility of objects and events in the microworld, the conversations with the teacher, and the microworld as backdrop which assures the topical cohesion of student talk. In the students' learning process, computer microworlds were not cultural tools which embed unique meanings that students can recover on their own. Rather, these microworlds achieved their meaning in part through the teacher's situated practices.