1 Biologya branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws:the mathematical sciences. 2  Biologysystematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation.
Bracha Alpert has identified three different patterns of classroom discourse: (1) silent (the teacher talks almost all the time and asks only an occasional question),(2) controlled (as in the excerpt above), and (3) active (the teacher facilitates while the students talk primarily to each other).
(2) More broadly, discourse is the use of spoken or written language in a social context. Discourse studies, says Jan Renkema, refers to the discipline devoted to the investigation of the relationship between form and function in verbal communication (Introduction to Discourse Studies, 2004).