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Recent reforms in science education highlight the need for student-centred approaches to teaching in school curriculum policy in South Africa. Science teachers are required to move away from traditional teacher-centred practices which regard students as mere passive recipients of knowledge. In this study, we examine classroom talk for the type of student participation encouraging moves employed in lessons on basic genetics concepts and the related quality of instructional strategies employed by a university lecturer during a semester course on genetics. A key feature of the course was the lecturer's use of students' prior knowledge including alternative conceptions from a diagnostic assessment to facilitate the learning of pertinent genetics terminologies. Through a qualitative approach, we combine two recently published frameworks--the "Analysing Teacher Moves (ATM)" and the "Elaboration" frameworks--to analyse teacher talk from transcribed videoed lectures and explore the likely influence on student participation. The findings reveal two dominant student participation stimulating talk-related instructional strategies that seemed to elicit diverse and deeper responses from the students. These include higher-order "initiating" and "rejoinder" moves, supplemented by "other" moves, through which the lecturer provided students with factual information, often in a manner that enabled knowledge synthesis. The intentional use of open-ended questions, explanations and representations and probing students for further contributions signal deliberate pedagogic intentions to promote student interaction while navigating observed language proficiency challenges. The combined analysis framework is recommended for use in future studies on instructional practices which aim to promote fruitful classroom interaction.

This paper reports on key aspects of a short in-service programme improving science teachers' pedagogical content knowledge to teach for the affective domain. The affective domain refers to outcomes that involve changes in feelings, values, appreciation, interests, motivations or attitudes that might result from a learning experience. The intervention adopts a socio-scientific issues instructional strategy aimed at enhancing the participants' capacity to promote these attributes in their teaching practice. Twenty-two science teachers from seven public schools in Johannesburg participated in a short intervention programme that explored creative ways of highlighting the practical relevance of science content, especially for the learners. Data were collected through questionnaires, interviews and observations and analysed qualitatively using Krathwohl's taxonomy of affective learning outcomes and Saldana's code-to-theory model. The emerging themes suggest that the intervention enabled the participants to develop more nuanced understandings and capabilities for privileging the needs of the affective domain in the teaching of science. The paper argues that, in the design and teaching of science lessons, the core content could be wrapped in contemporary social issues which learners can readily relate to and presented in ways that deliberately aim to excite students in order to promote their sustained engagement with both the content and social issues in more meaningful ways.