Teaching science through language

For me it was interesting to read this post at the end of a week when I'd twice said to different people that I do have a science bachground since Linguistics is a science. It's interesting to see this perspective beefed up big-time:

Language provides a wealth of data available from the students themselves — data with questions that beg to be asked, making everyday phenomena surprisingly unfamiliar and requiring explanation. Linguistics is at the core of cognitive science, offering incomparable ways to understand the nature of the human mind. The biological capacity for language appears to be shaped in part by genetic information and in part by information gained through childhood experience. Scientists have sought to tease that information apart, and this work has yielded good explanations in some domains and a body of understanding that can be made accessible to middle school and high school students

Interestingly I also use language to help teach cultural analysis for similar reasons: its proximity to all of us and the way that it scales to culture more widely.
Language Log � Teaching science through language