Teaching Science Through Home and Second Languages as the Medium of Instruction: a Comparative Analysis of Junior Second
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Teaching Science Through Home and Second Languages as the Medium of Instruction: a Comparative Analysis of Junior Secondary Science Classrooms in Hong Kong Dennis Fung 1 Received: 26 March 2020 / Accepted: 7 September 2020/ # Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan 2020
Abstract Positioned in the Hong Kong education context, this article evaluates the effects of teaching science through home and second languages (i.e. Chinese and English) in Secondary 2 (or eighth grade) science classrooms. A total of 479 students, divided into two language instruction groups, participated in a teaching intervention comprising 16 lessons on the topic of ‘Making Use of Electricity’. Informed by the results of a mixedmethods study with a quasi-experimental design, with data collected from science diagnostic tests, inquiry questions and focus group interviews, this article reports that Chinese is the most advantageous language of instruction for low- and middle-ability science students, whereas English is more favourable for their high-achieving peers. Whilst Hong Kong students who learnt the focal topic in English were able to rid themselves of certain naive ideas generated from the translation of science terms into Chinese (e.g. pencil ‘鉛筆’ is translated as ‘lead pen’ in Chinese), they were also found to have misconceptions about certain scientific concepts. For example, they were confused about ‘open’ and ‘closed’ circuits because they mixed up the words ‘open’ (‘開放’) and ‘switch on’ (‘開啟’) in English. The study’s broad implications for language support and a mixed-code approach in science teaching worldwide are discussed. Keywords Language support . Medium of instruction . Misconceptions . Quasi-
experimental study . Secondary science teaching
* Dennis Fung [email protected]; [email protected]
1
University of Hong Kong, Room 323, Runme Shaw Building, Porfulam Road, Hong Kong, China
D. Fung
Teaching Science Through the Medium of Home and Second Languages A thematic review of the recent literature on science education (e.g. Huerta, Irby, LaraAlecio & Tong, 2016; Larsson & Jakobsson, 2020; Lemmi, Brown, Wild, Zummo & Sedlacek, 2019; Oyoo, 2017) indicates that academic language is crucial to the learner’s success in terms of knowledge building and conceptual understanding in science. There is emerging consensus that English is fundamental to, and thus preferable for, scientific communication in the international context (i.e. Callahan, Sampson & Rivale, 2019; Rollnick, 2000), with many languages, including Japanese, Maltese and Turkish, found to fall short of the vocabulary needed for the precise identification of abstract scientific terms, thereby limiting the capacity of students who learn through those languages to make meaning of science (i.e. Kawasaki, 2002; Mifsud & Farrugia, 2017; Ünsal, Jakobson, Molander & Wickman, 2018). Indeed, although such limitations have reinforced the position of English as the world’s leading language in science education, learning science through a second language is a challenging task for many
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