Abstract:

This study investigated student understanding of 20 non-technical words used in a physical science classroom. The investigation was carried out in a context in which the classroom language of instruction is English, a foreign language to most participant learners and their science educators. A questionnaire containing 20 questions were administered in two schools with a purposeful sampling strategy employed on 75 students in two Government-owned South African high schools followed by an interview conducted with the students and their educators. The data was analyzed quantitatively using Rasch Statistical Analysis to measure person ability and item difficulties of the participating high school students. The Rasch analysis gave person and item reliability of 0.70 and 0.72 respectively. The findings of this study revealed that the participant students encountered difficulties with the meanings of 8 non-technical words when used in the physical science contexts.The difficulties were observed to be as a result of the students’ unfamiliarity with the usage and meanings of the words in physical science contexts; confusion between the meanings of non-technical words with similar spellings or pronunciations; and students’ inability to distinguish the meaning of a word from its opposite meaning; inadequacy in the required understanding of the science concept; non-explanation of the meanings of the words by the educators.Finally, this study is of the implication that much more attention should be given to the Physical science teachers' instructional language in the classrooms.

Keywords:

Non-technical words.