PHYSICAL SCIENCE TEACHERS' AWARENESS OF LEARNERS' MISINTERPRETATION OF NON-TECHNICAL WORDS

This paper is based on the major study that investigated high school learners’ understandings of non-technical words used in physical science context in the South African Schools. The present paper reports on the teachers’ awareness of the learners’ inappropriate interpretations of these words when used in the classroom teaching of physical science. It has been documented in the literature that science teachers’ classroom instructional language consists of technical and non-technical words. Also, it has been reported that high school students often encounter difficulties mostly with appropriate meanings of words used in everyday context whenever same words are used in the science context. However, little is known about the teachers’ level of awareness of the learners’ inappropriate interpretations of this category of teachers’ instructional language. Thus, this study was carried out in two public South African high schools in which science teachers’ instructional language is English. Having identified words that learners wrongly interpreted in the physical science context, an interview was conducted with the two particular physical science teachers. The findings of this study revealed that: only one of the two teachers showed some level of awareness of the learners’ misinterpretations; one of the teachers lack knowledge of the contextual meanings of the words and so indicated clear lacked awareness of the learners’ misinterpretations of the words when used in the science context. This report suggests that teachers should be adequately sensitized to the manner of use of language in explaining science concepts and the level of awareness should be raised.