Clarifying chemistry concepts through language analysis

Abstract

Chemistry concepts often pose considerable challenges to students at all levels of instruction, from secondary school to all the university courses. The search for options to facilitate clear and complete understanding is a major commitment of chemistry education research. Teaching and learning depend on communication effectiveness. Language is the most fundamental communication tool. Its communication effectiveness in education depends on the degree of rigour and clarity with which sentences are built and assembled to form a text, and on the learners’ ability to identify all the information conveyed by the text. Language analysis proves a powerful tool to facilitate full identification of the information in a text. It is also optimal to stimulate further reflection on the various features of a concept through the analysis of frequently occurring errors or of errors in learners’ work. After an introduction on the reasons making language analysis a powerful clarification tool, this paper considers illustrative examples from different tertiary-level chemistry courses, to highlight the practical implementation aspects and emphasise the integration between the analysis of chemistry concepts and the language-type analysis of the sentences expressing them. Because of its nature, the approach relies on in-class interactions. It has proved beneficial and rich of potentials for further explorations. The design of options for close collaboration between chemistry teachers and language teachers is expected to become the key for more generalised application.