Chemistry Teachers’ Attitudes and Needs When Dealing with Linguistic Heterogeneity in the Classroom - Affective Dimensions in Chemistry Education - page 272

activities take place in the classroom including reading, writing and listening just to
name a few, which all include the use of language. All students in public school
systems require a basic understanding of a given culture s official language, its

rules, its usage and its often tricky and changeable nature in order to learn. For
example, during problem-solving exercises students read and write using language.
Written language is deciphered in order to read the text, before spoken language is
used to communicate the pathway taken from the initial position to the learning goal
(Lemke, 1989 ).
It seems quite self-evident that if a student ' s language skills, particularly those
for reading and writing, are poor or even deficient, the learner will face severe
difficulties and disadvantages in learning any new content in chemistry. The
situation can be exacerbated if the student possesses only a limited vocabulary.
Even excellent learners can experience major difficulties in the chemistry class-
room, considering the fact that various disciplines in the natural sciences them-
selves and their accompanying jargon effectively represent “foreign languages” to
the layman. This conclusion becomes even more obvious if we think about the sheer
amount of reading and writing occurring in the average chemistry classroom:
reading textbook chapters, solving worksheets, understanding PowerPoint slides,
taking tests and quizzes, writing up laboratory reports and protocols, taking notes
during class, answering homework questions, etc.
The above-mentioned problems will be even worse for someone whose mother
tongue differs from the official language of the country where she/he studies, since
that person is effectively being instructed in complicated subject matter covering a
wide range of school subjects in a foreign language. Students being taught in a
second language they have not yet mastered may not understand even simple words
or terms, let alone entire sentences, questions or complicated instructions. For
example, in Germany it is quite common to meet children in schools—especially
in large urban areas—with migration backgrounds. One in five people living in
Germany fits this pattern. A total of 10 % of Germany

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s residents are literally
citizens of foreign nations, with Turkish, Russian, Polish, ex-Yugoslavian dialects,
Greek and Italian being some of the most common languages. Often children speak
one (or even two) non-German language at home and learn German as a foreign
language in school and in public settings. Additionally, they are expected to learn
English as a lingua franca in school (and quite possibly one or two other foreign
languages if they wish to study at the university). German (native) students on the
other hand generally tend to be monolingual until they leave primary school.
Both science and chemistry education in the past have quite often understood
language as a simple tool for the transfer of information from one person to another
(Fang, 2006 ; Ford & Peat, 1988 ). Unfortunately, we know from the history of
education that language was mostly considered to play a rather passive role with
low levels of influence on students

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learning processes in the chemistry classroom.
Rollnick ( 2000 ) stated that decisions concerning the use of language in the class-
room are usually not based on findings related to best practices in education but
more often cater to political expediency than educational effectiveness. However,
the idea of the passive role of language in learning has drastically changed in the

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