Chemistry Teachers’ Attitudes and Needs When Dealing with Linguistic Heterogeneity in the Classroom - Affective Dimensions in Chemistry Education - page 283

5 Conclusions

Although lacking linguistic skills may represent one of the major factors hindering
students when learning chemistry, this factor is also the one which teachers most
often ignore as irrelevant for their learning group or take for granted when planning
their lessons. Because of the reasons listed in the previous sections, a chemistry
teacher must be aware that every educator in every school subject has an influence
on the development of students linguistic skills to differing degrees and in different

areas. Each chemistry teacher must finally realise that there is no dichotomy
between language and chemistry when it comes to understanding new information.
All school subjects interact with the overall development of students

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general
language abilities. Thus, chemistry teachers carry the additional responsibility of
acquainting their students with an additional, scientific language as well. This is
also a crucial factor in preparing students for further education, not just in chemistry
but for lifelong learning. It also allows young people to express themselves clearly
and concisely and to actively participate in societal debates dealing with issues that
affect not just the learners but all the people around them as well.
Thus, there is a high need of making both chemistry student teachers and
in-service chemistry teachers aware of the linguistic issues in their classes. Fur-
thermore, we should pay more attention in our pre- and in-service chemistry
teachers training on making (student) teachers sensitive for the linguistic heteroge-
neity in their classroom and change their attitude and beliefs concerning this topic.
One possible method to sensitise (student) teachers to the linguistic challenges their
students face is to ask them to write a laboratory report in a second language they
studied in school. Usually the student teachers do not have sufficient capacity in the
second language to do so, even if they are describing a simple experiment, like a
filtration. This experience puts the (student) teachers in the same situation as some
of their students. Additionally, (student) teachers could be shown examples from
everyday school lessons that could be potentially confusing to students who are
non-native speakers or who do not have strong native language skills classes (see
Fig. 1 ). Finally different methods about how to deal and teach in linguistic hetero-
geneous classes must be given. An overview of the methods is given in Markic
et al. ( 2013 ).
Furthermore, for change to support learning in a linguistically heterogeneous
classroom, there must be collaboration between all teachers in schools, especially
those who are resistant to change and new methods (Gamoran et al., 2003 ). The
school programme and organisation are an important factor in this context. In
schools with a strong academic focus and an orientation on student-centred teach-
ing, the differences in student performance are much less dependent on students

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possible migration backgrounds than in other schools (Lee & Smith, 1995 ). Science
teachers in general and chemistry teachers in particular in these types of schools
tend to work more in professional collectives than as autonomous individuals. Such
collective work positively affects the quality of science teaching (Lee, Smith,
Croninger, & Robert, 1997 ). Some typical characteristics of such team-oriented