Learners’ Interpretations of Non-technical Words Used in Physical Sciences: A Case Study of Two Schools in South Africa

Abstract

This study explored the high school learners’ interpretations of twenty nontechnical words used in the classroom teaching and learning of physical
sciences. This study was conducted in a classroom context where all the
learners speak English as their second language however the medium of
classroom instruction is English. Two Government-owned high schools in
South Africa participated in this study with focus on the Grade 11 and 12
physical science learners. A validated questionnaire, which contains twenty
Items, was administered in two schools with a purposeful sampling strategy
employed on 75 students in the two schools. The administration of the
questionnaire was followed by an interview conducted with the participant
learners and their teachers. The learners’ responses to the questionnaire
were analyzed quantitatively using Rasch Statistical Analysis to measure
person ability and item difficulty. The person reliability and item reliability
as generated by the Rasch analysis were 0.70 and 0.91 respectively. The
validity of the measures was also established with the statistical values
between the acceptable range of +2/-2 for the persons and items. The
findings of this study revealed that the participant learners encountered difficulties in interpreting eight non-technical words correctly when used
in the physical science context. 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 and pronunciations; and learners’
inability to distinguish the meaning of a word from its opposite meaning.
This study recommends that much more attention should be given to the
Physical science teachers’ instructional language in the classrooms.