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

This study explored the high school learners’ interpretations of twenty nontechnical words used in the classroom teaching and learning of physicalsciences. This study was conducted in a classroom context where all thelearners speak English as their second language however the medium ofclassroom instruction is English. Two Government-owned high schools inSouth Africa participated in this study with focus on the Grade 11 and 12physical science learners. A validated questionnaire, which contains twentyItems, was administered in two schools with a purposeful sampling strategyemployed on 75 students in the two schools. The administration of thequestionnaire was followed by an interview conducted with the participantlearners and their teachers. The learners’ responses to the questionnairewere analyzed quantitatively using Rasch Statistical Analysis to measureperson ability and item difficulty. The person reliability and item reliabilityas generated by the Rasch analysis were 0.70 and 0.91 respectively. Thevalidity of the measures was also established with the statistical valuesbetween the acceptable range of +2/-2 for the persons and items. Thefindings of this study revealed that the participant learners encountered difficulties in interpreting eight non-technical words correctly when usedin the physical science context. The difficulties were observed to be as aresult of the students’ unfamiliarity with the usage and meanings of thewords in physical science contexts; confusion between the meanings ofnon-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 thePhysical science teachers’ instructional language in the classrooms.