Abstract

There is a worldwide concern about science and engineering undergraduate students, particularly those who are English language learners, struggling with their entry-level content courses. From a teacher cognition perspective and drawing on semi-structured interviews with chemistry, mathematics and physics teachers at a university in the Middle East, we sought to gain insights into the extent to which language is seen as interfering with content learning and how this issue is being addressed. Focusing particularly on challenges students face with processing written text in English, since this emerged through thematic analysis as the investigated content teachers’ primary concern, we explore reported practices and highlight needs for in-service professional development. We suggest that science and mathematics instructors may need heightened syntactical and morphological awareness to prepare them to more effectively help their students to decode dense word problems. They may also need consciousness-raising, so that they can see themselves as language teachers too.

摘要

科学和工程本科生，尤其是那些英语语言学习者，在他们的入门级内容课程中苦苦挣扎，这引起了全世界的关注。从教师认知的角度，并借鉴对中东一所大学化学、数学和物理教师的半结构化访谈，我们试图深入了解语言在多大程度上被视为干扰内容学习，以及这个问题是如何产生的正在处理。特别关注学生在处理英语书面文本时面临的挑战，因为这是通过主题分析出现的作为调查内容教师的主要关注点，我们探索报告的实践并强调在职专业发展的需求。我们建议科学和数学教师可能需要提高句法和词法意识，让他们做好准备，以便更有效地帮助学生解码密集单词问题。他们可能还需要提高意识，以便他们也可以将自己视为语言教师。