Vigyan Pratibha Discussion Session

Speaker:

Dr. Seah Lay Hoon

Zoom link:

https://zoom.us/j/94058085713?pwd=QjY3TWpKUC84TFhldkdlS01ScnVGdz09

or you can use

Meeting ID:

940 5808 5713

Passcode:

967696

Abstract:

Scientific language has evolved from everyday language to meet the needs of the scientific discipline, acquiring over time specialized linguistic resources, features and devices. These linguistic tools, while allowing scientists to construct and communicate propositions and knowledge claims, can nonetheless present a considerable challenge to students who are concurrently required to make sense of and employ them in the process of learning the content and practices of science. Although science teachers may recognise the role of language in science learning, many of them encounter challenges in addressing the language demands of science. One such challenge is a lack of knowledge about how to integrate language and content learning in science classrooms. This lack of knowledge in turn could be attributed to the scarcity of professional development opportunities that equip teachers with the speci?c skills needed for this type of integration. The challenges are compounded when the teaching context is that of a multilingual classroom where students are learning the language of instruction concurrently with the language of science. In this presentation, I will discuss an approach to raise science teachers’ language awareness to enhance their capacity to address the language demands of science. This approach, built upon a series of related research projects over the past 8 years, involves researchers working collaboratively with teachers in a series of iterative inquiry cycles to raise teachers’ awareness of the uniqueness of scientific language. This professional learning approach has been found to impact on teachers’ sensitivity to language use, their beliefs about the role of language in teaching and learning, as well as their assessment and teaching practices.

Bio Sketch:

Lay Hoon Seah is a Senior Research Scientist with the Office of Education Research within the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. A former secondary school science teacher, she did her post-doc at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden) and received both her Doctor of Philosophy and Master of Education from the University of Melbourne (Australia). Her research interests include students’ language challenges in learning science and disciplinary literacy. Her current research work focuses on exploring how science teachers’ language awareness can be fostered and examining the impacts of such awareness on science instruction.