Le Hénaff, C., Jameau, A., Gruson, B., Boilevin, J.-M., & Thépenier, L. (2017). Teaching chemistry in English as a foreign language, a case study. Paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER). Copenhagen, Denmark, 23-25 August. (original) (raw)

We present a case study on the teaching of chemistry in English, at a high school in France. The teaching of this « non linguistic subject » in a foreign language takes place within a specific environment in what are called « European classes », where academic content is taught through a foreign language. The data have been collected as part of a national research project in France (“ReVEA”, Living resources for teaching and learning), funded by the French National Agency for Research (ANR). In this paper, we investigate how a chemistry teacher uses her resources (Adler, 2010) during a lesson on atoms which is entirely in English. We do not only consider the teacher's resources, but also the links between her knowledge and her documentation work, using the perspective of the documentational approach of didactics (Gueudet & Trouche, 2009).For our analyses, we refer to previous studies in the field of teaching academic subjects in a foreign language (Gajo, 2007a, 2007b), notably to the concepts of “linguistic opacity” and “subject density”. The originality of the present research programme is to focus on the use of resources, more precisely on resources that had been previously used by the teacher with a former class. Our methodology is based on the “valise” methodology (Trouche, 2014), which provides methodological tools enabling us to track how the studied teacher, both inside and outside her educational institution, uses and produces her teaching resources. Video data has been collected during the lessons and our initial results are based on the transcriptions and synopses of several lessons, reconstructed from video recordings. These results seem to support the claim that learning an academic subject through a foreign language provides a different approach to the subject. For instance, the fact that the teacher shows a video in English to her students leads her to tackle, more deeply than usual, an epistemological reflection on the notions of atoms in chemistry. Our first analyses also show that the students can encounter comprehension problems due to the specificity of some scientific words. The resources used by the teacher, downloaded on a website and ready-to-use for the teaching of chemistry in English, can confine the teacher to less effective learning situations. We will eventually address the issue of teacher training in these programmes. As Duverger (2007) stated ten years ago, teachers of “non linguistic subjects” are not language teachers and therefore require specific training.