The role of language in students’ justifications of chemical phenomena

ABSTRACT

Making decisions, reasoning, and constructing arguments with scientific evidence are essential skills for all members of society, especially in a world facing complex socioscientific issues such as climate change and pandemics. Argumentation is a complex linguistic practice but little is known about how students from diverse language backgrounds engage in argumentation. The goal of this study was to identify how students’ English language proficiency and history was associated with the reasoning demonstrated in their written arguments. We found that students with lower English proficiency and less English history produced fewer causal responses compared to students with higher English language proficiency and history. Follow-up interviews with fifteen participants revealed that students’ comfort communicating in English on assessments was affected by a combination of general and academic language experiences. Findings suggest a need to identify the barriers encountered by students from diverse language backgrounds during argumentation to ensure students from all language backgrounds have equitable supports and opportunities to demonstrate their scientific abilities.

KEYWORDS:

• Science
• technology
• society
• reasoning
• English as a second/additional language

Acknowledgements

JD thanks Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) under the Vanier Graduate Scholarship program. The authors thank SSHRC for support through an Insight Grant.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical statement

The University of Ottawa’s Office of Research Ethics and Integrity approved the research described in this article (H11-18-1363).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: Insight Grant. JLD thanks the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada for support through a Vanier Scholarship.