The Relationship between Teaching Language and Student Learning in Swedish University Physics

J. AIREY

A mouse woke up one morning feeling hungry. Outside his hole he saw a small piece of cheese. 'What luck!' he said to himself. He was just about to run out and enjoy his breakfast when he remembered the cat – maybe it was a trap! Being a cautious mouse, he stopped and listened. In the distance he heard the cat's 'Miaow'. Reluctantly, he decided that it was not safe to go out, and so he went back to bed.

The next morning the mouse was feeling very, very hungry when he saw a much larger piece of cheese outside his hole. But he still had the self-control to stop and listen. Once again he heard the cat's 'Miaow', and once again he was forced to abandon his breakfast plans and go back to bed.

On the third day the mouse was absolutely starving. He dragged himself out of bed and saw a gigantic piece of cheese outside his hole. But he still had just enough self-control to stop and listen. This time he heard 'Woof, Woof'.

Thinking that he was safe with the cat's natural enemy around, the mouse ran happily out to eat the cheese, at which point he was jumped upon and eaten.

Later that day, the cat was heard to boast, 'You see! That's the benefit of learning a second language!'

Background

There are many benefits of learning a second language – particularly if this second language happens to be widely understood by others and can function as a lingua franca. Recently, the notion of English as a lingua franca (ELF) has received a great deal of attention in research circles (e.g. Ammon, 2000; Björkman, 2008a, 2008b; Firth, 1996; Jenkins, 2007; Mauranen & Ranta, 2008; Seidlhofer, 2004; Shaw, 2008; Smit, 2007) (see also Chapters 3, 4, 5, 9 and 10 on English as a lingua franca). The interest is justified. As Graddol (2006) points out, non-native speakers of English now account for the vast majority of communication in English. The ELF approach is also gaining ground in higher education, with more and more courses being taught through the medium of English – often as a response to an increase in international exchange students (e.g. Maiworm & Wächter, 2002; Wächter & Maiworm, 2008). This trend towards increasing mobility of the student population and the corresponding increase in courses taught through the medium of English seems set to continue (see also Chapter 3 on mobility). For example, the goal of the 46 countries implementing the Bologna Process is that by 2020 at least 20% of their graduates will have spent some time studying abroad (Bologna Process, 2010) (see also Chapter 8 on the Bologna Agreement).

There are many advantages of using English as the teaching language in higher education. I have previously listed some of them for the Swedish context as follows:

• In a number of disciplines, the publication of academic papers takes place almost exclusively in English. Teaching in English is therefore seen as necessary in order to prepare students for an academic career (see also Chapter 2 on teaching in English).

• In many disciplines the majority of textbooks used are written in English. Teaching in English may then seem like a natural choice in order to have a match between lectures and course literature.

• The use of English develops the language skills and confidence of Swedish lecturers and can be seen as promoting movement/exchange of ideas in the academic world.

• Using English as the language of instruction allows the use of visiting researchers in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching.

• Teaching in English allows exchange students to follow courses at Swedish universities.

• Swedish students can be prepared for their own studies abroad.

• A sound knowledge of English has become a strong asset in the job market. (Adapted from Airey, 2003: 11)

Of course this list is by no means exhaustive, but it is sufficient to underline the fact that there are many potentially positive effects of teaching university courses in English. But might there also be the potential for negative effects associated with this type of teaching? What, for example, are the effects on disciplinary learning when the medium of instruction changes to English?

In this chapter, I present some of the findings from my PhD thesis (Airey, 2009b) where I examined the differences that occur when Swedish undergraduate physics students are taught in English rather than in Swedish (see also Chapters 2, 6 and 7 on the Scandinavian perspective). I have organized the chapter as follows. After a short presentation of earlier research findings, I go on to describe my study, and report the main results. I then discuss these results and make suggestions for teaching. Finally, I discuss the issue of language choice and parallel language use in higher education, making recommendations for how decisions about the teaching language might be taken (see also Chapter 7 on language choice).

Earlier Research

Even without the introduction of a second language, the relationship between disciplinary language and disciplinary learning is known to be complex. Halliday and Martin (1993), for example, claim that language does not simply represent disciplinary knowledge – it is actively engaged in bringing such knowledge into being. Moreover, Geisler observes that disciplinary language can '[...] afford and sustain both expert and naïve representations: the expert representation available to insiders to the academic professions and the naïve representation available to those outside' (Geisler, 1994: xi-xii). Thus, it has long been known that students studying in their first language often do not appropriately understand the disciplinary language that they meet in lectures, even though they may use such language themselves (Bourdieu et al., 1965/1994). Bakhtin (1953/1986), calls this phenomenon ventriloquation, while diSessa (1993: 153) describes it as 'learning slogans' Elsewhere, I have termed this use of disciplinary language without the associated understanding, discourse imitation (Airey, 2009b; Airey & Linder, 2009a). If such problems exist in first language teaching then we should perhaps not be surprised if the introduction of a second language complicates matters still further. Both Met and Lorenz (1997) and Duff (1997) have suggested that limitations in L2 may inhibit students' ability to explore abstract concepts in non-language subjects, with Marsh et al. (2000, 2002) predicting that this problem will become more pronounced at higher levels of schooling.

Empirically, there are only a small number of international studies that claim to have found measurable effects of teaching in a second language on disciplinary learning at a tertiary level. Researchers in New Zealand, for example, report negative correlations between second language learning and performance in undergraduate mathematics, with students disadvantaged by 10% when taught in a second language (Barton & Neville-Barton, 2003, 2004; Neville-Barton & Barton, 2005). These negative effects were found to be at their worst in the final undergraduate year – seemingly confirming the prediction of Marsh, Hau and Kong. Similar relationships have been found to some extent by Gerber et al. (2005) in their study of speakers of Afrikaans learning undergraduate mathematics in English in South Africa. Research in the Netherlands has also identified negative effects for Dutch engineering students' learning when they are taught in English (Klaassen, 2001; Vinke, 1995). However, the longitudinal nature of Klaassen's work led to an interesting result. After one year of study, there were no longer any measurable differences in engineering grades between research and control groups. At first glance, this result seems at odds with the other studies reported above. However, this may not be the case. In New Zealand and South Africa one can imagine that students had been required to learn in English, and that this may have affected their motivation and performance. However, the students in Klaassen's study were, in fact, very different – they were elite students who had explicitly chosen an English-medium programme. Elsewhere, I have suggested that the students in Klaassen's study may have adapted in some way to being taught in a second language (Airey & Linder, 2006, 2007).

If we accept that there may be negative effects associated with teaching in a second language, but students may be able to compensate through their own strategies, then a number of questions remain:

• What is it that students find specifically problematic when they are taught in a second language?

• By what means can students compensate for the language shift?

• Do all students have this strategic ability, or are certain language-groups or types of students disadvantaged by second-language teaching?

• And, can lecturers do anything to help their students cope with the language shift?

Klaassen (2001) suggested following up her work with stimulated recall sessions to find out what students are actually doing in lectures and this is precisely what I did in my own study.

The Study

So, it was from this background that I started my research into teaching in English in Swedish university physics courses. At the outset, I decided to focus on lectures given in English. I reasoned that listening to lectures would be potentially the most difficult situation for students to deal with. A student reading a book can stop, look up a word and then re-read the text, but a lecture just goes on and on – unless someone is brave enough to ask a question that is! I also wanted to carry out a comparative, naturalistic study, where the same students were taught in both English and Swedish as part of their regular degree program. This entailed searching the country for instances where the same students were reading two physics courses in parallel – one in English, and one in Swedish – as part of their regular degree programme. Eventually I managed to find and negotiate access to three such situations at two Swedish universities. I videotaped a total of six physics lectures with different lecturers. Each student in the study was present at two of these lectures – one in English and one in Swedish. Prior to filming, I interviewed the lecturers about their aims for the lecture and how it fitted into the 'whole', and their experiences of the group as learners and any areas where they expected students to have problems with the material to be covered (see also Chapters 3, 4, 8, 10 and 11 on interviews as method).

Since at this stage I did not know what aspects of a lecture might be important, I decided to focus on as many different types of activity as possible. Guided by my interviews with the lecturers, my field notes taken during the lecture and an interest in sampling as many of the types of activity as possible, I edited down the video footage to four to five segments for each lecture. The total running time of these segments was between seven and ten minutes for each lecture. I then arranged individual semi-structured interviews with each of the 22 students in the study (approximately 90 minutes per student).

In the first half of the interviews I asked students directly about their experiences of being taught in English and in Swedish. Here, I invited students to talk about their experiences of learning in the two courses they had attended, their working patterns for each course and their thoughts about learning in English rather than in Swedish. In the second half of the interviews I used stimulated recall (Calderhead, 1981; Haglund, 2003). Put simply, since each student had been present at one lecture in English and one in Swedish, I used my edited video footage from these two lectures to help the students remember the situation and talk about their experiences. For both lectures, I also asked students to describe and explain in both English and Swedish one of the concepts presented in that lecture.

Results

So what did I find in this study? Well, the bad news is that there do indeed appear to be some problems experienced by students when they are taught in English. On the other hand, the good news is that I also identified a number of strategies that successful students use to mitigate these problems.

Student descriptions of disciplinary content

One of the things I asked students to do in the interviews was to describe in both English and Swedish one of the disciplinary concepts presented in each of the two lectures they attended. This resulted in a total of 60 transcripts where students discussed the same concept in English and in Swedish. Somewhat surprisingly, for the majority of students, there was little difference between these two descriptions of the same concept from a disciplinary point of view. Note that this is not the same as saying that it does not matter in which language students are taught, but rather saying that from the point of view of a subject specialist, students' descriptions were just as good (or bad!) in both languages regardless of the language that was used to teach the concept. Note too that I say the majority of students. Three of the students in the study had major problems describing concepts in English – with two of them effectively unable to say anything at all about disciplinary concepts in English. These three students were first years and this was the first time they had been taught in English. Interestingly, these three students encountered few problems when talking about their background in English at the start of the interviews, and thus I conclude that it is precisely disciplinary fluency in English that is lacking. Below is an excerpt from the interview transcript with the better of the three students:

Student: I didn't understand why it wasn't a real ... er vad ska jag saga? Tal – er only when you har det upphojd till tva. But she said it was an imeg ... imag ett sant dar tal.

Here, the student does not have access to the disciplinary words: number, squared, and imaginary. Such code-switching was not unusual when first-year students described physics concepts in English, and it was noticeable that their lexical gaps in disciplinary English were sometimes likely to cause a breakdown in communication. For example, the student in the interview excerpt below uses the false friend feather instead of the word spring:

Student: Yeah, yeah. I think it's a feather, that's ... it's going from potential energy to kinetic energy and if you combine, yeah, that with the feather constant you get this [...]

My analysis of the 60 transcripts also showed that the only situation where code-switching was uniformly absent was when students described in Swedish concepts that had only been taught in Swedish. The final observation I can make is that there was a major difference in the speed of the descriptions. Students spoke on average 45% slower when describing disciplinary concepts in English (see Airey, 2009a, 2009b for descriptions of the methods used to assess speaking rate).

The language does not matter

However, perhaps the most surprising finding in my study was that, in the first half of the interviews, students suggested that the teaching language was unimportant. They reported experiencing no real difference between being taught physics in English or Swedish. Here is a typical student response:

Student: Language is not very important I think. It doesn't matter.

Interviewer: Why's that?

Student: Well, I think ... Like I said, understanding English is not a problem for me.

Had the interviews stopped here, I would now be presenting some quite puzzling results! Fortunately, I had two parts to the interviews students reported their unreflected experiences in the first half before looking at specific situations that had occurred in the lectures in the stimulated recall section. It turned out that even though the students claimed that language was not an important factor in their learning in the first section, the same students, during stimulated recall, could point out a number of important differences in their learning when the teaching language changed to English. I will now present these differences.

Reduced interaction

It quickly became apparent to me as a researcher that students were less willing to ask and answer questions when the lectures were in English. In the stimulated recall parts of the interviews students confirmed this observation.

Student: If you want to ask a question, you have something you want to ask, then I don't speak English so well as I speak Swedish, so its easier for me to ask ... to talk in Swedish and ask things.

Interviewer: I noticed in [the Swedish lecture] there were a lot more questions than in [the English lecture] is that common or is that just ...?

Student: No ... It's common, um actually [laughs]. Yes, that for sure has to do with the language, that people don't er ... they're a little shy to speak English because they cannot speak English so well. Erm ... For me it is like that.