- Title
- Science literacy in Saudi Arabia through language analysis of a secondary school physics textbook
- Creator
- Albadi, Nouf Mohammed
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2018
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- Scientific language is an essential component of science education. Secondary schooling shapes student thinking and provides a gateway to future engagement; and it is there that student interest in science grows or diminishes. Reading science textbooks is an important tool by which students gain access to scientific knowledge. While there is an extensive body of research on language and learning with science textbooks written in English, there is less work in contexts where other languages provide the medium of instruction. Saudi Arabia is one such context. Modern standard Arabic is used in Saudi school textbooks, and Saudi science education has experienced enormous change over the past decade. This study particularly focused on the current mandatory Saudi Year 10 Physics textbook. A mixed method approach was used to: examine approaches to assessing text readability; gather expert opinions of relative text difficulty; identify specific student difficulties with the language of their Physics textbook; and, ascertain teacher and student response to recent changes in science curriculum and delivery. A review of the existing literature found gaps in the research that guided the formulation of the research questions, which were dealt with in four published articles and subsequent synthesis. This study revealed that expert readers of Arabic rated passages from science textbooks as harder to read than other text and that the physics passages appeared to be most difficult. Participating Year 10 Saudi students had greater difficulty in accessing their physics textbook than comparable English speakers accessing similar texts and those difficulties could be linked to specific language features. Year 10 Physics teachers agreed that applying the new teaching methods required by curriculum change was difficult but both they and their students held a variety of views about the textbook and other implementation issues. These findings suggest: that the written language style of the Physics textbook should be made more accessible; that specific language features associated with learner reading difficulty should be addressed more directly; and that, the components of recent changes in Saudi science education should be more closely aligned.
- Subject
- physics; language; cloze test; Saudi secondary school; science; thesis by publication
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1394249
- Identifier
- uon:33667
- Rights
- Copyright 2018 Nouf Mohammed Albadi
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 5 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 113 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |