Recently I covered a y7 biology lesson for a colleague. For the question "what is the function of a ribosome?" a student had written "the site of protein synthesis". I asked "what does protein synthesis mean?" They couldn't tell me. I asked another student. They couldn't tell me either. Almost every student in the class could tell me that ribosomes are the site of protein synthesis, but none of them could tell me what protein synthesis was. A similar situation arose in my own lesson today. All my year 8s could tell me that "reactivity increases down group 1" but when I asked what that meant, again, most of them didn't actually know. "It means the reactivity gets higher" okay, but what does that mean?
So often in science we use language that is perfectly normal for us, but it completely alien to the students in front of us. I do it too.
Beck, Kucan, and McKeown classified the language we use as fitting into three tiers. Tier 1 is the everyday words we use in speech. Tier 2 is those high frequency words from texts, and tier 3 is subject specific language. Like protein synthesis. Or reactivity.
 |
| Here, have a pyramid. |
But it's not just tier 3 vocab we need to worry about. Tier 2 vocab is just as important (and this is where I trip up most often). We assume that our students understand words and phrases like "theoretically" and "generic". And some students will. But some won't and those students will be excluded from our explanations if we don't explain them. I used the words "row" and "column" to describe the periods and groups of the periodic table, but quickly realised my students didn't know the difference [Notably when a student gave the answer "the periods are the horizontal rows and the groups are the up-and-down rows"]
The key here is not to avoid using such vocabulary - be it tier 2 vocab or tier 3 vocab - students deserve to learn loads of words just as much as they deserve to learn loads of science. The trick is to teach the words too: The first time you use the word, give the explanation and give it first - "ribosomes are where proteins are made, we say they are the site of protein synthesis". The second time put the explanation at the end - "ribosomes are the site of protein synthesis, where proteins are made" - and the third time don't use the explanation - "ribosomes are the site of protein synthesis". (Of course with some classes it will take [way] more than three repeats). For the most part, with tier 2 vocab, you can probably skip step 1.
But ultimately, if it comes down to my students knowing that "ribosomes are the site of protein synthesis" and not knowing anything about ribosomes, I'll take the former. As Adam Robbins puts it so well: knowing stuff is better than not knowing stuff.