Biology in English - a challenging variety

Martin A. Hefti-Gautschi
Zurich

L’auteur expose trois points, pour lui critiques, de l’enseignement en immersion: le travail à mettre en place pour développer des capacités linguistiques, pour activer les étudiants et pour trouver des matériels didactiques adéquats.
En révisant 23 leçons de biologie en anglais tenues dans sa classe d’immersion, il a estimé le temps consacré à chacune des quatre compétences. Écouter (39%) est la plus requise aux étudiants. Écrire (30%) prend près d’un tiers du temps et les étudiants passent 22% des leçons en lisant. Parler (4 minutes, 9%) vient en dernier. En effet, le plus souvent, c’est un seul étudiant qui parle, donc ces quatre minutes doivent être divisées par le nombre d’étudiants. Si 10 étudiants participent activement oralement, chacun a donc environ 25 secondes de temps de parole! L’article expose brièvement des stratégies permettant l’activation orale, la méthode “puzzle” et “la discussion des questions d’examen” (exam questions walkabout)”. Mais pour l’auteur, prof. de biologie, trouver des moyens pour activer les étudiants devrait être une stratégie pour faire comprendre un sujet de biologie et pas un but en soi. Même si l’oral est une capacité entraînée sporadiquement, l’auteur remarque des progrès significatifs dans les compétences en anglais de ses étudiants grâce à l’exposition supplémentaire dans les leçons en immersion.

Introduction

At our school (Kantonsschule Wiedikon, Zurich), students in the immersion class are currently taught Mathematics from the 3rd to 6th form, Biology in the 4th and 5th form and history from mid 4th to 6th form in English. We started the immersion project in 2002 and in July 2005 19 of the 24 students from my first immersion class chose to write their Matura paper in Biology and thus in English. In this article, I take a look at the three main immersion issues that kept me challenged during the past two and a half years: working on language skills, activating students and finding appropriate educational resources.

Language skills

In my biology lessons, speaking is the language skill that is involved least. As an example, I reviewed 23 lessons of Biology in English held in my immersion class between September and December 2005 and estimated the time spent on each of the four language skills: the receptive skills listening and reading as well as the productive skills writing and speaking. Figure 1 depicts the estimated percentage each skill was involved for all 23 lessons. As an illustration (indicated by arrows), lesson 10 was an exam and in lesson 19 the students worked on a selection of interactive narrated tutorials on cardiovascular diseases1.
Figure 2 summarizes the estimated average time each language skill was involved. Clearly, listening is what students are required to do most; in other words, that’s mainly the teacher talking.
Writing, a productive skill, takes up close to one third of the time and correlates mainly to times where students worked on handouts or on chapters in their biology book2.
Speaking, on the other hand, comes last. Those 4 minutes are mostly spent on repetition phases and discussions during the lesson. However, while all students are exposed to the spoken word when I talk, it’s mostly only one student at a time actually speaking.
So those 4 minutes have to be divided by the number of actively participating students. Assuming a number of 10 orally active students, we get a figure of between 0 and 25 seconds of speaking per student per lesson. That’s not very much, and when I first started my immersion teaching, I found this a little troubling. I felt that I should be doing more to activate my students. [...]