Estimating undergraduate bilingual scientific literacy in Sweden

Abstract

This paper reports ongoing research results from the first Swedish study to be carried out into the relationship between the teaching language and disciplinary learning at university level. The study explores the ability of Swedish science students to spontaneously describe and explain, in both Swedish and English, the concepts they met in their course lectures. The work reported here is a first attempt to evaluate a number of techniques that together may be used to estimate spoken bilingual scientific literacy. Transcripts of students using both English and Swedish to describe a science concept are analysed using three categories: fluency, involuntary codeswitching, and disciplinarity. These categories are then cross-referenced with the language in which the disciplinary concept was originally taught (Swedish, English, or both languages). The study finds that for some students, spoken scientific literacy in English is indeed a problem. Here, it has been suggested that these problems may be transitory, and more work is needed to ascertain whether this is indeed the case.

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