Content Teachers’ Perspectives of Student Challenges in Processing Science and Mathematics Texts in English at an Emirati University

Abstract

There is a worldwide concern about science and engineering undergraduate students, particularly those who are English language learners, struggling with their entry-level content courses. From a teacher cognition perspective and drawing on semi-structured interviews with chemistry, mathematics and physics teachers at a university in the Middle East, we sought to gain insights into the extent to which language is seen as interfering with content learning and how this issue is being addressed. Focusing particularly on challenges students face with processing written text in English, since this emerged through thematic analysis as the investigated content teachers’ primary concern, we explore reported practices and highlight needs for in-service professional development. We suggest that science and mathematics instructors may need heightened syntactical and morphological awareness to prepare them to more effectively help their students to decode dense word problems. They may also need consciousness-raising, so that they can see themselves as language teachers too.