Flerspråkiga elevers strategier för begreppsförståelse i biologi : En intervjustudie om gymnasieelevers erfarenheter

Sammanfattning

The purpose of this study was to investigate what strategies multilingual upper secondary school students use to understand biological concepts and what types of support they perceive as helpful in biology education. The study was conducted through qualitative interviews with multilingual upper secondary students. The results show that the students used a combination of linguistic, digital, and social strategies to develop an understanding of biological concepts and processes. Common strategies included the use of digital tools and AI, translation into different languages, peer support, and creating their own explanations of concepts. The findings also show that the students did not merely try to memorize definitions, but rather aimed to understand the relationships between different concepts. Images, videos, and simulations were perceived as especially helpful for understanding abstract biological processes. The study also demonstrates that the role of the first language is complex. For some students, their mother tongue functioned as a support, while others experienced that their understanding of scientific concepts in biology had mainly developed in Swedish. Several students described that they found it easier to use everyday language than scientific terminology in their mother tongue, which sometimes made translating biological concepts difficult. Overall, the results highlight the importance of content and language integrated biology teaching, where students are given opportunities to use different linguistic and multimodal resources to develop an understanding of biological concepts. The study emphasizes the importance of teaching that supports students in understanding and using scientific concepts, rather than simplifying the scientific language.