Teachers’ language and pupils’ ideas in science lessons:can teachers avoid reinforcing wrong ideas?

The lessons given by seven secondary school science teachers on the subject of ‘heat’, temperature and energy were observed and all of the teacher's substantive statements were recorded. The language used was descriptively analysed and categorized in order to find out the nature of the inherent ideas. It was found that the common misconceptions found in studies of pupils’ work in this topic area (such as the caloric notion of heat having substantial properties similar to a fluid) were embedded in the linguistic metaphors and analogies used by the teachers when discussing with the pupils. The misconceptions are thus not simply brought into classrooms from everyday discourse and experience: they are present in the classroom itself in the language of teaching. It is argued that the common misconceptions stand little chance of being eradicated in this situation, since they are continuously being unintentionally reinforced by the teacher. Teachers, who understand the ideas, cannot easily pass on their knowledge since the language they must use in order to communicate contains an implicit and serious barrier to learning. Some suggestions for coping with this situation are made.