Posted on 19 January 2012 at 16:10h

LILAC stands for language in Learning Across the Curriculum. Last term teachers at my school were offered the chance to take this course. I thought it would be a good idea to increase my awareness and gain some ideas so signed up. In my school most of the students do not speak English as their first language and although most have a good command some struggle. I have often noticed that even students with a strong background in physics can have diffficulty when it comes to understanding exam questions and often perform well below their potential. In physics classes we are very good at defining the words that we want our students to use (displacement, velocity, acceleration etc.) but not so good at giving examples of how to use them. I am absolutely not the person to try to teach anyone grammar but I am going to start to giving my stuents examples of how to put some of these terms into sentences.

A body experiences a constant force resulting in an acceleration.

A car travelling at constant velocity of 5ms^-1 accelerates to 10ms^-1 in 5s.

Hmm. How can a car travelling at a constant velocity accelerate? What in the sentence says that the car is no longer travelling at a constant velocity but is starting to accelerate? I can see that I could very easily start to tie myself into linguistic knots.

Undeterred I will start by adding sentences to the vocabulary lists on my scheme of work pages.

vectors

Displacement

I might even try the odd word game with my class. (Steady on now)