生物双语教学中易混淆的概念

葛海燕

Take Chapter one - what is biology - for example.

This chapter is the introduction of biology. Generally speaking, it should be easy and interesting. However, it is not easy to understand several concepts, especially for students whose English are poor.

Here are the summaries.

1.     Organization, an orderly structure, one of the characteristics of living things. Students will translate it into Chinese “组织”, which is wrong. In fact, it is not easy to find a specialized Chinese word to match it. So it is important to let students remember its English definition.

2.     Species, in Chinese it has a specialized word “物种”，however, they still do not grasp the nature of species. We have to emphasize the conditions to be a species, like horse and donkey, they can interbreed, but the offspring of them – mules - are sterile, no fertility, so horse and donkey are two species. If a group of organisms belong to one species, they can not only interbreed, but also produce fertile offspring. Also, students would be interested in other examples, such as liger (offspring of lions and tigers).

3.     Characteristics of living things.

Different books have different points of Characteristics of living things. But these four properties are common, an orderly structure, produce offspring, grow and develop, adjust to changes in the environment .

Before telling these to students, we can first ask students how to distinguish living things and nonliving things and encourage them to think. They might say that they can move, need food and so on.

Also, I have to mention that do emphasize the meaning of characteristic, which means feature or property, not the character in a drama. Believe me, some students do not know the word. According to their understanding about English words, one word just has one meaning, which is not true of course in English.

In a word, these are three conditions we will meet when we teach concepts. Some specialized concepts have no relevant Chinese words, while some do. However they may not grasp the nature of the concept, and others will be misunderstood by students. In order to conquer these problems, we need to stress these definitions again and again, and most importantly, explain them carefully and properly.

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