Inquiry-based bilingual physics course for the International Baccalaureate Diploma Teacher Education Programme

Abstract

Internationalization is an important nature of science (Chen, 2022a). Scientists all over the world need close international cooperation, such as the elementary particle research of the LHC and long-baseline interference black hole observation of the EHT (Brüning et al. 2012; The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration et al., 2019). Therefore, learning physics through bilingualism has become an important process for international STEM talents. Bilingual learning in schools attaches great importance to cultivating students' academic language proficiency (IBO, 2014). Research on bilingual teaching has found that context-embedded and learning with higher cognitive requirements are more helpful for students' second language learning (Cummins, 1976; Cummins, 2008). Among the natural science teaching strategies, inquiry and practice teaching emphasizes contextualized problem solving and learners' high-level inquiry thinking, which is a feasible strategy for bilingual physics teaching (Kuhn, 1996; Çankaya, 2017).

The International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP) requires high academic language proficiency and emphasizes the process of inquiry-based teaching and learning. In the International Physics Teacher Education Program of National Taiwan Normal University, the inquiry-based physics bilingual curriculum is designed to enhance the goals of physics and language learning at the same time (Chen, 2022b).

REFERENCES

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