Language Barriers to Learning Geological Concepts

The high level of abstraction associated with geological concepts, and the widespread use of the French language in the teaching of scientific subjects, in this case Life and Earth Sciences in the secondary school cycle, constitute a major obstacle to access to knowledge and academic success. In the present study, the major difficulties associated with the assimilation of geological concepts in the first year of secondary school were investigated by means of a questionnaire sent to 30 teachers of Life and Earth Sciences in schools in the Kalaâ des Sraghna provincial department of AREF Marrakech-Safi. Analysis of the results shows that only a minority of learners are able to assimilate geological concepts in French without difficulty, while the vast majority struggle with the high degree of abstraction of these concepts, difficulties linked to sentence structuring and others inherent in geological vocabulary. For most of the teachers questioned (80%), the absence of field trips and classroom manipulations made geological concepts difficult to explain, due to their abstract nature.