Chemistry Vocabulary Attainment among Higher Secondary Students

In the context of growing empirical evidence to lack of clear understanding of the language of the science content, undesirable student outcomes including difficulty in learning science and a lack of interest with their science content area, and chemistry being particularly loaded with specialized terminology of its own, this study analyzed the vocabulary in higher Secondary School chemistry textbooks published by NCERT. Forty eight terms were identified and categorized into four broad areas namely Inorganic chemistry, physical chemistry, Thermodynamics & Electo Chemistry and Organic chemistry. Difficulty with select words was studied through a sample survey among a random sample of 200 class X11students of chemistry in higher secondary schools. Meanings of prefixes like diazo, ampho, syn and photo, and suffixes like oid (eg.,actinoid), were not recognised by majority of students. Meanings of terms like ferromagnetic, solvate, and aprotic also were not recognised by majority.