Bilingual Scientific Literacy? : The Use of English in Swedish University Science Courses

A direct consequence of the Bologna declaration on harmonisation of Europeaneducation has been an increase in the number of courses taught in English at Swedishuniversities. A worrying aspect of this development is the lack of research into the effectson disciplinary learning that may be related to changing the teaching language to Englishin this way. In fact, little is known at all about the complex inter-relationship betweenlanguage and learning. In this article we attempt to map out the types of parameters thatour research indicates would determine an appropriate language mix in one section ofSwedish higher education—natural science degree courses. We do this from theperspective of the overall goal of science education, which we suggest is the productionof scientifically literate graduates. Here we introduce a new term, bilingual scientificliteracy to describe the particular set of language-specific science skills that we hope tofoster within a given degree course. As an illustration of our constructs, we carry out asimple language audit of thirty Swedish undergraduate physics syllabuses, listing thetypes of input provided for students and the types of production expected from students inboth languages. We use this information to map out an ‘implied student’ for the courseswith respect to bilingual scientific literacy. The article finishes by identifying issues forfurther research in this area