English video clips in teaching chemistry among year 9 primary school students

We live in the time when we are exposed to modern information technology on a daily basis. It is really important for teachers to adapt their lessons and teaching methods by facilitating the information and communication technology (ICT) development. The use of new technologies is namely not new to the students as they learn it at a very young age. This graduation thesis discusses the use of video clips in chemistry classroom as the curriculum for chemistry in primary school does itself encourage the use of ICT (which also includes the use of video clips). The aim of the thesis was also to verify to what extent chemistry teachers in Slovenian primary schools use video clips as part of their lessons. We also wanted to find out how video clips are incorporated in the lesson plans and what the connection between students’ knowledge and the use of video clips is. We were interested in finding out whether the use of video clips in chemistry classroom affects the level of knowledge and the comprehension of chemical principles. Primary school teachers often use video clips taken from the Internet, for example, YouTube, and these are usually in English and not in the Slovenian language. That is why the thesis also relates to the modern teaching approach Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and how the language of schooling and how English as a foreign language affects students in video clips. Our study showed that chemistry teachers often include video clips in their lessons, which has positive effects on students’ knowledge. We not only concluded that the use of video clips in foreign language (English) has no negative influences on students’ understanding of chemical principles but also improves their foreign language skills