Alternative Strategies for Working with Scientific Terminology (in the Language and Communication Curricular Area)

The assimilation of scientific terminology and its insertion in the students’ active vocabulary is an insistently pursued objective for any school subject. For the Language and Communication curricular area, the relevant terminology is comprised of dozens of words and phrases, which are defined (sometimes with examples) and used in formulating learning and assessment tasks. Over the gymnasium stage the school subject Romanian Language and Literature (as language of instruction) introduces the students to several hundred terms, which come with definitions and occasionally with attached examples. However, in teaching practice the students will often be required to merely memorize the terms and reproduce the definitions. We suggest such alternative approaches as creating definitions based on the Frayer model, inserting the terms in a system, insisting on adjectives in terminological phrases, and analyzing the terms from a transdisciplinary perspective.