An Analysis of Earth Science Vocabularies Used in the 10th Grade Science Textbooks

The purposes of this study were to analyze the level of Earth science vocabularies in the 10th grade textbooks with the Science Word Analysis (SWA) program and to investigate the vocabularies selected by the 10th grade students as difficult ones. For this purpose, we extracted the Earth science vocabularies from eleven textbooks, and classified into scientific and non-scientific vocabularies with the SWA program based on the standard Korean language dictionary. In addition, we investigated the difficulty of each vocabulary by surveying five hundred sixty students with a questionnaire. Results showed that the frequency of the scientific vocabularies that were beyond the designated level was the largest among any other levels in all textbooks. Most of the vocabularies selected by students as difficult ones to understand were classified into out of the level. From these results, it were suggested that the students` cognitive level should be considered when developing science textbooks and difficult vocabularies should be replaced with easy ones without a change of meaning.