Specialist language style and supposedly adept monolingual science students

Secondary school science curricula are becoming increasingly conscious of communication issues in mainstream classes. However, the perception that ‘language difficulties’ are confined to minority students remains widespread among science teachers. This paper reports the results of a number of investigations into the impact of the specialist style of scientific English on mainstream science classes made up of monolingual speakers of the locally standard dialect of English. Communication difficulties in specialist contexts do not appear to be restricted to ‘minority groups’.