If one goes through the textbooks at the senior secondary level, on an average, the lexical density of technical nouns becomes high per sentence. Unless, students are deliberately trained in consulting glossaries and science dictionaries, listening with comprehension and meaning-making while attending the class lectures gets lost. It has been seen that in the standard textbooks of physics at the senior school level, in many definitions and statements, five and more previous terms get used at a time.
A way that has been suggested is that use of crossword puzzles with clues or fit-in criss-cross puzzles to build the vocabulary of the new topic first and foremost. These methods have been found helpful for enhancing the language skill of listening with comprehension.
According to updated curriculum of Cambridge International AS and A Level physics, teachers are required to develop scientific communication skills and vocabulary that could be used in their oral and written responses to the topic-related questions. In other words, the language of physics should be reflected both in the questions and their answers by both the science teachers and science students.
Consequent to the use of fit-in criss-cross puzzles for first two lessons of grade eight physics, the clue-based crossword puzzles were made and used before the topic was introduced. This helped students to have better meaning and decoding of the teacher-directed activities of science instruction at the middle school level at the Plenum School in Himachal Pradesh.
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