Vladimir Bakylin

The relevance of this study is due to the difficulty for students to discern synonymous and homonymous physical quantities and their designations. The language of science is like a foreign language, it has its own vocabulary, its own grammar. Learning it is the key to successful professional activity. The issue of students' competent use of scientific terminology, as well as the problem of associating everyday objects with scientific ones, in particular with technical devices, are the subjects of the present article. The aim of the research: to find out the students' level of terminological skills and their ability to identify physical objects; to determine effective ways of memorizing physical terms, physical quantities and their designations. The article presents an analysis of the origin of names of physical and technical devices, gives examples of synonyms, paronyms, homonyms use in the language of physics. The research was conducted among 1st- and 2nd- year Physics majors and other students. They were offered several variants of tests: 1) to associate household objects with parts of technical devices presented in illustrations; 2) to list all possible meanings of these words; 3) to list different designations-synonyms for one and the same physical quantity; 4) to list physical quantities-homonyms denoted by the same symbol. Analysis of picture associations showed only partial awareness of technical devices and difficulty in using synonyms when describing them. Quantitative results of the test without pictures for different specialties were approximately the same, however, Physics majors gave clearer definitions and more variants of terms interpretation. Evaluation of the second group of tests for checking and presenting professional knowledge in physical terminology led to the conclusion that mostly Physics majors gave correct characteristic of the offered things and some of them suggested their own variants of homonyms and synonyms, at the same time the knowledge of terminological apparatus by students of other specialties was worse. This means that residual knowledge even of physical quantity designations is lost very quickly without practical support. The theoretical significance of the research consists in expanding the limits of understanding of physics language, in finding out the facts of similarity of scientific language with a foreign one as well as in revealing the conditions of perception and application of physical terms and designations borrowed from other languages. The results of the study can serve as a basis for the development of recommendations for successful learning of physical terminology, as well as for the development of didactic tools, including materials of interdisciplinary nature with the possibility of use both in physics classes and in Russian language classes.

Modernization of modern education content and structure implies the strengthening of independent research activities role, which must be organized and directed. We suggest a set of creative tasks for a research experiment on wave optics that requires some inventiveness in experiments and deep theoretical knowledge in the analysis of their results.