Literacy in Science: A Natural Fit; Promoting Student Literacy through Inquiry

Reading is an essential part of science literacy, but what, when, and how can we incorporate reading in the science classroom? Like many of my colleagues, I avoided relying on the textbook by engaging students in lectures, hands-on activities, demonstrations, and videos. Unfortunately, as each year passed, my students read less while I worked harder. I wanted students to become the scientifically literate citizens envisioned in the National Science Education Standards: students who read science, enjoy reading science, and even experience the passion I feel for the natural world. However, with 65% of incoming freshmen at my school reading below the sixth-grade level, it was clear that our science curriculum, especially the textbook, did not include motivating or accessible reading for most students. To bring reading back into our science classrooms, my colleague, Ann Akey, and I designed four quarterly reading projects with yearlong literacy routines that we use successfully with our ninth-grade students, including English language learners. An inquiry approach to literacy and science We created these projects as part of a three-year professional inquiry into literacy in science with our colleagues at the Strategic Literacy Initiative at WestEd. The two yearlong literacy routines we developed are based on Reading Apprenticeship, an instructional framework offered by the Strategic Literacy Initiative (Schoenbach et al. 1999) to support middle and high school student literacy in content areas. Reading Apprenticeship encourages reading in classrooms as an active problem-solving process. Students and teachers engage in a shared inquiry into literacy by taking mental risks as they read together and discuss their reading processes, confusions, and methods of resolution. Creating a classroom climate that supports inquiry is essential to both science and literacy learning. This connection to inquiry made the Reading Apprenticeship approach a natural fit in our science classrooms (Schoenbach et al. 2003). [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Yearlong metacognitive conversation To begin our classroom inquiries into science literacy, we talk about our thinking processes every day as we delve into lab procedures, graphs, data tables, and all the different "texts" of science. I model talking aloud about my own thinking processes and encourage students to "think aloud" about how they make sense of what they are doing. Through this metacognitive conversation, students learn that text includes labs, data, and their own work, and that reading is an active problem-solving process. As this way of working becomes comfortable and routine, I teach students to record their thinking by writing down their confusions, questions, connections, clarifications, and summaries in "Metacognitive Reading Logs."[Editor's note: The tools and projects described in this article, including Metacognitive Logs, were created by the author and can be downloaded from the Reading Apprenticeship website at http://wested.org/stratlit.] As a yearlong literacy routine, these logs take on different forms depending on their purpose. Some are as simple as a vertical line drawn down the center of a piece of binder paper with an "I read" heading on the left and an "I thought" heading on the right. At other times logs may contain a series of sentence stems to choose among and complete such as "I was confused by" or "This reminded me of." Often students are asked to write questions, short summaries, or personal connections to what they are reading. Some logs have a printed format, some are kept in spiral notebooks, and others are simply written on the edges of the reading handout itself. This routine metacognitive writing and conversation supports students throughout the year as they encounter more difficult texts and complex reading tasks. Once we establish this foundation, we are ready to expand our reading experiences. …