Essential questions

• What literary devices are used to create meaning within science?

• How do we teach students to master these devices so that they become agents of social change?

Essential Vision

We seek to create “access to the evolving language of work power and

community” and to help students “design their social futures and

achieve success through fulfilling employment.”

-The New London Group, 1996

Critical Literacy and Printed Texts:

A Win-Win Situation

Literacy Demands for Science Texts

• Genre• Multiliteracies • Nominalization• Tenor

– Use of adjectives and adverbs

• Mode– Passive Voice

• Gaps and silences

Important Definitions• Genre: Use of a language associated with and constituting part of some

particular social practice. (Fairclough, 1995)

• Grammatical Metaphor: The substitution of one grammatical class, or one grammatical structure by another. (Unsworth, 1996)

• Nominalization: Using a phrase to compact a great deal of information. (The New London Group, 1996)

• Critical Literacy: Teaching and learning how texts work, understanding and re-mediating what texts attempt to do in the world and to people, and moving students toward active position-takings with texts to critique and reconstruct the social fields in which they live and work. (Luke, 2000)

• Metalanguage: A language for talking about language, images, texts, and meaning-making interactions. (The New London Group, 1996)

• Social Semiotics: The systematic study of the systems of signs themselves and the study of how people use signs to construct the life of a community. (Lemke, 1990)

ProceduralDiscussion

Not in Presentation

•Explanation•Descriptive/taxonomic

Report•Exposition•Narrative

In Our Presentation

Genres

Helping Students Access Science Textbooks

Challenge: Students find science textbooks challenging to read.

Solution: Deconstruct the texts to facilitate content learning and writing.

Elementary School Text Example

What is a habitat?

Tomatoes are growing in the garden. What other living things do you see?

A habitat is a place where plants and animals live. A habitat has everything a plant or animal needs.

This garden is a habitat [referring to picture on page] for many living things. There is food, water, and air for the animals. There is sunlight, water, and air for the plants.

What animals live in this garden? What do they eat? Where do they find water?

Genre = Explanation

Middle School Text ExampleHabitats

All plants and animals live in a habitat. For example, a whale’s habitat is an ocean. Habitats provide food, water, and shelter that animals need for survival. The ocean provides for all of the needs of a whale. Look at the woodland habitat in the picture. How do you think this habitat meets the needs of the plants and animals that live there?

Red squirrels depend on trees for nuts, seeds, and buds. Using twigs and leaves, squirrels build nests high up in trees where their young will be safe.

Foxes make homes underground. During the day, they come out to search for food.

Hummingbirds build tiny nests held together with spiderwebs! They gather nectar from flowers and also eat insects and spiders.

Grass and soil are home to many tiny animals, such as grasshoppers, spiders, and earthworms. Grasshoppers eat grasses, and earthworms eat dead plants and animals.

Genre = Explanation

High School Text ExampleThe biosphere is the total of all of Earth’s ecosystems

The biosphere is the global ecosystem – that portion of Earth that is alive, or all of life and where it lives. The most complex level in ecology, the biosphere includes the atmosphere to an altitude of several kilometers, the land down to water-bearing rocks about 1500 meters deep, lakes and streams, caves, and the oceans to a depth of several kilometers. Isolated in space, the biosphere is self-contained, or closed, except that its photosynthesizers derive energy from sunlight, and it loses heat to space.

Another feature of the biosphere is its patchiness, and we can see this on several levels. On a global scale, we see it in the distribution of continents and oceans. On a regional scale, patchiness occurs in the distribution of deserts, grasslands, forests, lakes, and streams, for example. The aerial view of a wilderness area in Figure B shows patchiness on a local scale. Here we see a mixture of forest, small lakes, a meandering river, and open meadows. If we moved even closer, into anyone of these different environments, we would find patchiness on yet a smaller scale. For example, we would find that each lake has several different habitats (places where organisms live), each with a characteristic community of organisms. Abiotic factors, especially water depth, temperature, and dissolved O2, largely determine the kinds of organisms that live in the different lake habitats.

Standing in a wilderness can be misleading; the lakes and streams appear untouched, and the forest seems almost boundless. Views from space are more sobering, for they show planet Earth as only a small sphere in the vastness of the universe. Unfortunately, we humans tend to treat the biosphere as an unlimited resource for our own consumption.

Note: Nominalized words are in bold.

Genre = Explanation

Comparing the texts: Grammar

Paragraph Length• Elementary School: No paragraphs. Sentences.

• Middle School: Shorter paragraphs.

• High School: Longer Paragraphs.

Use of Nominalization• Elementary School: None

• Middle School: None

• High School: 11 times

Comparing the Number of Words in Elementary, Middle School, and High

School Textbook Passages

83

149

295

0

50

100

150

200

250

300

350

Elementary Middle School High School

Nu

mb

er

of

Wo

rds

Proportion of Page comprised of Images versus Words

High Image.Low Word

High Image.Moderate

Word

Moderate Image.High Word

Low Image

HighImage

Low Word

High Word

Proportion of Page comprised of Images versus Words

High Image.Low Word

High Image.Moderate

Word

Moderate Image.High Word

Low Image

HighImage

Low Word

High Word

ElementarySchool

MiddleSchool

HighSchool

From elementary to high school:

• Increase in nominalization

• Increase in paragraph length

From elementary to high school:

• Increase in communication via printed words

• Decrease in communication via images

Putting it into practice

Assessment ToolCreate text for elementary school science textbook

• Based on a section in high school textbook.

• Design section for elementary text book.

• Examples: Plant Physiology, Classification, Ecology

Critical Literacy

• Understanding the register of the text– Field

• Things and events and the relationships between them– Who participates, how are they talked about?

– Tenor• Social relationships between reader and writer

– What person is the text written in, what type of adjectives, modal verbs, adverbs used?

– Mode• The way language influences the text

– How is theme utilized, what voice is used and when?

• Understanding reader positioning– Gaps and Silences

• Understanding the social purpose of the text

Global warming risks ‘not taken seriously’(an example of tenor from a newspaper)

• The United States government and the public are not taking the risk of global warming seriously.

• Americans continue to drive fuel-guzzling SUVs.• There is going to be large change…• Climate change is already under way.• Bush pulled out in 2001, arguing Kyoto was too expensive and

unfairly excluded developing nations.• The United States is the world’s biggest polluter…• Ice sheets are highly vulnerable to global warming…• In the next 100 years, unless immediate action is taken…

• http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/06/16/1087244983232.html?oneclick=true• June 17, 2004 Sydney Morning Herald

Genre = ExpositionBold and underlined words are adjectives/adverbs

Real Facts About Global Warming (an example of mode from a website)

• Global warming has been particularly strong over the past 20 years.• Temperatures are predicted to rise another 2.5 to 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit

by the end of the century.• North Pole arctic sea ice has shrunk almost 40 percent in recent decades,

attributable in part to global warming.• If the West Antarctic ice sheet were to melt, sea levels could rise by

another 16 to 30 feet, flooding coastal regions in places like Florida and Lousiana.

• Droughts could become more frequent, putting central and western agricultural areas in the United States at risk.

• El Nino events, which can lead to significant damage, could become more frequent and severe.

• Tropical diseases could expand their range into areas further north, including the southern United States

• http://www.dayaftertomorrowfacts.org/explore/index.html

Genre = Exposition, ExplanationBold and underlined words are in passive voice

Global Warming (an example of gaps/silences from a textbook)

• Since the Industrial Revolution, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has been increasing as a result of the combustion of fossil fuels and burning of enormous quantities of wood removed by deforestation.

• If CO2 emissions continue to increase at the present rate, by the year 2075, the atmospheric concentration of this gas will be double what it was a the start of the Industrial Revolution.

• While scientists debate how increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 will affect global temperatures, there is mounting evidence that a doubling of CO2 concentration, which could occur by the end of the next century, might produce an average temperature increase of 3°-4° C.

Genre = ExplanationBold and underlined words are nominalized

Questions to ask when reading a text

• Who is the audience?• Whose point of view is being represented?• Whose ideas are missing from the text?• Whose interests are served by this

representation?• What is the social purpose?• How does the text try to position you in

relation to its message?

Juxtaposing texts exposes:

• Genres with different social purposes

• Gaps and silences

• Reader positioning

Juxtaposing with a text set

• EPA website on global warming

• Professor William M. Gray’s article on global warming

U.S. EPA on Global WarmingOur Changing Atmosphere

• Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have increased nearly 30%, methane concentrations have more than doubled, and nitrous oxide concentrations have risen by about 15%. These increases have enhanced the heat-trapping capability of the earth's atmosphere.

• Scientists generally believe that the combustion of fossil fuels and other human activities are the primary reason for the increased concentration of carbon dioxide.

• http://yosemite.epa.gov/oar/globalwarming.nsf/content/climate.html

What's Known for Certain?

• Scientists know for certain that human activities are changing the composition of Earth's atmosphere.

• It's well accepted by scientists that greenhouse gases trap heat in the Earth's atmosphere and tend to warm the planet. By increasing the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, human activities are strengthening Earth's natural greenhouse effect.

• http://yosemite.epa.gov/oar/globalwarming.nsf/content/climateuncertainties.html

Genre = Explanation, Descriptive and Taxanomic Report

Dr. William M Gray on Global Warming• This small warming is likely a result of the natural alterations in global ocean

currents which are driven by ocean salinity variations. Ocean circulation variations are as yet little understood.

• Human kind has little or nothing to do with the recent temperature changes. We are not that influential.

• It is not the human-induced greenhouse gases themselves which cause significant warming but the assumed extra water vapour and cloudiness that some scientists hypothesise.

• It has been extended and grossly exaggerated and misused by those wishing to make gain from the exploitation of ignorance on this subject.

• This includes the governments of developed countries, the media and scientists who are willing to bend their objectivity to obtain government grants for research on this topic.

• http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/2000/climate_change/1023334.stm

Genre = Exposition, Explanation

Accessing the Truth

• These texts are “not an innocent statement of fact. Like all texts, [they] deploy a variety of grammatical means of colouring its argument to position the reader to see it from the writer’s viewpoint.”

– Unsworth, 1996

Assessment

• Students choose a topic from the following (cloning, stem-cell research, animal testing, evolution) and write within a genre (explanatory, exposition, descriptive/taxonomic report) to persuade a particular audience to a point of view

• Teacher provides a written document on a particular topic. Students use their transdisciplinary toolbox (understanding of nominalization, passive voice, positive and negative adjectives and adverbs, critical literacy questions) to deconstruct the text to determine the genre, identify the social purpose of the text, and identify the position of the writer.

A Fable for Tomorrow

• “There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings…”

• Rachel Carson’s use of narrative in her seminal work Silent Spring is an excellent example of the utilization of a different genre that can be applied in the classroom.

Genre = Narrative