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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)
Genres
Not in Presentation
In Our
Presentation
•Explanation
•Descriptive/taxonomic
Report
•Exposition
•Narrative
Discussion
Procedural
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 Example
Habitats
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 Example
The 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
Number of Words
350
295
300
250
200
149
150
100
83
50
0
Elementary
Middle School
High School
Proportion of Page comprised of Images
versus Words
High
Image
High Image.
Low Word
High Image.
Moderate
Word
Moderate Image.
High Word
Low
Image
Low
Word
High
Word
Proportion of Page comprised of Images
versus Words
High
Image
High Image.
Low Word
Elementary
School
High Image.
Moderate
Word
Middle
School
Moderate Image.
High Word
High
School
Low
Image
Low
Word
High
Word
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 Tool
Create 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
•
Bold and underlined words are adjectives/adverbs
June 17, 2004 Sydney Morning Herald
Genre = Exposition
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
Bold and underlined words are in passive voice
Genre = Exposition, Explanation
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.
Bold and underlined words are nominalized
Genre = Explanation
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 Warming
Our 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, stemcell 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