Essential questions

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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?

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Essential VisionWe 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

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Critical Literacy and Printed Texts A
Win-Win Situation
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Literacy Demands for Science Texts

• Genre
• Multiliteracies
• Nominalization
• Tenor
• Use of adjectives and adverbs
• Mode
• Passive Voice
• Gaps and silences

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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)

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Genres
Not in Presentation
Procedural
Discussion
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• Helping Students Access Science Textbooks
• Challenge Students find science textbooks
  challenging to read.
• Solution Deconstruct the texts to facilitate
  content learning and writing.

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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
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Middle School Text Example

• Habitats
• All plants and animals live in a habitat. For
  example, a whales 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
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High School Text Example
The biosphere is the total of all of Earths
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
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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

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(No Transcript)
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Proportion of Page comprised of Images versus
Words
High Image
High Image. Low Word
High Image. Moderate Word
Low Image
High Word
Low Word
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Proportion of Page comprised of Images versus
Words
High Image
High Image. Low Word
High Image. Moderate Word
Elementary School
Middle School
High School
Low Image
High Word
Low Word
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• From elementary to high school
• Increase in nominalization
• Increase in paragraph length

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• From elementary to high school
• Increase in communication via printed words
• Decrease in communication via images

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Putting it into practice
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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

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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

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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 worlds 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/2004/06/16/10872449
  83232.html?oneclicktrue
• June 17, 2004 Sydney Morning Herald

Genre Exposition
Bold and underlined words are adjectives/adverbs
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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, Explanation
Bold and underlined words are in passive voice
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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 Explanation
Bold and underlined words are nominalized
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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?

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Juxtaposing texts exposes

• Genres with different social purposes
• Gaps and silences
• Reader positioning

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Juxtaposing with a text set

• EPA website on global warming

• Professor William M. Grays article on global
  warming

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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/cont
  ent/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/cont
  ent/climateuncertainties.html

Genre Explanation, Descriptive and Taxanomic
Report
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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
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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 writers
  viewpoint.
• Unsworth, 1996

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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.

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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 Carsons 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