Matter Part II

Teachers must present students with reading tasks regularly. In my meetings with teachers in the Science Department, I'm often shown vocabulary exercises and comprehension tasks based on YouTube texts. This is good but students are rarely required to process an extended chunk of scientific text. An obvious reason for this is the lexical density of science texts. Using our list of comprehension skills, scanning, predicting, clarifying and summarising we can help student improve their comprehension skills when reading a science text. Feedback must be given for summary tasks so students can focus on those skills which need strengthening.

Teaching Reading Skills -Summary Writing The Metal Man by Chris Culshaw

One aspect of text summarising is persuading students to follow a process. I give students a list of keywords and ask them to say the keywords in their heads. They do this before they attempt to write a summary. At the same time, I also encourage students to check their understanding of the text. If they can’t add a keyword from the list to their summary it suggests they need to return to the text to improve their understanding of that section of the story. In the example, The Metal Man, students did not include the word ‘beg’. They did not explain that Magoda was forced to ‘beg for food’ and simply jumped to his decision to leave the village and to live in the jungle. Also, students often ignored the last section of the text and did not include the time indicator where the story jumps ‘five years’. It’s hard to say if students didn’t think this information was important or if they had difficulty making the leap in narrative time of five years. A recent addition to Google Slides is the ability to record yourself. There is a record button on each slide. This Google Sheet was placed on the class site. Each student created an oral summary before they wrote their summary. A crowded classroom isn’t the best place to record a student's response but I saw students writing notes as an aid and I saw students quietly speaking into the microphone on their devices. This digital summary helped students process the text, in their own words,

Teaching Reading in Secondary Science

Science texts at a secondary school level are lexically dense. Extra effort is needed to help students gain the necessary vocabulary so they can read descriptions and explanations found in a science lesson. Some studies have suggested learning semantic groupings may impede language development when learning a second language. However when learning the vocabulary in a subject area like science it is important to learn subject categories and which words belong to that category. This way a student may make local connections between words learnt previously and the new words associated with a new topic.