Reading Matters Winter 2018

From Erupting Volcanoes to Building Simple Machines: Strengthening our Students’ Scientific Vocabulary Knowledge

By Jennifer L. Altieri, Coastal Carolina University

ABSTRACT: With the increasing emphasis in our classrooms on informational text and strengthening content knowledge, we must focus on the strong link between literacy skills and content information. This article specifically addresses the importance of developing academic vocabulary as it relates to science so that our students can continue to build their scientific knowledge. Details are given for several specific strategies and the importance of using local text to support this goal is addressed. In classrooms across the country, we are seeing a growing emphasis on developing our students’ knowledge in the various content areas, and we realize the importance of the link between literacy skills and acquiring content information. Science is no exception. Whether we are creating volcanoes or asking small groups of students to use unique objects to build simple machines, we realize that our students have to be able to access scientific information in text in order to strengthen their science knowledge. Our students’ ability to read and understand digital and print text is necessary in order for them to learn about past scientific accomplishments, engage with experiences that we cannot recreate in the classroom, and even to compliment the hands-on learning they do on a daily basis (Altieri, 2016). Students also have to be able to follow written directions for experiments and read the class text. As our students engage with science through digital texts, the class textbook, and informational trade books, we want them to deepen their scientific understanding, but often the vocabulary is challenging. This isn’t surprising because research shows that science text is lexically dense. This means that there are a large number of content words compared to other words in a piece of science text (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008). As educators, we know that our students will more than likely only encounter these terms when engaged with science content. Chances are our students won’t use terms such as photosynthesis , anemometer , or dwarf planet when they are texting or emailing friends or participating in a family activity, and yet not knowing the terms will keep our students from understanding that science knowledge we seek to deepen. In fact, research shows us that vocabulary knowledge is extremely important for informational text comprehension (Liebfreund & Conradi, 2016). KnowingWhat Does and Doesn’t Work To begin with, we have to consider what we already know does and doesn’t work with strengthening scientific vocabulary in the classroom. We know that assigning students a list of vocabulary

terms to learn at the beginning of a science chapter and assessing these terms with a test at the end doesn’t motivate students to build their vocabulary. Many students fail to remember the words as soon as they complete the test, and sometimes they don’t even remember them that long. Looking up a list of terms and writing their definitions is also a time-consuming task that can quickly kill the scientific passion we are trying to develop in our lessons. Since we know that motivation plays an important role in the development of students’ scientific knowledge (Schumm and Bogner, 2016), these are practices we want to avoid. However, it is important that we have some specific ideas to build our students’ knowledge of these vocabulary terms and create lifelong science learners. Vocabulary activities we use must be motivating to our students so as not to create a negative association with science. If we leave students to struggle with unknown terms or to dread the introduction of science terms, it won’t help to build that love of science we want to pass on to our students. We also realize that we won’t always be there to help students figure out specific science terms they encounter in texts. Our students have to be able to engage with scientific text long after they leave our classroom. Strengthening Scientific Vocabulary Let’s look at a few specific ways that we can best address strengthening students’ scientific vocabulary. Each of the following suggestions can be used with almost any science topic and can easily be modified as needed for diverse grade levels. Talking Drawings Talking Drawings (McConnell, 1993) is a great way for students to develop their vocabulary through drawing. As students begin studying a new science topic, introduce the topic to them briefly and ask them to draw a picture about the topic showing what they know. Then have students share their drawings, and talk about their drawing. After students study the topic, participate in experiments, view videos on the topic, and look at texts, ask them to draw another illustration on the topic. Encourage students to label any aspects of the illustration that they can, using the vocabulary terms that they are learning. A first-grade teacher chose to introduce her students to sea turtles. Before reading a text on sea turtles, the students drew pictures. Many of the pictures were very basic, and some even contained anthropomorphic characteristics. In fact, the female turtles in one student’s illustration had long eyelashes. However, as the unit drew to a close, the students again drew a

Reading Matters Vocabulary Matters

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