Eliciting Preservice Teachers’ Reading Strategies Through Structured Literacy Activities

ABSTRACT

Educational reform needs to address the role of literacy in science if there is to be any hope of achieving the goal of literacy for all U.S. students. For reading to play a more prominent role in secondary science, teacher education programs need to develop and offer courses that familiarize preservice science teachers with disciplinary literacy. This study examines this question: What tacit reading strategies do preservice science teachers use to understand science texts? This study focuses on structured literacy activities designed to engage preservice secondary science teachers in reading 3 common genres of science texts. Analysis reveals that preservice science teachers use a variety of general comprehension strategies that are consistent with expert reading strategies. Also, preservice science teachers employ reading strategies that attend to genre-specific text features to understand texts. These findings could be used by science teacher educators to inform the design of science methods and disciplinary literacy courses that scaffold the development of pedagogical content knowledge necessary to teach reading as a disciplinary practice.

KEYWORDS:

• disciplinary literacy
• secondary science preservice teacher education