Top Highlights

• before students begin a task – for example on the conventions of layout in a formal letter or on the main features of writing persuasively?
• Science, you have a responsibility to help your students learn about science, but you also have a responsibility to help them speak, read and write like a scientist.
• This means you have to possess some specialist knowledge of – for example - the conventions of scientific report-writing and of the ways scientists themselves write about science.
• But, perhaps more importantly, it means having an analytical self awareness, which enables you to identify how you speak, read and write about science so that those skills can be made explicit for your students.  And this is best done by explaining, demonstrating, modelling, teaching, and giving feedback...on which more later.   So that's the WHY: ...
• "To be literate is to gain a voice and to participate meaningfully and assertively in decisions that affect one's life.  To be literate is to gain self-confidence.  To be literate is to become self-assertive.  Literacy enables people to read their own world and to write their own history.  Literacy provides access to written knowledge and knowledge...