6.2 Reading Science

One important way of supporting science inquiry and learning is reading. Through reading, students are able to gain content knowledge, formulate questions, synthesize information, examine and critique ideas, construct explanations, and demonstrate understanding of epistemology of science (Goldman et al., 2016). This ability to read science has been called the fundamental sense of science literacy; it is considered vital to the development of the derived sense of science literacy, which refers to knowledge about the unifying themes, big ideas, and core concepts in science (Norris & Phillips, 2003). Reading science in this sense means more than just the ability to read, comprehend, and recite information in the text. It also involves analyzing and evaluating what is read and drawing inferences. This critical reading ability is highly valued in the scientific community. According to Wellington and Osborne (2001), for example, "To be capable of reading carefully, critically and with a healthy skepticism is a vital component of being a scientist" (p. 42). Scientists must accurately assess the veracity of knowledge claims, the quality of evidence, the soundness of reasoning, the logic of argument, and the coherence of claims with respect to the established body of knowledge in the field in order to produce and renovate knowledge (Yore, 2004).

Even for the vast majority of students who will not become scientists, there is likewise a need for critical reading. For these students, their encounters with science are primarily through journalistic or government reports in magazines, newspapers, websites, and other media outlets. These reports can distort the original source by, for example, omitting potentially important details or evidence, twisting logic, overgeneralizing findings, diminishing substantive claims, or foregrounding applications. Detecting these distortions and inconsistencies requires not only an extensive knowledge about science but also an acute understanding of the forms by which this knowledge is represented and communicated. Because of this, developing critical reading ability has emerged as a top priority in science education, particularly in the current sociopolitical climate where what counts as science, evidence, or news is being debated with intense heat and considerable rancor.

An approach to developing critical literacy in science is through examining how language (and other semiotic) choices in science texts construe knowledge and ideology. Science texts are not repositories of immutable facts. Instead, they communicate scientists' interpretations of the universe through what Kress (2003) called " 'motivated' conjunctions of form and meaning" (p. 169). That is, scientists, like other authors, select language and other representational resources (e.g., symbols, images) for their texts in a way that realizes their interests, values, perspectives, and positions; and they do so with "an awareness, more or less explicitly held, of the history of the resources, expressed as the force of convention" (Kress, 2003, p. 169). From this perspective, then, science texts are never neutral: they are imbued with authorial intent, attitude, and value. The language choices scientists make in their texts are both "positioned" and "positioning" (Janks, 2010, p. 153): science texts are positioned by the author's values and points of view, and the lexical and grammatical choices they make are designed to convey a particular set of knowledge claims and values in particular ways and to have particular effects on the reader.(https://www.daowen.com)

Given the ideologically laden nature of science texts, it is imperative that students adopt a critical orientation in science reading. They must come to understand that science texts, like all texts, are a dialogue between author and reader and that they need to play an active role in decoding the overt and covert meanings in the text. Recognizing such an authorial "voice" is essential to being able to critically appraise the information and messages in the text. In short, fostering critical language awareness — by focusing on how language is used to present information, develop argument, embed value, create authorial voice, and structure text — is an important step toward helping students develop critical literacy skills in disciplinary learning.