Infusing literacy into an inquiry instructional model to support students' construction of scientific explanations

Abstract

Disciplinary literacy is increasingly emphasised as an important enabler for students to learn science inquiry. However, the nature of literacy instruction and how it supports inquiry-based science in practice still remains unclear. This chapter reports on the design and enactment of an integrated literacy-inquiry instructional model aimed to support students' development of disciplinary literacy in science. With the goal of understanding how literacy instruction supports inquiry-based science in practice, the study reported in this chapter utilised a design research to develop, enact, and test the literacy-inquiry model in four secondary school science (physics and chemistry) classrooms in Singapore. Analytical cases are shown to illustrate the nature of the literacy activities involved in the classrooms, and how they supported science inquiry in terms of: (a) framing driving question, (b) conducting experiments and collecting evidence, (c) constructing explanations and (d) communicating and evaluating explanations. The cases also illustrate how the participating teachers utilised and integrated literacy activities to support inquiry in their classrooms in order to enable the students to construct and communicate scientific explanations.