Reading in the science classroom

Abstract

The paper is about science teaching and learning from a social communicative perspective. A special emphasis is given to the cognitive ability of reading comprehension, as one important hability among others such as talking, writing, thinking, doing, and feeling... A diversity off reading texts and specially those being multimodal are presented and analysed. The difficulties experienced by learners with a poor command off scientific language while reading scientific texts are discussed. Finally, examples and illustrations from science classrooms interactions are presented and discussed about the reading process involved, the difficulties in finding the main idea of texts, and the construction of scientific knowledge from multimodal texts.