Designing a reading pedagogy for undergraduate biology students
Issue: Vol 7 No. 1-3 (2011)
Journal: Linguistics and the Human Sciences
Subject Areas: Writing and Composition Linguistics
Abstract:
This paper reports on research and intervention developed to support students in the four core courses of the undergraduate Biology program. This investigation was conducted as part of the SLATE research project (Mahboob, Dreyfus, Humphrey and Martin, 2010), a joint research project between the University of Sydney and City University Hong Kong (CityU). The paper focuses on the support provided for students to comprehend and extract relevant biological knowledge from course materials which were beyond teacher mediated lectures and notes. The pathway of reading support developed and implemented by SLATE researchers includes explicit modelling of genres written by expert biologists and guidance in taking notes from and summarizing those expert texts. In terms of pedagogy, the paper is informed by both reading and writing oriented pedagogies within the Sydney School genre tradition (Unsworth, 2001; Rose and Martin, 2012) and focuses on the stage of the Teaching Learning Cycle known as Building the Field (see Rothery and Stenglin, 1995)
Author: Sally Humphrey
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