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Understanding the Disciplines of Science: Analysing the Language of Science Textbooks

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Critical Analysis of Science Textbooks

Abstract

Following some decades of empirical and theoretical attention on the acquisition of the generic skills of reading and writing, in particular as they are dealt with in the early years of schooling, significant interest has resurfaced in the ways in which each curriculum domain puts literacy to work in distinctive ways. Motivating this interest is a reaction to an apparent belief that explicit pedagogical work on the generic, content-free elements of reading and writing (decoding, encoding, comprehension and so on, as exemplified in the US National Reading Panel, 2000) is enough to prepare students adequately for the increasingly complex and specialised reading and writing demands of the secondary school’s curriculum domains. Researchers, like teachers, have found that this belief amounts to a policy of leaving many students behind and a systematic misreading of literacy difficulties as a lack of aptitude or effort (Freebody, Chan, & Barton, in press; Moje, 2007).

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Correspondence to Sandy Muspratt .

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Muspratt, S., Freebody, P. (2013). Understanding the Disciplines of Science: Analysing the Language of Science Textbooks. In: Khine, M. (eds) Critical Analysis of Science Textbooks. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4168-3_3

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