As ABE/HSE teachers, we face the continual dilemma of so much to teach, and so little time to teach it—that is why it makes sense for us to teach literacy strategies in the process of helping students acquire content knowledge.  One of the main ways we can do this is through reading.

The Integrating Literacy Strategies into Science Instruction series from the American Museum of Natural History is a very helpful tool for this purpose.  The series consists of videos, 5-10 minutes in length, on particular reading strategies—paraphrasing, summarizing, read alouds, vocabulary, and interactive reading guides—that are accompanied by the tools used along with the videos.

The videos are excellent tools if you think you would like to try these reading strategies, but would like a little support.  The video on paraphrasing, for example, shows how the teacher models the strategy and explain its main purpose—to monitor comprehension.  

Once the strategy is modeled, students try it on their own in pairs verbally before writing their paraphrases.  Once students have a good handle on paraphrasing, they are ready to try summarizing.  It’s helpful to see how teachers break these into steps, integrate them with the other tools they are using with the content they are teaching, and also to see the tools they use, which can be downloaded from the webpage.

For the video on science vocabulary, we see how a teacher can have students observe phenomenon before learning the word that applies to it; how double entry journals in the text can facilitate vocabulary learning, and how they can underline phrases in the text in order to contribute to a class-created definition. 

The video on Interactive Reading Guides is particularly useful for more complex texts. These Interactive Reading Guides are basically a set of detailed instructions to students as they read the text in pairs.  Often, one partner reads a section of text aloud while the other jots down the gist.  The Guides allow teachers to focus students on certain aspects of the text that they might skip over if reading it on their own.  

Finally, for lower level students, read alouds with trade books on science topics can be a good introduction to important science concepts.  The video on Read Alouds shows how this is done in two middle school classrooms, but the techniques will certainly work in adult classrooms as well. 

The fact is, in our adult ed classrooms where science materials are going to be scarce and technology is going to be spotty, students will mostly have to learn from text.  Applying the strategies demonstrated in these videos can go a long way to helping your students not only learn the content, but also acquire the tools to become true independent learners.