Using Authentic Texts to Promote Disciplinary Literacy in Biology

Biology as a discipline has its own language, its own ways of thinking and explaining the natural world and supporting its knowledge claims. However, students and teachers struggle when it comes to reading scientific texts. Helping students to read biology texts requires teachers to promote their students’ disciplinary literacy by emphasizing appropriate strategies for reading and writing in biology. In many cases, students’ inability to comprehend the text lies in the text’s distinctive structure and language as it is used by biologists to explain the natural world and support their claims. Thus, to help their students cope with the literacy demands of biology, teachers should have a full understanding of the literacy of their discipline, and a better understanding of the central role that language plays in their discipline. Adapted Primary Literature (APL) articles are specifically designed to enable the use of scientific research articles in high school. These articles represent authentically the structure, claims, content and uncertainty that are found in the original research articles and may therefore serve as models of scientific reasoning and communication. In this chapter, we suggest several activities for using APL articles in biology education that are aimed at promoting students’ disciplinary literacy.