May/June 2005 | Home

Literacy Project Update: How Technical Writing Supports High School Science

T. R. Girill currently manages the East Bay STC’s Technical Literacy Project. For more details about this initiative, check the EBSTC web site.

That technical writing and science classes belong together in high school might seem obvious to DMV readers...except that it is not true! In turf-conscious high school curricula, writing (even technical writing) "belongs" to the English department, while most science teachers feel unprepared for literacy development (or are too busy to try it). This spring the EBSTC literacy outreach project challenged this old pattern by bringing technical communication and high school science students together in three ways.

Technical Talk Tips

In January, Granada High School (Livermore) Science Department head Frankie Tate invited me to help prepare her 21 junior and senior biology students for their project-review talks to their classmates. On January 6 I visited her class to explain and illustrate specific techniques (well known to most of us but not to her students) for designing and delivering an effective technical talk. Psychological background on the four problems that a technical talk poses for listeners (and on the difference between reading and hearing complex material), examples of good and bad slides, and a look at Edward Tufte's influential ideas on data density all formed part of this session.

Then, on January 21, I returned to join the audience and hear these biology students try out what they had learned in 15-minute formal presentations on their semester projects. The result was interesting science shared, a great feedback opportunity for all participants, and the teacher's conviction that this should be tried on a broader scale in future science classes.

Science Field Trip

Science teacher Morgan Theis (end of table) encourages her Media Academy students as they learn how to extract their own DNA while visiting the Edward Teller Education Center in February.

Visiting a scientific laboratory will not teach students to write better, but it can motivate them to write better. Hence, on February 1, 31 grade-9 science students and two science teachers (Mr. Sunny Chan and Ms. Morgan Theis) from Oakland's Media Academy High School spent the day on a field trip to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The Media Academy, our long-time literacy partner, falls in the bottom 10% of all California high schools, and most of these students had never before traveled as far as Livermore.

After an hour-long bus trip from their urban Oakland campus, the students

toured the introductory exhibits at the LLNL "Discovery Center,"
participated in active "Fun with Science" demonstrations (basic physics and chemistry),
conversed with an ethnically diverse cross-section of staff members over box lunches hosted by the Computation Directorate, and then
extracted their own DNA in the hands-on biology classrooms of the Edward Teller Education Center.

One goal of this adventure was to stimulate student appreciation for science. A second important goal was to help the students connect their school work over the next few years with life beyond school (possible technical careers, the relevance of literacy to job success, and the need to persevere with hard tasks in and out of school). The teachers too departed with some new instructional techniques and classroom samples. The social highlight of the day happened as we waited for the video projector to warm up. It displayed a count-down clock, so the entire room counted down aloud with it...in Spanish.

Second-Language Science

If English is your native language, you may not realize how hard learning science is (in this country) without it, even at the high school level. Many California students, however, have trouble with science classes because they lack the nonfiction English competence that science projects presuppose. Some have picked up adequate "social English" from their friends but still lack the "academic English" needed to write about science. Others come from families unable to read or write even in the language spoken at home, so they struggle to become their first literate family member while working in English at school.

Because it is anchored in concrete science tasks and results, technical writing can give such English-language learners just the focused practice that they need to meet the literacy demands of their science classes. This works best when the usual exercises have extra scaffolding that overtly coaches students on such notorious English features as articles, irregular verbs, and common science idioms (blow up, break up, look up, etc.). English for Science and Technology: A Handbook for Nonnative Speakers by Thomas Hukin and Leslie Olsen is one such technical-writing text.

Throughout this spring, I have tried this approach (and this text) in continuing email exchanges with one Mandarin-speaking high school junior who recently immigrated from Shanghai to Livermore. The experience gained here suggests how we can even more effectively meet the specific writing needs of one of California's big challenge audiences, namely, Spanish-speaking science students in Oakland (and the Central Valley).

You Can Contribute

If you are interested in literacy outreach, please contact T. R. Girill to explore ways that you can contribute to this ongoing project.

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