That's not necessarily a new thing for me. However, what's new for me, having mainly taught freshmen and sophomores for most of my career, is that these students are seniors. I find it disturbing that they have gotten this far in their science education and still want to slap down a few words copied from a book as an answer without really knowing what it means or to what other concepts those meanings are connected.
So I have them practice how to make meaning from what they read a lot. This involves seat work where I do some modeling, students are reading, students are discussing, and students are writing. Not exciting stuff that my evaluators want to see (I got dinged for having students seated during a lesson when we were using Nearpod), but I feel it's necessary-if students don't have these basic life skills, then where will they get them? Life is a teacher, but not always the best one for teaching literacy, if you know what I mean.
I was also told by a colleague that I shouldn't be focusing on these skills. They said they would get that "literacy stuff" in other classes, and that I should be focusing on experiential learning of content rather than having students make meaning from what they read.
At first I felt guilty that I wasn't giving these students enough solid science experiences to get them engaged. I even started to feel guilty that I was spending too much time teaching students how to comprehend what they were reading.
But then the idea of balance came to mind.
Yes, science is at its very core experiential, and students learn by doing. But literacy, in my opinion, is the same beast - the only way students are to be literate is to experience the process of learning to be literate.
Besides - is it assumed that students can automatically make meaning from experiences over text? And, if students can't read and comprehend what they read, how are they supposed to know the core concepts needed to understand the experiences? I think it really comes down to balancing these two essentials out - working on the literacy while, at the same time, working on giving students engaging science experiences.
In either case, however, you're working on the same skill - meaning-making.
Image credit: CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons