dieS Summer School 2015

From Reading to Writing Scientific Texts - Research Design and First Evaluations of an Intervention Study in the 11th Grade

In this workshop, an intervention study on science writing will be presented. The study aims to teach 11th grade students what constitutes scientific texts and what to look for when writing scientific texts.

 The focus  of the intervention design is on the recognition and realization of scientific text procedures. Starting with the reading of scientific texts[1] (or text sections), the students should be introduced step by step to the writing of scientific texts via receptive, semi-productive and productive tasks. The focus is on the analysis, reflection and realization of relevant form-function relationships in scientific introductions and controversies. With the 3-step task setting, previous approaches to the didactics of text procedures are expanded, which usually presuppose an implicit, receptively acquired knowledge of language action in the writers. However, students usually do not have any experience in dealing with scientific texts and therefore do not have any procedural language knowledge acquired through reading that could be used when writing scientific texts. Accordingly, they do not have at their disposal the patterns of action and expression that are constitutive for scientific texts. The intervention study aims at building up language knowledge related to scientific text procedures by interweaving receptive and productive tasks and thus supporting the development of domain-specific text routines.

In the workshop, the test and  research design  will be presented on the basis of selected tasks, and student texts as well as initial results of the evaluations will be presented and discussed together.

[1] These are authentic scientific texts that have been simplified for didactic purposes.

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