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Makale Özeti:
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The focus of this paper is on selected recent South African research studies that have
explored efforts to promote the discussion, writing, and arguing aspects of scientific literacy
in primary and middle schools, particularly amongst second-language learners.
These studies reveal improvements in the participants’ abilities to both use the ‘science
notebooks’ approach and argue their findings, as well as statistically significant improvement
in their problem solving skills. The positive findings of these studies, and the
call for attention to be paid to the fundamental sense of scientific literacy by a number of
international researchers, resulted in the development of an integrated learning strategies
approach. This approach not only specifically includes classroom discussion, argumentation
and writing strategies to learn science, but also provides teachers with ideas and
techniques to stimulate their learners to develop their own investigable questions, plan
and execute a successful investigation in the classroom, and present their findings to an
authentic audience. Findings on the effect of the strategy on learners’ general literacy
skills, both in their home language and the language of learning and teaching in their
schools, are reported.
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