Before introducing the new concepts of a unit, teachers may help students build up background knowledge of the abstract concepts by getting them familiarised with the relevant information about the concepts. The teachers may make good use of multimodal facilities to create a rich context to allow students to experience aurally, visually or physically the phenomena or situations that are closely related to the concepts. For example, in the scenarios demonstrated in the following pictures, the teacher adopted different multimodal strategies such as videos, teaching realia, demo, PowerPoint slides, pictures, diagrams, blackboard sketches and body language to visualise the abstract concepts in the science lessons.
The use of multimodalities at the presentation stage may provide useful scaffolding for the students by motivating them and immersing them in the subject field which is very helpful for the introduction of the concepts or principles at the later pedagogical stages.
When presenting concepts or principles that are represented by texts, teachers may guide students to do detailed reading of the texts. During guided reading, the teachers may help students highlight the key language features that are useful for the meaning making of the concepts and principles in this unit. For example, when introducing the concept “ingestion”, the teacher provided the definitions of the key concepts “ingestion” and “alimentary canal”. As passive voice and active voice would be both frequently used in this unit, she helped the students to review the grammar point by demonstrating how to convert the passive sentence back to the active one. She also reminded students of the reason for doing so (e.g., the focus of the topic is not on “the food” but “the teeth”).
When guiding students to read longer texts, teachers may raise students' awareness of the key language features in the text (e.g. text type structures, academic functions and sentence patterns, and different types of academic vocabulary including subject-specific words, general academic words and logical connectors). For example, in the following lesson scenario, the teacher guided the students to read the text in detail to help them consolidate the content knowledge (i.e. the types and structure of teeth) they had learned in the previous lesson.
To prepare for this lesson, the teacher re-edited the text into a Descriptive Report and presented the different concepts through guided reading questions. Through teacher-student meaning-making interactions, students were able to identify the genre (text type) structure, the register, the sentence patterns and academic functions (sentence-making tables were provided as handouts) as well as the different types of academic vocabulary (highlighted in different colours). While reviewing the content knowledge, the teacher also introduced reading strategies including:
•recognising the organisation of the text type (Classification ^ Description_ shape and function_ structure_ number) and the hints in the topic sentences
•identifying subject-specific vocabulary (e.g., “incisors” and “canines”) and general academic vocabulary (e.g., “shape”, “function” and “number”)
•paying attention to the academic functions realised by different sentence patterns (e.g., sentence making tables “classifying” (There are N types of X: A, B, C and D), “describing” (...be...; ...have...) and “expressing functions” (be used for...))
•guessing word meaning from the relationship between hyponyms and superordinates (e.g., “Canine” is one type of “teeth”.)
•knowing the meaning of logical connectors (e.g., “similar to/also” expressing similarity; “but” expressing differences)
•understanding the meaning of pronouns (e.g., “they”) by searching for their (anaphoric) referent in the sentence
•inferring word meaning by the prefix/suffix (e.g., “molar” and “pre-molar”)
Both the guided reading interactions as well as the detailed reading pedagogy are not only helpful for students to understand the academic content knowledge thoroughly but also beneficial for them to develop their academic English literacy.