Samenvatting

Reading and writing within Science education: Text structure as a bridge between content knowledge and text comprehension
Science education provides a functional context for reading and writing activities. Previous interventions on language-and-science integrated approaches have generated positive effects on language skills as well as on science knowledge. While such interventions often focused on the role of vocabulary, we targeted text structure instruction for reading and writing within Science, as knowledge about common expository text structures (sequence, comparison, cause-effect and problem-solution) can be related to essential conceptual relations within Science. We examined the effects of the FLINT intervention (4 reading lessons, 3 writing lessons and 2 hands-on lessons) on text comprehension, summarization skills, writing skills and subject knowledge of Dutch fourth graders. Teachers and students were enthusiastic about the lesson series, but compared to another language-and-science integrated approach (without text
structure elements) we did not find additional effects of text structure instruction on any of the outcome measures. Given that several metaanalyses did establish the benef its of text structure instruction, weprovide alternative explanations for these findings as well as suggestions for future research.