Extending the Practice of Modeling into Meaning-Making with Science Texts

In an era that increasingly emphasizes scientific literacy, more attention is needed to how modeling can support engagement with science texts beyond the immediate modeling context. This is especially important as teachers are expected to enact standards-aligned modeling while ensuring access for all students, including those from linguistically diverse backgrounds. Doing so requires inviting diverse language resources into science instruction and positioning science practices as spaces for language development, yet research remains limited on how teacher preparation leverages standards-aligned practices to support this work. Using multimodal interaction analysis and social semiotic multimodal analysis, this qualitative case study examined how preservice elementary teachers used linguistic and multimodal resources during modeling and how they later drew on those insights when reading science texts. Findings show that modeling fostered the development of a shared language and the use of that language to interpret a science text. Tracing how modeling-derived language travels into text-based meaning-making beyond the immediate modeling context, the study highlights modeling as a resource for scientific literacy and offers implications for teacher education that expands language repertoires in modeling and reading.