Apparently, science teachers are the only teachers that take this seriously. Of course, that was the opinion of one person, but I think I can say that my department, at least, takes literacy seriously.
I think, in our case, it's self-defence. We have an awful lot of specialist vocabulary and are so dependent on analogies and models that we need to be really proactive in teaching students how to read and interpret texts, how to read and interpret images, and how to construct their own meanings from texts and images.
That's one of the reasons I love visualisations like wordles, love visual dictionaries, and adore talking books online. But today, we did a classic collage with scissors and glue, with my Y11 class making analogies for cell structures. Another time, I would probably do this using online tools. Today, though, it was nice to get our fingers a bit dirty. And my students came up with some lovely analogies - like centipede legs for pili and baleen (as in whales) for the cell membrane.
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