Instructors of English for STEM typically rely heavily on authentic content, largely because of the dearth of ESOL materials for STEM at the college level. Having tried the handful of textbooks available for this concentration, I prefer locating materials among the excellent science books intended for the native speaker audience.

Consequently, I chose The Best American Science Writing 2012 in an advanced English class for engineers preparing for undergraduate studies at American universities. This series is in its 12th year, and the 2012 edition contains 22 articles reprinted from a wide range of publications including Scientific American, National Geographic, New York Review of Books, Science, and Popular Mechanics. With hundreds of potential contributions to choose from, Editor Michio Kaku narrowed his search based on the author’s ability to explain “scientific concepts [that] guide our understanding of the entire universe.”

Kaku organized the content logically by topic: from the human body, to human and artificial intelligence, followed by the environment, then beyond earth to space, and, finally, the interaction between science and society. Although the order was strategically planned, each article stands alone and can be read out of sequence. The book lends itself to planning a course around STEM topics, with the text as inspiration for further research, writing assignments, and listening/speaking activities.

The level of reading difficulty varies among the articles. After the Introduction, the book begins with a six-page article about stem cells used to repair damaged hearts. Taken from Science magazine, “Mending the Youngest Hearts,” by author Gretchen Vogel, is a down-to-earth treatise on this oft-misunderstood and controversial topic. David Dobbs’ “Beautiful Brains” is another easy read about teenagers’ brains adapting to independence, a reading that inspired a lively discussion and sharing of anecdotes.

Artificial intelligence is a favorite topic among STEM students who typically are intrigued by robots. Jaron Lanier’s “It’s Not a Game” tells the story of IBM’s computer Watson defeating humans on the game show Jeopardy!. Besides inspiring a class debate on the pros and cons of robots, this five-page article generated vocabulary acquisition (pop spectacle, inexorable, statistical correlations, extrapolations, and sui generis entity). This reading whet the students’ appetite for “more robot stories,” so we followed it with excerpts from Isaac Asmiov’s I, Robot, focusing on stress and intonation as we read aloud readers-theater style.

In “Going to Extremes,” Linda Marsa weaves numbers and statistics into writing in this eight-page story about climate change in Australia and its implications for the whole world. The follow-up writing assignment tasked the students with researching an environmental sciences topic, using numerical data to support their findings and convincing an audience of its importance.

Next, we read a space science article by Erik Sofge, “The Early Adopter’s Guide to Space Travel.” While only nine pages long, this was a challenging read because of unfamiliar collocations (zero-gravity guinea pig, on their companies’ dime, lunar fly-bys, teeming with life). It was also an opportunity to examine the author’s point of view because it was not immediately obvious to the students whether Sofge supported or disdained tourist space travel.

The reading we struggled with the most was Steven Weinberg’s “Symmetry: A ‘Key to Nature’s Secrets,’” which required all of us to read it at least twice before attempting a discussion. The vocabulary was not the issue; in fact, it was simply a good review from basic physics. I think it was difficult because symmetry in physics has such a different meaning than symmetry in common usage. Weinberg’s article led us to explore more sources when it became clear that the laws of symmetry govern our basic understanding of the universe. The students spent 2 days doing peer teaching on their discoveries of the various types of symmetry in nature.

Although I have mentioned only some of the articles in Best American Science Writing, the entire collection is indeed some of the best that is available. With the variety of topics, author writing styles, and degrees of accessibility, the book is a good choice for an English for STEM course. Each article inspires research and supports activities, including annotating, paraphrasing, summarizing, critical thinking, discussing and debating, peer teaching, and responding in writing.

Another valuable outcome from using this book was my students’ increased enthusiasm for reading. The benefits of extensive reading are widely acknowledged and well documented (Day & Bamford, 1998; Krashen, 1982). The Best American Science Writing is a book filled with excellent writing on contemporary science topics. All of my students voluntarily read more than the assigned articles, which is surely one of the strongest endorsements for choosing this text in an English for STEM course.

Would I use Best American Science Writing again? Absolutely yes, and I am eagerly anticipating the 2013 edition, hopefully available later this year.

References

Day, R. R., & Bamford, J. (1998). Extensive reading in the second language classroom. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.

Krashen, S. D. (1982). Principles and practice in second language acquisition. New York, NY: Prentice Hall.