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Content-Area Literacy
While the early grades of learning to read include a great deal of narrative text, children also encounter expository texts for learning in the content-area curriculum. As students move through the grades, they learn to use a general set of strategies, such as predicting, questioning, and summarizing a text, to support their comprehension and response to texts across the curriculum. These strategies are often used as procedures for study skills to learn and retain content information. Content-area literacy, therefore, refers to a basic set of strategies for reading and responding to texts with little differentiation among the content-area subjects. For example, students may learn to use the same techniques for determining important information, making inferences, asking questions, and summarizing in science, social studies, and math. The reading strategies are the same across subject areas, only the content differs.
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Disciplinary Literacy
In contrast, disciplinary literacy focuses on teaching students the differences among the various texts used in different disciplines and the specialized reading practices required for comprehension and critical analysis of ideas within each. Some of these differences include specialized vocabulary, types of language used to communicate ideas, text structures,text features (e.g., boldface headings and vocabulary, diagrams, charts, photographs, captions), and sources of information within and across disciplines.
Disciplinary literacy teaches students to move beyond the use of general reading strategies toward the use of specialized reading practices for making sense of the unique texts found within each discipline. Each discipline represents knowledge and the ways of producing and communicating that knowledge differently, resulting in a different approach to reading. For example, when reading a literary text, there is a range of interpretations a reader can make based on background knowledge and experiences. When reading a history text or document, interpretations are made based on a consideration of the source and context for the information as well as a corroboration with other sources. Science and math texts present information with one “truth” or interpretation based on accepted methods for using evidence. In essence, the focus is on teaching students ways of thinking about texts by developing reader identities for each discipline—to become, for example, expert readers by reading like a historian, a scientist, a mathematician.
It should be noted that teachers often combine the strategies of content-area literacy and disciplinary literacy to support students as they read and respond to texts in different disciplines.
Now consider the demands of the content, texts, and assignments your students encounter in your subject area. In what ways do you model the thinking of an expert in your discipline to support students in their learning?
How do you promote understanding of why your discipline is important and how it contributes to our understanding of the world?
What Is the Impact of New Technologies on Disciplinary Literacy?
IMPLICATIONS FOR INSTRUCTION
Students in middle school and high school encounter more challenging, complex texts and are expected to use their knowledge of literacy (reading, writing, and oral communication) practices to make sense of the content. The literacy demands in each discipline require continued instruction in how to approach a text, determine key ideas, critically evaluate the content, and communicate knowledge. Even students who enter these grades with a strong foundation of literacy skills and strategies benefit from explicit instruction in the disciplinary-specific practices for effective reading, writing, and thinking about what they are learning within a discipline.
This does not mean that disciplinary teachers should be reading teachers in the traditional sense. But it does mean they need to teach students how to be discipline-specific readers and writers of increasingly complex texts. To do this, disciplinary-expert teachers can identify and integrate relevant literacy practices that promote effective understanding, analysis, and evaluation of texts within their disciplines, practices reflected throughout the Common Core State Standards.
Before you watch: Consider the short- or long-term projects you assign and how technology can support student learning and performance. How can this technology connect to the practices students use outside of school? How does it motivate and engage them in learning?
Watch the video: As you watch, notice the different types of technology that students use to develop their journalism projects. How was the topic—The Power of Narrative—enhanced by the use of technology? How did this project connect both home and school literacy practices?
watch video
watch journalism video
What was the impact of technology on student learning, engagement and motivation, and performance? What role can technology play in your own instruction?
How is the definition of disciplinary literacy illustrated in this classroom lesson? How are the literacy practices students used similar and/or different from those students use in your discipline?
Think about the types and formats of reading and writing your students use to comprehend important concepts in your discipline. How do you prepare and support them as they engage in specific literacy practices?
watch video
“The difference is that content literacy emphasizes techniques that a novice might use to make sense of a disciplinary text (such as how to study a history book for an examination) while disciplinary literacy emphasizes the unique tools that the experts in a discipline use to engage in the work of that discipline.” – Shanahan and Shanahan, 2012, p. 8
Shannon and Shannon 2008
Several researchers in the field of literacy have developed models illustrating the process of learning to read through the grades. Jeanne Chall proposed a model of stages of reading development (1983) that identifies a progression of skill development from pre-reading through college. According to this model, children in grades 1 through 3 learn letter–sound relationships, build a sight vocabulary (words recognized immediately without sounding them out), and acquire basic strategies like automaticity and fluency that support their comprehension of text. In the intermediate and middle school years, students learn strategies and skills that develop vocabulary and support making deeper inferences about textual information, author use of language, purpose, and perspective. During the high school years, students read widely and deeply across a variety of complex texts to analyze and critically evaluate multiple viewpoints, develop perspectives, and identify and support their stances.
Review this chart of Chall's model of stages of reading development
From your perspective, is this linear model of literacy development portrayed by Chall supported by your observations of students with whom you have worked?
Is this model supported by your students?
A New Definition of What It Means To Be Literate in Today’s World
Traditional views of literacy learning and development are changing to address the more global view of understanding and communicating in today’s increasingly complex world. The use of technology and the Internet has had a significant impact on the way we read, write, communicate, and think. This technology provides a critical connection between home and school literacy and has changed the often-held view by students that reading and writing are things you only “do” in school.
Apply: Read the following quote and respond to the questions below.
“Literacy is no longer a static construct from the standpoint of its defining technology for the past 500 years; it has now come to mean a rapid and continuous process of change in the ways in which we read, write, view, listen, compose, and communicate information.” Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear, & Leu, 2014, p. 5.
Have a brief discussion to this question: How does this quote relate to student learning in your discipline? How has technology changed the way you teach and the way your students learn?