Literacy Across Disciplines in Grades 4-12
Disciplinary literacy is based on the idea that reading and other literacy components such as vocabulary, writing and critical thinking are specialized based on the specific discipline (history, chemistry, mathematics, etc.). Each academic discipline requires unique content that is nuanced to the individual discipline. The texts used in each discipline vary significantly. Students must have in place foundational strategies that cut across content areas before they can access the discipline-specific strategies. Discipline-specific (literacy content) strategies are necessary to support students’ understanding. At its core, disciplinary literacy encompasses the discipline-specific skills needed to read, write, and think about a particular discipline.
Because students in grades 4-12 begin to use reading as a tool for learning, and because grades 4-12 are organized by academic disciplines, the following information addresses grades 4-12 as one entity rather than addressing each grade band separately. Educators should focus on teaching students about the unique texts they encounter within the discipline, such as the specific text features seen within the discipline (i.e., specialized vocabulary, text structures, text features, types of language used in the texts) to communicate essential ideas, as well as sources of information typically used within the discipline. In addition, educators in the academic disciplines must identify the discipline-specific strategies to support students’ ability to learn from the texts they are presented in these classrooms. Educators must support students as they grapple with the literacy demands in each discipline with explicit instruction in the practices needed to effectively read a text to learn the content of a specific discipline.
Creating routine core practices within grades 4-12 classrooms can help foster a culture of high expectations. Routines help to establish students’ expectations for what, how, and why they do things. According to experts, successful teachers organize instruction in routine ways that:
- Reinforce the concept of reading as a meaning-making process.
- Provide guided support for making sense while students are engaged in acts of reading.
- Shift responsibility for thinking and making sense of texts to students themselves through guided supports in both small and whole group work.
- Sequence discipline-specific inquiry tasks and the reading of a range of discipline focused texts in ways that build knowledge and dispositions over time.
- Focus classroom talk on how students make sense of texts and how they use what they learn from texts to carry out discipline thinking tasks.
- Provide consistent supports so that students experience success and develop or reinforce their sense of efficacy as readers as well as students who value the practices of the disciplines as these are instantiated in authentic classroom tasks.
(Source: Lee and Spratley, 2010)
Furthermore, establishing the same instructional routines for before, during, and after reading a text benefits student learning. For example, during reading a teacher can always use that opportunity to model via “think alouds.” Through this type of teacher modeling, students gain an understanding of how the teacher makes sense of the text as the teacher “makes visible” their own thinking by narrating their thinking process aloud while reading.
In addition, disciplinary teachers should use a variety of instructional tools that help students “hold their thinking” about important content until students need to use the information or content. Some of these tools include:
- Graphic organizers based on text structure
- Double-entry journals
- Text annotation
- Anticipation guides
While these are critical instructional tools for supporting students as they interact with discipline-specific texts, it should be noted that these are not a substitute for providing explicit instruction in core and missing foundational skills for struggling adolescent readers.