Teaching Disciplinary Literacy to Adolescents: Rethinking Content-area Literacy

Shanahan, T., & Shanahan, C. (2008). Teaching disciplinary literacy to adolescents: Rethinking content-area literacy. Harvard Educational Review, 78 (1), 40-59.

Summary:
The authors present data collected during the first two years of a study on disciplinary literacy. In year one, the authors worked with specialists in math, chemistry, and history to identify the content-specific reading skills that would better enable students to succeed in these subject areas. In year two, they investigated strategies that would help students learn these skills. For each of the three disciplines, the researchers created teams of two "disciplinary experts" (university professors who were researchers in their discipline), two teacher educators who prepared teachers to teach that discipline in high school, two high school teachers who taught disciplinary content to students, and two literacy experts. Each team's members read various documents for the purpose of learning how they approached reading and what they saw as the challenges to students. The researchers also taped and transcribed the disciplinary experts as they read and thought aloud about their own reading process. In year two, each team proposed strategies that they thought could help students learn from their texts. The authors found that each of the disciplinary experts emphasized a different array of reading processes, which suggests that literacy at these levels is highly specialized.

Evaluation:
The methods used by the researchers do match the question. Since the authors wanted to identify specific reading strategies useful to different disciplines, it made sense to ask content experts to read specific texts in these subject areas and reflect on their reading process. It might have been helpful, though, if the authors had interviewed a larger number of content experts. Also, it might have been helpful to study high school students as they read content-specific texts and monitor the challenges they faced in comprehending the texts. Instead, this article focuses primarily on insight gleaned from disciplinary experts. This article would be useful to math, chemistry, and history teachers because it offers specific details about the reading demands of each field. Historically, instructional efforts in literacy have focused on highly generalizable skills, such as decoding, fluency, and basic comprehension strategies that can be applied to most texts across the content areas. However, this research study suggests that as students advance through the grades, reading instruction should become increasingly disciplinary, focusing on the kinds of texts and interpretive strategies that are needed in each specific subject.

Reflection:
This article inspires me to focus more closely on the types of texts students are required to read in the different content areas and how teachers scaffold these discipline-specific strategies. I am interested, broadly, in how literacy skills are addressed in project-based learning. This article expands my notion of literacy and makes me more attuned to the different demands placed on students by different genres of texts.