Teaching Disciplinary Literacy to Adolescents: Rethinking Content Literacy
In their article “Teaching Disciplinary Literacy to Adolescents: Rethinking Content-Area Literacy,” Links to an external site. Timothy Shanahan and Cynthia Shanahan provide insight into the different reading skills required for success in different disciplines. What reading skills, the authors asked, do chemists need? What reading skills do mathematicians need? What reading skills do historians need? And how does this affect secondary students’ reading abilities and inform the secondary curriculum?
The authors of this study, both professors in the College of Education Links to an external site. at the University of Illinois at Chicago, analyzed the approach to discipline-specific reading taken by experts in those disciplines. They asked mathematicians to talk through their work reading math articles, chemists to talk through their work reading chemistry, and historians to talk through their work reading works of history. The authors then identified the specific strategies that the experts employed as they read. Once they had done this, they worked in collaboration with teachers to develop discipline-specific instructional approaches for teaching these strategies. Their overarching purpose was in part to develop an advanced literacy curriculum and a corresponding teacher education curriculum.
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Additional Resources from the Authors:
http://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/ Links to an external site. Links to an external site.
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