Literacy Mash-Up

Discipline-specific practices empower content-area teachers.

In our work with middle and high schools, we often find teachers and leaders grappling with the same set of essential questions on how to incorporate literacy instruction across content areas: What does literacy instruction look like for someone who isn’t a literacy teacher? Does literacy in content areas mean literacy, content literacy, or both? What counts as content literacy in my area? Recent efforts to integrate literacy standards across content areas from the Common Core State Standards have fueled these questions, yet questions about how to support literacy and use literacy to support learning in content areas are not new. Existing research and practice about reading in the content areas falls along a wide-ranging spectrum (Wenz & Gabriel, 2014). Efforts to infuse, embed, or

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Authors

Hannah Dostal, Rachael Gabriel

Hannah Dostal (hannah.dostal@uconn.edu) and Rachael Gabriel (rachael.gabriel@uconn.edu) are assistant professors of reading education at the University of Connecticut.

References

Bean, T.W. (1997). Preservice teachers’ selection and use of content area literacy strategies. The Journal of Educational Research, 90(3), 154-163.

Duke, N.K. & Pearson, P.D. (2002). Effective practices for developing reading comprehension. In A.E. Farstrup & S.J. Samuels (Eds.), What research has to say about reading instruction (3rd ed., pp. 205-242).

Newark, DE: International Reading Association. Lesley, M. (2004). Looking for critical literacy with postbaccalaureate content area literacy students. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 48(4), 320-334.

Moje, E.B. (2008). Foregrounding the disciplines in secondary literacy teaching and learning: A call for change. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 52(2), 96-107.

O’Brien, D.G., Stewart, R.A., & Moje, E.B. (1995). Why content literacy is difficult to infuse into the secondary school: Complexities of curriculum, pedagogy, and school culture. Reading Research Quarterly, 30(3), 442-463.

Wenz, C. & Gabriel, R. (2014). An integrative review and conceptual model of disciplinary literacy. Paper presented at the Literacy Research Association annual conference, Marco Island, FL.

Hannah Dostal

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