Figure I. 1: Percentage distribution of fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-grade students across NAEP reading achievement levels.
▶ For many students, the rate of growth toward college readiness actually decreases as students move from eighth to twelfth grade.
▶ American fifteen-year-olds perform worse than their peers from fourteen other countries.
▶ Disciplinary literacy is an essential component of economic and social participation.
▶ Middle and high school students need ongoing literacy instruction because early childhood and elementary instruction does not correlate to later success.
Among the many concerns within collaborative discussions about teaching and learning, literacy continually ranks as one of the most worrisome. In many of our discussions with teachers throughout North America, teachers across academic disciplines express three running concerns: (1) many students struggle with basic literacy skills, (2) many students read and write below grade level, and (3) many students do not know how to complete reading or writing assignments.
Gaps in literacy skills are staggering, and these gaps affect all areas of many students’ education. As students are marched through their schooling, the statistics demonstrate that gaps in literacy increase over the course of many students’ elementary, middle, and high school years. Columbia University Teachers College (2005) reports many students find themselves reading three to six grade levels below their peers, many students struggle mightily to comprehend informational texts, and many students graduate from high school unprepared to enter a college-level experience. Columbia University Teachers College (2005) and Michael A. Rebell (2008) further highlight the following statistics, which present significant and long-standing concerns.
▶ By age three, children of professionals have vocabularies that are nearly 50 percent greater than those of working-class children, and twice as large as those of children whose families are on welfare.
▶ By the end of fourth grade, African American, Hispanic, and poor students of all races are two years behind their wealthier, predominantly white peers in reading and mathematics. By eighth grade, they have slipped three years behind, and by twelfth grade, four years behind.
▶ Only one in fifty Hispanic and African American seventeen-year-olds can read and gain information from a specialized text, such as a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)-focused journal, compared to about one in twelve white students.
▶ By the end of high school, African American and Hispanic students’ reading and mathematics skills are roughly the same as those of white students in the eighth grade.
▶ Among eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, about 90 percent of whites have either completed high school or earned a GED. Among African Americans, the rate is 81 percent; among Hispanics, 63 percent.
▶ African American students are only about 50 percent as likely (and Hispanics about 33 percent as likely) as white students to earn a bachelor’s degree by age twenty-nine.
Statistical results like these are a stark reminder that we need to focus our attention on the literacy development of students in every corner of our schools. For the grades 6–12 ELA teacher, developing students’ abilities to comprehend informational texts should stand out as an important goal, as these abilities are central to state and national standards for ELA, skill development, and curriculum content expectations. As we will note throughout this book, reading and writing strategies in an ELA classroom often require different instructional approaches that ELA teachers must collaborate on. These approaches must be tailored to meet the needs of every student and demand innovative thinking.
In this book, we offer suggestions focused on teaching students intermediate literacy skills. These are important skills to attain because students with strong intermediate literacy skills have essentially developed an awareness of their own active comprehension, and they know what to do when comprehension begins to feel shaky. It is vital that, within our disciplines, we don’t jump ahead of intermediate literacy but instead continually model this phase for our students and provide opportunities for them to practice these skills in a constructive and guided manner.
Due to its focus on literacy in the ELA classroom, this book regularly refers to the CCSS ELA that help articulate the priorities teachers should support in their classrooms. In doing so, we strive to emphasize the importance of all students having the literacy expertise necessary to be college and career ready after graduation.
Disciplinary Literacy
As you gain confidence that students have a good grasp of basic, foundational literacy skills, and as you begin to see them develop more intermediate and advanced literacy skills, you can move forward with tailoring their literacy instruction with an eye toward disciplinary literacy. Even though students will need you to continue modeling the use of academic vocabulary and monitoring their comprehension, they will also be ready to attack complex texts with a disciplinary lens even as they practice building their skills.
For our purposes, a discipline is a unique expertise, which schools often split into subject-matter divisions such as mathematics, science, ELA, physical education, world languages, fine arts, and so on. Disciplinary literacy focuses on the literacy strategies tailored to a particular academic subject area. This book, as previously noted, focuses on the expertise of ELA teachers who see the value of integrating specific literacy-building strategies into their classrooms to support readers and writers working at various skill entry points as they work toward mastering course-content goals. Who better to lead the way with disciplinary thinking connected to ELA topics than the experts—our ELA teachers? After all, when English teachers read, write, and speak, they do so with certain goals and objectives in mind, such as determining universal themes, the meaning of symbols, and an author’s purpose, to name a few.
thinking BREAK
What would happen if you were to gather teachers from every discipline in a school and track the way they each address a reading, writing, and speaking task? Predict how different content-area teachers would approach and work through literacy tasks. What similarities and differences would you observe among these varied content areas?
There are certain stylistic and conceptual norms professionals attend to in each discipline. A scientist, a historian, a businessperson, or any other professional is going to address literacy tasks with norms and behaviors befitting his or her expertise and profession. That makes total sense; after all, each expert or professional has unique insider knowledge. Insiders have more background knowledge, subject-related vocabulary knowledge, and subject-related purpose than others without such dispositions. On the other hand, disciplinary outsiders lack sufficient background knowledge and vocabulary to navigate a disciplinary text successfully. Literacy expert Doug Buehl (2017) suggests that our job as educators is to teach students how to think like we do—as disciplinary insiders. So, where an English insider might focus on themes and symbolism, a science insider, for example, approaches reading tasks with specific goals and objectives, such as locating causes and effects, finding meaningful data, analyzing experimental conclusions, and drawing connections to scientific concepts.
Text comprehension in all disciplines generally follows a similar nine-step process, illustrated in figure I.2, but the ins and outs of application, connection, and extension reside within the specific lens of the disciplinary expert and must be modeled accordingly. Years ago, when training our peer tutors on how to help struggling readers navigate disciplinary texts, Katherine Gillies crafted this poster as a guide to moving
