RM Winter 2016 FLIP

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Reading Matters
Teaching Matters
| 26| Reading Matters | Volume 16 • Winter 2016 |
PRINCIPLE 3: Develop ways to learn about the role of literacy
in disciplinary subjects. It is not feasible for literacy teacher
educators to take courses to learn about the concepts and
practices of all the content area subjects that they will encounter
in their teaching. However, it is important that they have some
familiarity with the various disciplines and the role that literacy
plays in each discipline (Johnson et al., 2011). One of the ways
that they can do this is by learning from their students. As
literacy teacher educators, we oftentimes feel that we are the
sole dispensers of information while our students are always the
recipients of what we deliver. However, that does not always have
to be the case. Oftentimes these preservice and inservice students
come to us with several credit hours of discipline-specific courses
that they have taken, and they are well-versed in the principles of
their subject area. They know how to read and process the text
in their disciplines, and they know the kinds of information that
P-12 students need to think about and learn to be considered
proficient in their disciplines (Hynd-Shanahan, 2013). And so,
either through a formal class assignment, or a question posed
for general class discussion, we could ask them to respond to the
following: Based on your knowledge of and experience with your
specific discipline, help me to understand what reading and writing
looks like in your content area. That is, if I walked into your classroom
and observed students’ using reading and writing to acquire
knowledge, what should I expect to see? Asking this question each
semester will help literacy teacher educators to develop a strong
understanding of what it means to use literacy in each discipline.
PRINCIPLE 4: Help students to see how literacy strategies can
be authentically adapted to their individual disciplines. Gillis
(2014) believes that “strategies adapted (rather than adopted)
to fit the content (discipline specific strategies) are more
effective than general literacy strategies” (p.616). The literacy
teacher educator must think about ways that strategies can be
adapted to fit learner needs. The literacy teacher educator can
also encourage students to think about how they can adapt
specific strategies to meet their individual needs. Maybe a
weekly activity could be called, How Can I Adapt This Strategy?
With this activity, students would get an opportunity to analyze
strategies that are presented to determine how it would need to
be modified to work for a specific topic within their discipline.
Shanahan and Shanahan (2008) conducted a study on
disciplinary literacy to discover “how content area experts and
secondary content teachers read disciplinary tests, make use
of comprehension strategies, and subsequently teach those
strategies to adolescent readers” (p. 40). In this study they
found that content-area experts and secondary teachers were
somewhat reluctant to teach some of the generic strategies
suggested by the researchers, saying that the strategies did not
promote the disciplinary literacy skills needed for their specific
discipline. For example, one chemistry teacher was reluctant
to use a particular reading strategy on summarization until he
suggested a modification of the strategy. With the modification,
“the strategy was not just about understanding text; it was also
about understanding the essence of chemistry” (p.54). The
strategy was adapted to make it subject matter specific. Also,
the history content-area experts and secondary history teachers
liked several of the strategies recommended by the literacy
researchers; however, suggestions were made for improvement
to more closely mirror a historian’s way of thinking. As a result
of their two year study, Shanahan and Shanahan (2008) found
that “the disciplinary teams advocated strategies that mirrored
the kinds of thinking and analytic practices common to their
discipline” (p. 56). However, they also contended that:
instead of trying to convince disciplinary teachers of
the value of general reading strategies…we set out
to see if we could formulate new strategies or jury-
rig existing ones so that they would more directly and
explicitly address the specific and highly specialized
disciplinary reading demands of chemistry, history, and
mathematics. (p.57)
This reflects the idea presented in principle four. As literacy
teacher educators, we must not simply present a plethora
of general reading strategies to our students in the various
disciplines; instead we must understand the nuances of the various
disciplines represented in our classes and teach our students
to adapt those general strategies, not simply adopt them.
PRINCIPLE 5: Examine the linguistic challenges of academic
texts that may make them demanding to read for adolescents.
As children move from elementary school to middle school to
high school, the reading of academic texts becomes increasingly
more complex. The language typically used in elementary texts
is closer to the language used in everyday conversation and the
topics typically focus on areas of interest to elementary-aged
children. On the other hand, adolescents are faced with language
demands in their academic texts that are more “advanced, abstract,
and complex…the language used to construct and challenge
this specialized knowledge thus becomes more technical, dense,
abstract, and hierarchically structured” (Fang, 2012, p.35). Not only
is the language more complex, but it also varies from discipline
to discipline; academic texts in history are distinctly different
from those in science or mathematics or music, making the
comprehension of academic texts challenging for many readers.
This linguistic variation across the disciplines does
not just occur at the word level; it also takes place at
the level of grammar…Recognizing disciplinary ways
of using language is important because one cannot
fully comprehend the text of a specific discipline …
without having a sense of how the discipline organizes
knowledge through language. (Fang, 2012, p.36)
As literacy teacher educators we must prepare our
students to recognize and examine these linguistic variations
in the various disciplines. This requires literacy teacher
educators to understand both the quantitative measures and
qualitative measures of text complexity (McArthur, 2012).
This presents a problem for literacy teacher educators. As
mentioned earlier, just as it is not feasible for literacy teacher
educators to take courses to learn about the concepts and practices
of all the content area subjects that they will encounter in their