Literacy and Learning in the Content Areas

Enhancing Knowledge in the Disciplines

Sharon Kane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351206891
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Fourth Edition of Literacy and Learning in the Content Areas: Enhancing Knowledge in the Disciplines provides readers with the knowledge, motivation, tools, and confidence for integrating literacy in their disciplinary classrooms. Offering an original, literature-based approach to teaching disciplinary literacy, the new edition shares important ways in which teachers of courses in the disciplines can enhance student learning of subject matter and skills while also fostering their growth in the many facets of literacy. Throughout each chapter, Kane provides engaging and creative strategies and activities to make literacy come alive in discipline-specific courses and to encourage students to explore and learn in the classroom.

Embedded in each chapter are examples, resources, and strategies to help readers actively engage with and implement literacy practices. These features include Teaching in Action examples by subject area; Activating Prior Knowledge activities to stimulate critical thinking to prepare readers to learn complex theoretical and conceptual material about teaching, learning, and literacy; and end-of-chapter Application Activities to apply field experiences to classroom use.

New to the Fourth Edition

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• Every chapter of this new edition is updated to reflect the current approaches, standards, and benchmarks for discipline-specific literacy.

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• Enhanced Companion Website with BookTalks to introduce relevant books in many genres and subjects, encouraging readers to explore the books for themselves and providing a model for BookTalks in their own classrooms.

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• Expanded practical instructional strategies for teaching literacy in math, science, and social studies.

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• Updated to include newly published titles in children's literature, young adult literature, and nonfiction.

Chapter 1
Reading, Literacy, and Teaching in the Disciplines

This chapter helps you to think about and understand the term reading, then to consider the ever-broadening concept of literacy, especially in terms of disciplinary literacy. You are asked to consider what it means for you to be a teacher of literacy in your chosen content area and are introduced to the concept of learning standards.

Reading

Perhaps this is the first literacy education course you have taken, or perhaps when you were in earlier education courses, they focused on methods for teaching disciplinary concepts, procedures, and skills but excluded or limited attention to literacy. Schoenbach, Braunger, Greenleaf, et al. (2003) note that

few middle and high school teachers see their own abilities to read subject-area texts as a powerful resource for helping students approach these texts independently, confidently, and successfully. Because most secondary content teachers have not spent much time thinking about the mental processes by which they make sense of texts in their fields, this knowledge is invisible and therefore unavailable to most of them.

(p. 134)

Researchers and theorists have made great progress defining the act called reading and explaining how it works. There is not, however, universal agreement among experts as to how reading happens, how it is first learned, or the best way to teach it. Not all readers approach text or reach comprehension the same way, and an individual might stress different components of reading at different times, depending on the text type and the reading purpose. Some readers are very aware of the comprehension strategies they use as they construct meaning, while others may be very efficient readers but haven’t analyzed what for them seems like a natural process. As you think more about how you read and as you observe and talk with your students, you will discover that there are numerous ways that individual readers process print and construct meaning from text. Varied examples of how people describe their reading processes are presented in Figure 1.1.

You can see that the way reading is thought of and talked about is dynamic. The field is always developing, and there are ongoing philosophical and political debates about how best to teach it. The good news is, as Murray (2016) points out, “In just the last few decades there has been a massive shift in what is known about the processes of learning to read. Hundreds of scientific studies have provided us with valuable knowledge regarding what occurs in our brains as we read” (p. 28). At present there is general agreement that certain components are absolutely necessary for a person to be successful at reading. Good readers must be competent at phonological processing, word decoding, and structural analysis. They are able to read texts fluently. They understand the meanings of words they encounter in texts and can comprehend fictional and expository texts; they use the information gained from the print and construct meaning as they apply the background knowledge they bring to the text. Of course, in order to accomplish all the tasks required while reading, they need to be motivated. These concepts will be further developed throughout the chapters of this book. But because decoding and fluency have for some time been dealt with at the early literacy levels, and have recently become much more prominent in the literature on adolescent and content area literacy, the next section will introduce you to these crucial aspects of reading.

Figure 1.1 Readers talk about their reading processes.

Decoding

In order to identify words in text, readers need phonemic awareness, or the ability to understand that spoken words are composed of individual units of sound; it’s important to be able to manipulate these units. Readers use phonics or the association between letters in written words and the sounds they make in speech. When students struggle with phonics, it’s hard for them to decode (decipher the print and turn it into language sounds) multisyllabic words, and it affects vocabulary development, comprehension, and fluency. If you have students who are extremely weak in decoding skills, you’ll need to recruit the help of a literacy coach or reading specialist; as a content area teacher, you probably don’t have the expertise needed to best help these students develop skills in this area, while a literacy specialist has been trained to assess and apply intervention strategies. This is not to say that there is nothing you can do within the context of your discipline to help in word identification. You can look over course materials to identify words you think students might struggle with and teach these words directly, modeling how you recognize patterns and notice prefixes or suffixes, as well as pointing out syllables. More will be explained about structural analysis, or morphology, in Chapter 6.

O’Shea, Katsafanas, and Lake (2009) point out that secondary school students who struggle with the skills usually associated with beginning reading are often from families of poverty and/or from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Through no fault of their own, the gap will widen between them and their peers if teachers don’t intervene. The authors suggest explicit instruction using culturally specific materials, demonstrating for students how to sound out words; using materials and games that reinforce phonemic awareness and phonological processing; using choral reading; using connected, decodable text for readers to practice sound–spelling relationships; and using music, art, and movement to segment phonemes through a multisensory approach. We’ll explore in future chapters how to access students’ diverse funds of knowledge to take advantage of the rich stores of information and skills they bring with them, which may not always be immediately evident in a mainstream school setting.

O’Shea et al. (2009) offer instructional strategies for middle and high school teachers that will improve decoding and structural analysis skills. As a teacher, you can model ways to use phonics to sound out unfamiliar words. You can employ think-alouds to show how to break apart long words into meaningful chunks. (You’ll learn more about think-alouds in future chapters.) You can supply print and online dictionaries and help readers to look up culturally relevant, meaningful, interesting words, in both English and students’ heritage languages. You can encourage student interest in word play and word investigation.

Fluency

Another crucial aspect of reading is fluency. You probably can recall a time when you listened to someone read and recognized that it was not smooth, but rather choppy and uneven. Perhaps you are not happy with your own ability to read with expression and a sense of rhythm or flow. These are examples of lack of fluency. In the following paragraphs, I’ve gathered what some experts have to say about the importance of fluency, especially with regard to those who are no longer considered beginning readers.

Rasinski (2008) explains, “Reading fluency is defined in two components—the ability to read words in print automatically, and the ability to read text with appropriate and meaningful expression (prosody) …. Expressive or prosodic reading takes fluency to the next level in which a reader embeds prosodic features, such as pitch, volume, emphasis, and phrasing that make the reading sound like authentic oral language” (p. 119). Rasinski suggests an artful approach to teaching fluency, involving readers theater, poetry, songs, and speeches, since “Fluency is best developed through assisted and repeated readings of texts. Repeated and assisted reading is best and most legitimately employed when readers intend to perform for an audience” (p. 137). His research found multiple benefits of using these texts, which

not only developed reading fluency, an area that has become a focal point for high-stakes testing of students … [but also] an appreciation of language …, deeper and more heartfelt or aesthetic understandings of the meanings authors intend to create through such texts, more varied responses to those texts, opportunities to write in various forms, opportunities to create a sense of unity among classmates, an appreciation of the differences that classmates bring to school, and, of course, greater opportunities to develop that internal confidence in one’s own abilities that is essential to future growth.

(p. 137)

Seok and DaCosta (2014) studied oral reading fluency and silent reading fluency at the secondary and postsecondary levels, finding a strong relationship between them as well as a connection to comprehension. They conclude that teachers of older students who have reading disabilities or who are English language learners pay attention to and model fluency. They offer methods for increasing vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension, stressing, “We propose that a perfect match between students and vocabularies, instructional goals and learning strategies be pursued to practice effective direct reading instruction in the content areas in order to promote best learning outcomes” (p. 165).

Fink (2008) notes that her research “suggests that the more a student reads in one content area (such as science), the richer or better at reading the student becomes in that domain” (p. 36). This raises an intriguing question in her mind:

Should the concept of fluency be expanded to embrace a more flexible concept similar to the way Gardner (1983) expanded the notion of intelligence to a more dynamic theory that included multiple intelligences? Perhaps there are multiple fluencies. A more flexible, intraindividual concept of fluency could help teachers understand how children … read personally appealing texts at high readability levels with more ease and skill than they read other texts.

(pp. 36–37)

McCollin and O’Shea (2009) consider the challenge of addressing fluency with readers representing diverse heritages. They recommend using folktales and poetry, as well as websites devoted to cultural themes, that relate to students’ particular cultural and linguistic backgrounds, as they practice repeated reading to increase their fluency. As we teach the content of our disciplines, we can employ strategies such as choral reading (which involves a group reading in unison as the teacher or another fluent reader leads), partnered reading, and readers theater based on discipline-specific texts. For example:

A simple strategy to support fluency is to choose a familiar speech, skit, or poem and assign readers to roles/passages or lines. Advanced readers may begin the activity, modeling appropriate vocal tone and fluency …. Readers focus their attention to see and hear the speech-to-print correspondence in repeated readers’ theater opportunities to present … aspects of various poems or stories with scaffolded materials, using poetry or stories from around the world, such as Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

(p. 93)

We’ll explore readers theater more in later chapters, but one resource you might want to check out is A Comprehensive Guide to Readers Theatre: Enhancing Fluency and Comprehension in Middle School and Beyond (Black & Stave, 2007).

It’s especially helpful for some readers who struggle with fluency to hear and see the text at the same time. So having the combination of audiobooks and print versions of titles that are not too difficult for your students and providing independent reading time or allowing students to bring the materials home to practice is beneficial. The voices on computer programs and electronic readers that provide text-to-speech options are improving, also. Consider recording some of your required texts, so that students will be able to hear their teacher’s expressive voice as they read along in their books or handouts. This could be especially helpful for your English learners, those whose first language is one other than English. Ness (2017) describes success her students have had practicing fluency and reflecting on repeated readings using iPads.

A wonderful resource is Unite for Literacy (www.uniteforliteracy.com/). There are dozens of picture books that include English text and that can be read in English and many other languages, including American Sign Language. Students studying English as a New Language, or English speakers studying one of the other languages provided can practice listening and reading aloud to gain fluency and comfort with multiple languages while enjoying attractive pictures.

BookTalk 1.1

If you are interested in getting a more thorough overview of the components of literacy and research-based instructional strategies than space allows for here, I recommend Steps to Success: Crossing the Bridge Between Literacy Research and Practice, edited by Kristen A. Munger (2016). It has entire chapters, written by scholars in specific areas, devoted to the topics of word recognition skills; literacy assessment; helping students for whom E...