Reading in the disciplines

Juel, C., Hebard, H., Park-Haubner, J., & Moran, M. (2010). Reading through a disciplinary lens. Educational Leadership, 67, 13-17.

Background

The writers feel that some students with limited vocabulary are stymied in their reading. The writers discuss reading texts through what they call the ‘disciplinary lens’ as an approach to helping them. Their focus is on young children reading texts in class who, they believe, will be able to read more confidently if they are helped to read like scientists, historians, etc.

Aims

The article aims to show that even young children can approach text from a disciplinary point of view and that this approach helps them to develop their reading and writing skills in the different disciplines. For example, students can learn the vocabulary of rocks through observation and categorization in the same way as geologists.

Sample

The article is a theoretical article and is not based on any actual samples. However, the writers use a number of scenarios to illustrate their point. For example, they use a scenario about a student looking at a story with a writing lens and then looking at the same story with a science lens and learning different things.

Method

The stories relate to individual students who have benefited from using different lenses. For example, the teacher in one scenario encourages the students to discuss the figurative language in a story about turtles but also encourages them to ask science questions such as, ‘Do turtles really return to the same beaches to lay their eggs?’ The types of questions and responses are different depending on the lens being used at any point.

Findings

The writers believe that there are two important reasons for getting students to use different lenses. First, the different lenses provide scaffolding for students, helping them approach the texts of different disciplines appropriately and thus extending their reading abilities. Second, the spread of technology means that students tend to go to the Internet for information instead of the traditional encyclopaedias. Without an understanding of the appropriate lens to use in different disciplines, students will encounter difficulty evaluating the mass of texts in terms of their usefulness.

Implications

The writers believe that teachers should be actively helping students from an early age to develop the disciplinary lenses – literary, scientific and historical.

Original article retrieved from EBSCOHost.