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All About Disciplinary Literacy

Explore how teaching students to read, write, and think like subject specialists can improve learning across all ability levels.

Last updated 8 September 2026

Fang, Z., & Coatoam, S. (2013). Disciplinary literacy: What you want to know about it. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 56(8), 627-632. doi: 10.1002/JAAL.190

Background

The writers suggest that over two-thirds of students in middle and high schools (in America) are struggling with content-area texts. The article proposes that approaches to literacy training that are based on the disciplines are the way to deal with this problem.

Aims

The focus of the article is to suggest that content area literacy (taught by literacy specialists) does not meet the needs of the students. The writers want to show that the real solution is to develop disciplinary literacy where students learn the ways of thinking, speaking, reading and writing of the subject discipline as part of their content lessons.

Sample

As this is a theoretical paper, there are no samples.

Method

The article reviews the present situation with regard to literacy in content areas and proposes an improved approach.

Findings

The writers suggest that the content area literacy approach (where literacy specialists teach generic strategies) does not work. Instead students need instruction in disciplinary literacy (where students are coached in the special literacy requirements of subjects in their content lessons). The literacy teachers and content teachers need to work together on an equal footing to do this as neither is fully qualified on their own. They point out that there is disagreement on when such coaching should begin with some suggesting it should only start at the tertiary level but the writers suggest that there is evidence that students are capable of starting to differentiate between subject literacies at a much earlier age. The writers note that there is no strong evidence in favour of disciplinary literacy but this is because the idea is relatively new and still theoretical. Appropriate research still needs to be carried out. However, they believe it is something that could help students at all ability levels with content-area texts.

Implications

The disciplinary approach will involve literacy and content area teachers working together not only on classroom teaching but also on assessment. The aim is to help students think like specialists so that they have a better understanding of the subject content.

Original article retrieved from EBSCOHost.