Why Disciplinary Literacy

Shanahan, T. & Shanahan, C. (2012). What is disciplinary literacy and why does it matter? Topics in Language Disorders, 32(1), 7-18.

Background

A need to help students with weak reading skills to deal with content subject material has been recognized and this has led to courses in content area literacy that aim to help develop generic reading skills that can be used across all subjects. However, there have been questions about their effectiveness and some resistance from content area teachers who see teaching such skills as difficult in an already packed syllabus.

Aims

The authors seek to contrast disciplinary literacy with content area literacy. They believe that the focus of disciplinary literacy (the literacy skills related to specific disciplines) will help not just weak readers but also high and middle level students. Moreover, as it is more discipline specific, it will be more acceptable to content area teachers.

Sample

The authors do not give much information on the studies they have done but mention that they have studied and compared the reading procedures of discipline experts and novices. They have also analysed language differences between texts from various disciplines using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL).

Method

The authors used think-alouds and interviews to highlight the differences in reading approaches of discipline experts.

Findings

The authors found differences between the approaches of experts to reading different texts. These approaches could be taught to students as ‘disciplinary literacy’ to help them work with content area materials. However, the authors concede that few studies have been done on the effectiveness of disciplinary literacy approaches in the classroom and the results of those studies that have been done have been mixed.

Implications

While the authors believe disciplinary literacy will help to raise the literacy skills of all students in the subjects they studied, they feel that further research needs to be carried out before this can be confirmed.

Original article retrieved through Google Scholar.