Literacy Matters - Vol 21 - Winter 2021

traditional ways in which teachers themselves learned their subject matter (Braaten, 2019; Feiman-Nemser, 1985; Lortie, 1975).

Research increasingly suggests that teachers who analyze students’ thinking with empathy are those best able to support their students (Horn & Kane, 2015; Philip et al., 2018), and many students are still mastering a variety of reading strategies while in middle and high school (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008, p. 45). If the group is still hesitant to begin, you may choose to ask a series of more specific questions: What did you read first? Second? What questions did you ask yourself before you read? During? After? Did you re-read it? Which parts? Why? Did you make notes in the margins? If the group seems to need more support, model your own analysis of the reading strategies you used to make meaning of one of the texts. Below, we provide the first of four texts. As you read, note the ways each text can be read from differing disciplinary lenses, and how those lenses influence the reading strategies that individuals may use to make sense of the text. Please note we use an expanded definition of text , in which a text is understood not only as a word-based document but also as any set of multimodal signs and symbols from which meaning can be constructed (pictures, charts, infographics, film, etc.; see Kress, 2003). Reading in Math, Reading in English: The Problemwith Letting the English Teacher Do It In secondary schools, there is frequently an assumption that English teachers bear most of the responsibility for teaching students to read and write. In fact, this assumption is often among the reasons teachers cite for their well-documented skepticism related to content area and disciplinary literacy (Hinchman & O’Brien, 2019). However, English Language Arts is a content area unto itself, and it encompasses many specific ways of practicing literacy that do not necessarily translate well into other subject matter. To showcase this point, we begin with a short text such as the following:

In reading instruction, this means teachers need opportunities to read what they are expecting students to read, to analyze the reading strategies they—and their students—might draw upon to comprehend those texts, and to make instructional plans according to their findings. This process may be especially important in content-area and disciplinary literacy since expert readers in a specific discipline are rarely explicitly aware of the specific reading strategies they use to make meaning of text (Moje, 2007). Moreover, in some disciplines teachers may not have a deep grounding in the discipline itself, so teachers may themselves need greater support learning to read, write, speak, listen, and think as experts in a given field. For example, history teachers in the United States do not necessarily have either a major or a minor in history (Monte-sano et al., 2017). Finally, readers of this article may note that literacy is much broader than reading alone, but we begin an exploration into content-area and disciplinary literacy with a focus on reading because reading is often most associated with literacy. Framing an Exploration of Disciplinary Texts In what follows, we present four texts, each of which is intended to be read in content-area classes by middle grades or high school students. We suggest making these texts available to participants, one by one, and providing them in a way that will allow participants to mark up the text as they see fit. In-person, we suggest paper. In distance learning, texts can be provided in a shared Google folder or through an online annotation program such as Perusall. When preparing for this activity, we recommend making two charts visible to all. One should be reserved for the group’s rough draft and initial thinking and the second should be a T-chart. Label one side of the T-chart Content-area Literacy Strategies and the other Disciplinary Literacy Strategies .

Reading Matters Displinary Literacy Matters

To begin, ask participants to read through each text twice. The first time, simply ask participants to read the text and to come up with a short 1-2 sentence summary. What is this text? What is it about? The second time, ask participants to pay attention to the strategies they used to make meaning of the text. How did they come to understand what the text means? What strategies did they use in order to comprehend the text?

Figure 1 “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” (Frost, 1922/2020).

If you, or the people with whom you are working, at first struggle to articulate the strategies you are using to make sense of the text, you are in good company. Most adults struggle to articulate the reading strategies they use and for good reason: As we achieve expertise as readers, we automatize the reading strategies we use to make sense of the text. Thus, by definition, many adult readers are not necessarily aware of the reading strategies they use (Byrnes &Wasik, 2019; Moje, 2007). Although automaticity is necessary for fluent reading, automaticity may be less helpful.

As many will recognize, this is a commonly assigned text in English Language Arts: Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Before continuing, take a moment to consider the reading strategies you used to make sense of it. Doing so will allow you to compare and contrast your own thinking with that of others with whom we have discussed this poem.

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