Literacy Matters - Vol 21 - Winter 2021

In discussions of this text, educators oftenmention they begin making sense of this text by visualizing where the narrator is. They also describe drawing inferences about the way the narrator must be feeling based on word choice. Visualizing and drawing inferences are content-area literacy strategies since they are used to comprehend text across disciplines. Yet, as the group continues to discuss their reading strategies, it becomes clear that a disciplinary lens, too, is needed: Without fail, groups note they“put themselves in the narrator’s shoes.” They puzzle over the relationship between the narrator and the author; they often note the repetition of the final line and re-read it. Lovers of poetry describe reading the whole poem aloud, whispering it, because they know the rhythm is central to poetry, and that punctuation and line breaks influence both rhythm andmeaning. Notably, all of these approaches have deep roots in the English Language Arts as a discipline, and in poetry in particular. For example, asking questions about the relationship between a narrator and an author, and about the extent to which contextual information about an author’s life should influence an interpretation of literature, formed the basis of a long-standing debate between literary theorists who center historical and literary background and authors’biographies in literary analysis, versus the New Critics, who argued that interest in anything but the text itself was simply a distraction (Christenbury, 2006; Park, 2013). As for the punctuation and its relationship to meaning, Frost himself is said to have been apoplectic when a printer mistakenly amended his work to suggest that the woods were“lovely, dark, and deep,”rather than,“lovely, dark and deep,” since the first version suggests a list: the woods are lovely and dark and deep. By contrast, without the Oxford comma,“dark and deep” gives us insight into the exact character of the loveliness of the woods (see Dreyer, 2019 for an explanation of the Oxford comma). As this activity begins, we write down all of the strategies participants describe without differentiating among them. We then ask a second question: Which of the strategies the group has named are used across content areas?Which are specific to ELA as a discipline? After allowing a few responses, we deepen our discussion by considering a second text: 

about which parts of the provided information are relevant and which are extraneous. You can use these observations to point out how expert readers use content area literacy strategies, such as visualizing and drawing inferences, across disciplinary texts, but they do so for very different reasons. You can also use this discussion to point out the ways in which English Language Arts-specific reading strategies will fail students who, in good faith, attempt to make sense of texts like these: Here, students are free to imagine the relationship between the author of the text and the narrator, but the comparison is unlikely to be fruitful in a mathematics class. As for punctuation, readers in mathematics might look for commas as a way to demarcate the number of items in a list, but the placement of commas will probably not shed light on the meaning or purpose of this text in the way it does for readers of Robert Frost. Instead, expert readers of texts in mathematics draw upon a very different skill set than that expected in the English Language Arts (Lent & Voigt, 2018). Those with expertise in mathematics do not necessarily read the entire task deeply or sequentially, which is often expected in English Language Arts. Instead, mathematics experts skim the first paragraph, looking for pertinent information while filtering out the extraneous (see Lent & Voigt, 2018, for the importance of identifying relevant information when reading in mathematics). They report reading most carefully where the words could most readily be translated into a numerical value (i.e., “The number of points scored by Damien can be found by reversing the digits of his favorite number, thirty-one,” became “13” ) . Thus, a central purpose of reading in mathematics seemed to be translating words into numbers or mathematical notation. Some, but not all, note that the names of the players (Abby, Bill, Carla, Damien) could be represented by the common mathematical notation of variables--a, b, c, and d--and many use this information to annotate the text. Annotating the text is often considered a content-neutral literacy strategy, yet it is important to note that expert mathematical readers do not necessarily annotate the text in the way most literacy educators might recognize. Instead, a goal

Reading Matters Displinary Literacy Matters

seems to be, again, translating the words into mathematical notation (e.g., “Abby outscored her partner Bill by six points” became “a-6=b”). After leading educators in discussions of both of these texts, we ask the group to revisit the brainstorming list we have made. We ask them to think about which literacy strategies seemed to be most useful in both English and math and which seemed to be discipline- specific. We are careful to point out that comprehension does not

Figure 2 “Problem of the Week.” (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2019)

As with the Frost poem, educators often note they visualize this text--imagining the players on the basketball court and drawing or noting which players were on each team. They also describe making inferences; usually, they draw inferences

involve either content-area literacy strategies or disciplinary literacy strategies, but often a layering of both (Dobbs, Ippolito, Charner-Laird, 2016). This discussion helps the group to explore the following ideas: (1) If we expect English teachers, alone, to

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