Literacy Matters - Winter 2020

be if the English teacher had to teach students how to read every textbook they use throughout the day. I usually ask a science teacher if he would like to teach his students how to read the English textbook. The answer is always no. Then why would an English teacher want to teach students how to read a science text? It is the responsibility of each content teacher to teach their students how to read their content textbook along with any supplementary texts. • Content reading strategies only take a few minutes to teach, and then the students practice them while reading the text. Many content teachers believe they are squeezed for time to get their content in let alone teach reading strategies. Students in my class are surprised when they discover that most strategies take no more than two minutes to teach. A Shift in Thinking The “battle” for content reading instruction has been going on for decades (Fisher & Ivey, 2005). Although it probably will continue for decades more, my goal is to create a new way of thinking regarding the topic. My purpose is not to discredit disciplinary literacy. In fact, the opposite is true. Much has been written about what disciplinary literacy looks like and how it benefits both educators and students (e.g., Dobbs, Ippolito, & Charner-Laird, 2016; Kucan, Rainey, & Cho, 2018; Rainey, Maher, Coupland, Franchi, & Moje, 2017; Temple & Doerr, 2018). However, disciplinary literacy should not be seen as a replacement for content area reading instruction (Brozo, Moorman, Meyer, & Stewart, 2013). In fact, disciplinary literacy builds off of the foundation of content area reading (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008). How is a student to navigate through and comprehend historical documents, science logs, or mathematical computations if they have not been taught content reading skills involving vocabulary strategies, text features, or interpreting graphs? Is there a happy medium to all of this madness? Perhaps. According to Fang (2014), “the ultimate goal of literacy instruction is to support disciplinary learning and socialization” (p. 446). In order for this goal to be met, there needs to be a collaboration between content teachers and literacy faculty (Fang & Coatoam, 2013). This collaboration unites the best of both worlds: the experts in content with the experts in literacy. One is not better than the other, but with both sides working together, the winners are the students. Content area reading is NOT dead. It is misunderstood. Until the myths surrounding it have been debunked, content area reading professors need to hold firm to the belief that our courses do make a difference.

the privilege to attend featured a speaker who displayed a very difficult science passage for the attendees to read and asked us to summarize it. It was an impossible task. He went on to explain that summarizing is a content area reading strategy that fails in this instance. His argument was that content reading strategies are taught as if they will work every time in every content area. He furthered stated that there needs to be a new trajectory in content classes towards disciplinary literacy, which connects strategies to content much better than content reading instruction ever did. This one size fits all approach regarding content area reading strategies is a false premise. Content teachers need to be able to choose from a variety of strategies due to the nature of the text and the reading abilities of their students. Perhaps summarizing will not work on that difficult science passage, but a vocabulary strategy will. That same vocabulary strategy may work on a math text but not on a history text. All content strategies will not work in every content area, but the more strategies the content teacher has to choose from will help him teach his students how to better navigate and comprehend different texts. Myth #3: It Is Someone Else’s Responsibility to Teach Content Reading At the beginning of my content reading course, the students take a survey about their attitude and knowledge of content area reading instruction. The results are always the same. Early childhood and elementary teachers favor content area reading instruction by middle school and high school teachers. The middle school and high school teachers state that teaching reading in the upper grades is the English teacher’s responsibility. The English teachers in the class are always thrilled by this response! However, according to Shanahan & Shanahan (2017), “English teachers take responsibility for general literacy and language skills – knowledge and abilities that can be applied across disciplines” (p. 21). This statement seems to support what many content teachers believe – It’s not MY responsibility to teach these reading skills, but it is the English teacher’s responsibility. The Shanahans go on to write, “Of course, English teachers also have disciplinary teaching responsibilities” (p. 21). So now we are telling English teachers they need to teach both English content AND content reading skills that can be used across the disciplines? No other content teacher should have this dual role? A disconnect is obvious, and the question is where to begin to change these attitudes. I have found the following to be the most important facts for understanding what content reading instruction is and whose responsibility it is to teach content strategies. • Content reading is not grade specific. All teachers, no matter what the grade are responsible for teaching content reading strategies. If informational text is used in that grade, then content strategies should be taught. • Teachers are responsible for helping students navigate through and understand the different texts used in their classes. In the upper grades, the English teacher knows the text used in his English course. The science teacher knows the text used in his science course. What a burden it would

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Literacy Matters | Volume 20 • Winter 2020 | scira.org | 57

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