Cynthia Shanahan

What Is Disciplinary Literacy and Why Does It Matter

Recently, it has been proposed that schools teach disciplinary literacy in science, mathematics, history, and literature classes as students move into middle school and high school. A disciplinary literacy approach emphasizes the specialized knowledge and abilities possessed by those who create, communicate, and use knowledge within each of the disciplines. This article compares disciplinary literacy with the more widely emphasized approach known as content area literacy and provides an analysis of the growing research base underlying the disciplinary literacy construct. Research studies on disciplinary literacy are drawn from expert–novice comparisons in which think-aloud data are collected, during reading, from experts (i.e., mathematicians, chemists, historians) and students, and from functional linguistics analyses of the features of the grammars in disciplinary texts to identify the purposes and cognitive and communicative approaches that these grammars reveal. Finally, implications for school programs and instruction are considered.

Analysis of Expert Readers in Three Disciplines History, Mathematics, and Chemistry

The purpose of this study is to describe educationally relevant differences in literacy use among three subject-matter disciplines—history, chemistry, and mathematics. These analyses were drawn from an investigation of the teaching of disciplinary literacy in high schools. The purpose of the overall project was to improve the literacy-teaching preparation in a secondary preservice teacher education program, but this study sought to identify specific features of literacy and literacy use only in the three disciplines. It is the first expert-reader study to consider the reading of mathematicians and chemists (though other kinds of scientists have been studied in this way). To conduct this investigation, three teams were assembled, one for each discipline, including two disciplinary experts (historians, chemists, and mathematicians), two teacher educators who prepare high school teachers to teach those disciplines, and two high school teachers from each discipline. Using think-aloud protocols, transcripts from focus group discussions, a recursive process of member checking, and a cross-disciplinary consideration of reading approaches identified in each discipline, the study identified important differences in the reading behaviors of the six disciplinary experts. Although much of the work was based on think-aloud protocols and interviews with the disciplinary experts, the teachers and teacher educators participated with the disciplinary experts in focus-group discussions of the protocols, and their reactions and insights helped the disciplinary experts to articulate their approaches and to determine implications of the reading behaviors that were observed. Differences were evident in sourcing, contextualization, corroboration, close reading and rereading, critical response to text, and use of text structure or arrangement and graphics.