Reading comprehension instruction may be critical for students to learn from social studies text, particularly for students who are not yet proficient in reading. Understanding factors that correspond to high levels of student engagement during text-based social studies instruction appears particularly important. Data were collected from 50…

In this mixed method study I evaluated the relationship between teachers' perceptions of text complexity and data of text complexity assessed by standard and non-standard measures in the disciplines of English Language Arts (ELA), science, and social studies. For the quantitative portion of this study, I evaluated and correlated the text…

English for specific purposes research reveals that learners at a variety of levels experience difficulty reading science text, sufficient to impede their acquisition of science understanding. However, little research exists regarding subject-specific language styles or reading difficulty in Arabic. Difficulties with specialised language may…

Science curriculum standards were mapped onto various texts (literacy readers, trade books, online articles). Statistical analyses highlighted the inconsistencies among readability formulae for Grades 2-6 levels of the standards. There was a lack of correlation among the readability measures, and also when comparing different text sources. Online…

This article presents an overview of how to relate reading to a content area, specifically technology education. The author notes that, with the new focus on Common Core English Language Arts State Standards and state-developed standards, technology and engineering teachers should include disciplinary literacy in their curriculum. Academic…

This study aims to augment the current understanding of how practicing teachers perceive and implement disciplinary literacy and in what ways they collaborate with researchers in a disciplinary literacy project. To do this, we collected and analyzed transcripts of the meetings from a disciplinary literacy project that was a university-school…

This article focuses on research into academic reading practices of international graduate students in taught Master programmes in a Malaysian university. The purpose of the study was to examine the challenges faced in the academic reading practices as well as the strategies employed to overcome the challenges in the academic reading practices.…

The concept of readability has had a variable history, moving from a position where it was considered as a very important topic for those responsible for producing texts and matching those texts to the abilities and needs of learners, to its current declining visibility in the education literature. Some important work has been coming from the USA…

This paper reports the observed behaviors and difficulties that eleven precalculus and calculus students exhibited in reading new passages from their mathematics textbooks. To gauge the effectiveness of these students' reading, we asked them to attempt straightforward mathematical tasks, based directly on what they had just read. These …

School science has been criticized for its lack of emphasis on the tentative, dynamic nature of science as a process of learning more about our world. This criticism is the guiding force for this present body of work, which focuses on the question: what are the educational benefits for middle school students of reading texts that highlight the…

Reading in content areas is generally difficult for English-language learners (ELLs), but reading in social studies is particularly challenging for ELLs for several reasons. First, ELLs often lack background information that textbook authors assume readers have. Second, ELLs in the process of learning a new language do not have…

This article discusses methods for evaluating students' content-area literacy skills. Four specific factors that affect content-area literacy are described: vocabulary knowledge, topic knowledge, text structure knowledge, and textbook readability, along with methods of evaluating each of the factors. Most of these methods have not yet been…