This article reports on recent research which found that academic communication skills are a problem for a surprisingly large proportion of English-speaking Australian students. Despite the widely-held recognition of the importance of academic literacy instruction in Australian higher education, literacy skills have previously been largely…

In this study, we investigated the literacy practices of undergraduate calculus students and non-mathematics STEM faculty members as they read excerpts from a calculus textbook. We found several differences in their practices that appeared to be tied to the didactical nature of the excerpts and the participants' identities and power relationships…

The newly revised Third Edition of "Reading for Understanding: How Reading Apprenticeship Improves Disciplinary Learning in Secondary and College Classrooms" is the latest iteration of the best-selling, landmark book in the field of adolescent literacy. The book contains strategies for boosting the reading independence of middle,…

With policies that strongly emphasize reading, teachers need interdisciplinary strategies that not only represent professional scientists' practices but also support students' engagement and learning in both science and reading. Opportunities abound for teachers to help students recognize the fluid connections between disciplines such as science,…

In this exploratory case study, the authors employed an "interpretive communities" lens to investigate the ways in which 12 high school English teachers of one district read and reasoned with literary works. Primary data sources were verbal protocol interviews and semistructured interviews. Analysis revealed that the focal teachers…

This paper takes up key questions of this special issue regarding tensions and challenges in the field of literacy education by exploring how literary knowledge and skills intersect with subject area teachers' disciplinary ontologies and epistemologies. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's thinking tools, we analyse how literacy across the curriculum has…

In this study, we focused on the implementation of a disciplinary literacy inquiry unit with a group of sixth-grade students. Guided by us, students learned about a local budgetary crisis, researched subtopics of interest to them (e.g., the effect of budget cuts on school athletics), and then wrote letters to their state's governor sharing their…

We developed a sustained content literacy intervention that emphasized building domain and topic knowledge from Grade 1 to Grade 2 and evaluated transfer effects on students' reading comprehension outcomes. The Model of Reading Engagement (MORE) intervention emphasizes thematic lessons that provide an intellectual framework for helping students…

In this essay, authors Todd Reynolds, Leslie S. Rush, Jodi P. Lampi, and Jodi Patrick Holschuh provide a disciplinary heuristic that bridges literary and literacy theories. The secondary English language arts (ELA) classroom is situated at the intersection between literary theory and literacy theory, where too often literary theory does not…

The purpose of this mixed-method case study is to determine the effect that a grade-wide literacy intervention program implemented through a professional learning community (PLC)has on the motivation, literacy identity, and performance of a cohort of sixth-grade students at a middle school in Norwalk, California. In this study, team of sixth-grade…

Integrating content-area and literacy instruction in primary-grade classrooms creates authentic and engaging opportunities for students to build background knowledge and literacy skills. Furthermore, when students engage in meaningful dialogue about content-area topics they can discuss complex ideas and use content-specific vocabulary. These…

Reading problems among students in Nigeria prompted the implementation of a literacy across the curriculum initiative in a cluster of schools within a district, where all teachers were required to integrate literacy strategies into their lessons. The problem investigated in this study was that the teachers' instruction of science at Beta Schools…

Research supports the finding that middle school students prefer hands-on activities to reading and writing to learn new information. However, disciplinary literacy, the reading and writing in science class, is an integral part of inquiry-based science instruction and a necessary complement to hands-on instruction to build student understanding.…

Due to the implementation of No Child Left Behind and the Common Core State Standards, disciplinary literacy has become a vital component of social studies instruction in middle and secondary classrooms. This paper determines the degree to which nine middle and high school social studies teachers were successful in designing integrated learning…

We investigated the effectiveness of a sustained and spiraled content literacy intervention that emphasizes building domain and topic knowledge schemas and vocabulary for elementary-grade students. The Model of Reading Engagement (MORE) intervention underscores thematic lessons that provide an intellectual structure for helping students connect…