Although kindergarteners often are excited to share their mathematical ideas, they may not be sure how to explain the underlying reasoning that brought them to their answers. Teachers seeking to use literacy skills in mathematics to support kindergarteners' reasoning can use writing to provide each student an avenue to communicate their individual…

This article addresses key issues in WAC/WID regarding translation and biliteracy. Informed by translingual scholarship, genre studies, and history of the English language research, it first defines translation politically and historically, and as always involving negotiations of meaning-making across linguistic repertoires and genres. It then…

Though discipline-specific approaches to literacy instruction can support adolescents' academic literacy and identity development, scant attention has been paid to ways of targeting such instruction to address individual student needs. Dialogic writing assessment is an approach to conducting writing conferences that foregrounds students' composing…

When the COVID-19 pandemic began to affect in-person schooling, teachers around the world expressed a balance of optimism for new possibilities in instruction along with trepidation at the challenges which lay ahead. Shortly after March 2020 and into the 2021 school year, even 2022 for some, remote instruction became the norm for many educators.…

Becoming more disciplined about teaching disciplinary literacy in our classrooms can be a challenge. Encouraging student production of the academic language and the demands and styles of thinking associated with each discipline requires an additional push that was often overlooked in content area instruction of the past. As this new journey in…

Mathematics teachers often resist generic literacy strategies because they do not seem relevant to math learning. Discipline-specific literacy practices that emerge directly from the math content and processes under study are more likely to be embraced by math teachers. Furthermore, national and state-level mathematics standards as well as Common…

Transitioning from teaching whole number operations to teaching fraction operations can prove difficult, even for the seasoned mathematics teacher. However, with effective literacy practices, teachers can seamlessly shift their students to learning the rules for fractions. The implications can be a mastery of mathematical language used to describe…

Content area literacy and disciplinary literacy are umbrella terms that describe two approaches to literacy instruction embedded within different subject areas or disciplines. Under a content area literacy approach, students learn reading and writing processes that are common across disciplines. As part of content area literacy instruction,…

We designed a professional development (PD) teacher-mentor program that used problem-based learning (PBL) to accomplish two goals. First, teachers explored how PBL could be used effectively in their classrooms to change the way they think about teaching to include literacy development in content areas. Second, PBL was the basis for PD training to…

Education in science and engineering should develop students' ability to read and write domain-specific texts (NRC 2012). Unfortunately, "science teachers are not generally well prepared to help their students penetrate the linguistic puzzles that science texts present" (Snow 2010, p. 452). Thus, Juanita Boliha (a biology teacher) and…

Disciplinary literacy is gaining momentum as an approach to adolescent literacy. Believing that a key aspect of disciplinary literacy is knowledge construction, the authors introduce a model for relating disciplinary literacy with project-based inquiry. Rather than merely exploring topics during inquiry, students use practices of a discipline to…

Various instructional approaches have been laid out for conceptualizing argumentation talk and writing in English classrooms. One prominent, and historically durable, approach is formalist--teachers slot the teaching of argument into a form-based approach, usually using the 5-paragraph theme. This model too often fails to persuade students of the…

Writing and photography are composition processes that help develop children's linguistic and visual competencies, respectively. Using photography in teaching writing has been found to enhance students' literacy skills by naturally invoking their interest and motivation, and eventually strengthening the reading-writing relationship. Children can…

During the past several years, middle schools and high schools have been shifting their attention to disciplinary literacy. The Common Core State Standards are explicit in requiring teachers to teach the literacy of science, literature, and history, and even states that are not part of Common Core (such as Texas) are making this shift as well.…

Educators across the nation have been responding to the push for content-area literacy instruction in their systems. While the press for higher academic standards has sharpened national focus on the reading of complex, discipline-specific informational texts, educators have been grappling with how to help science, social studies, and vocational…