Disciplinary literacy strategies in mathematics lessons are essential and may be embedded in three necessary parts of the lesson: before reading, during reading, and after reading. In this article, we highlight disciplinary literacy strategies that middle school mathematics teachers might implement to guide students to increased mathematical…

Content area literacy has an important role in helping students understand content in specific disciplines, such as mathematics. Although the strategies are not unique to each individual content area, they are often adapted for use in a specific discipline. For example, mathematicians use mathematical language to make sense of new ideas and…

Despite the growing body of literature emphasizing the specialized literacy practices within the disciplines, the literature concerning how to prepare preservice teachers for disciplinary literacy instruction is less clear. In this article, we present a mentorship model for content area teacher preparation that Steve (first author) developed and…

Recent scholarship on secondary reading calls for a shift from teaching generic literacy strategies to teaching discipline-specific language and literacy practices (Fang & Schleppegrell, 2008; Moje, 2008; Shanahan & Shanahan, 2012). This call for disciplinary literacy instruction (DLI) reflects the growing recognition that literacy…

Concerns about adolescent literacy continue to be highlighted in regards to the challenges of reading and learning from academic text. Recent efforts to address these concerns have led to an examination of the disciplines and their specialized ways of thinking and using language. In this article I discusses a metalinguistic protocol in a…

Within an evidentiary framework for operationally defining academic English language proficiency (AELP), linguistic analyses of standards, classroom discourse, and textbooks have led to specifications for assessment of AELP. The test development process described here is novel due to the emphasis on using linguistic profiles to inform the …