This book will help educators rethink their expectations of and practices for developing the literacy skills of Black boys in the elementary school classroom. Tatum shows educators how to bring students' literacy development into greater focus by creating an early intellectual infrastructure of advanced literacy, knowledge, and personal…

The challenge of reading across disciplines is often not a matter of word recognition or general comprehension instruction; it is a matter of understanding how ideas are represented in the language and conventions of that discipline. In this article we describe a strategy for foregrounding the disciplines in the design and implementation of…

This practitioner article describes the recent implementation of critical media literacy (CML) activities in secondary teacher education at a large university in the Southwestern United States. Preservice teachers in a content area literacy course analyzed a variety of media coverage of events that occurred near their university. Using an…

This study aimed at examining context effects of processing science terminology in Chinese during the reading process. The science texts were first chosen, and then they were replaced by science terminology with familiar words; other common words remained in both texts. The results implied that readers spent longer rereading durations and total…

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,…

An elementary-level content area reading course was redesigned using a project-based learning (PBL) model to improve undergraduate pre-service teacher course content instruction. The research question was, "What are college/ university students' perceptions of a project-oriented undergraduate course?" Six university pre-service teachers,…

To a science 'outsider', science language often appears unnecessarily technical and dense. However, scientific language is typically used with the goal of being concise and precise, which allows those who regularly participate in scientific discourse communities to learn from each other and build upon existing scientific knowledge. One essential…

This study examined the outcome expectancy beliefs (beliefs in one's ability to impact students' reading development) of secondary teachers in their content area who were not trained in literacy pedagogy. Results of the study reveal that many in-service secondary teachers lag in reading outcome expectancy beliefs (RTOE).

The purpose of this interpretive, qualitative multi-case study (Merriam, 2001; Stake, 1995) was to describe the experiences of three elementary classroom teachers as they integrated literacy and social studies during their literacy instruction. This study was grounded in an interpretivist paradigm and a theoretical lens of symbolic interactionism.…

Embedding discipline-specific literacy instruction within social studies content can assist a variety of students, including those with reading difficulties, to build higher-level reading abilities, increase knowledge acquisition, and improve their overall content learning. Moreover, many state learning standards already address the need for…

There is a worldwide concern about science and engineering undergraduate students, particularly those who are English language learners, struggling with their entry-level content courses. From a teacher cognition perspective and drawing on semi-structured interviews with chemistry, mathematics and physics teachers at a university in the Middle…

Background: To succeed in school, young children must acquire the domain and vocabulary knowledge needed to read complex texts. Despite the growing literacy demands in the 21 century, fewer than 5% of US school children in the early elementary grades can evaluate complex nonfiction texts and there are larger gaps based on family income and student…

This study explores the disciplinary literacy perspectives of middle school students of color attending urban parochial schools and the reader subject positions they took up across content-area classrooms. Qualitative analysis of 19 student interviews and accompanying observations of subject-area classes revealed that students' constructions of…

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…

In this much-needed book, the authors marshal research and several decades of their own experience to provide instructional practices and activities that will help teachers develop newcomers as readers and writers of English and engage them in content learning across the curriculum. Equally important, they show how teachers can advocate for these…