Disciplinary Literacy: Providing Students with the Literacy Tools to Succeed Across Disciplines

Now more than ever it is important to help adolescents with reading and writing, as two thirds of middle school and high school students struggle with reading and writing in various content areas (Carnegie Council on Advancing Adolescent Literacy, 2010). There are no specific rules informing readers the “right” way to approach a text, not even in the Common Core State Standards. How can we ask students to closely read texts in several disciplines without having explained how to do so? We are setting our students up for failure if we neglect teaching them how to read across disciplines. In an effort to understand how teachers implement literacy strategies across disciplines, I examined research articles on the implementation of disciplinary literacy and the effects of literacy strategies in mathematics, English, science, and history curriculum. Additionally, further research is necessary to explore literacy teaching in other content areas as well as a closer examination of other literacy strategies to determine the effects and advantages of literacy teaching.