November 2002 | Volume 60 | Number 3

Reading and Writing in the Content Areas

Beyond 3rd Grade

Marge Scherer

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From Efficient Decoders to Strategic Readers

Richard T. Vacca

As students enter the middle and high school years, many of them do not receive the instructional support they need to become strategic readers—readers who can activate prior knowledge before, during, and after reading; decide what is important in a text; synthesize information; draw inferences during and after reading; ask questions; and self-monitor and repair faulty comprehension. The author sees evidence of a growing awareness that content-area reading instruction is the responsibility of all teachers. He describes how a high school history teacher incorporates two common literacy strategies—graphic organizers and word exploration—into his instruction. With increased professional development, the author predicts that content-area teachers will make more effective use of strategies to support students' content-area literacy.

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The Challenge of Content-Area Reading: A Conversation with Donna Ogle

Marcia D'Arcangelo

A past president of the International Reading Association, Donna Ogle describes the progress that middle and high schools have made thus far in making reading part of the curriculum. Very much a challenge in discipline-based schools, teaching reading strategies improves students' understanding of the subjects and increases overall achievement. Ogle describes strategies for teaching reading before, during, and after the process and explains how to set up schoolwide programs for teaching reading in the content areas.

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You Can't Learn Much from Books You Can't Read

Richard L. Allington

The author offers two possible reasons that so many students in grades 5–12 struggle with content-area learning: the mismatch between the reading levels of content-area textbooks and students' reading abilities; and the reliance on these textbooks as the main instructional resource for all students. He describes how exemplary teachers avoid these problems by providing multiple levels of instructional resources, offering students options in what they learn and how they demonstrate their learning, and individualizing instruction.

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Getting Started: Manageable Literacy Practices

Gay Ivey

Most language arts classrooms make good use of several key strategies to help students become motivated and skillful readers—appropriate reading materials, instruction in thoughtful reading, and extended time to read. Students rarely encounter these strategies in their content-area classes, however. The author describes how content-area teachers can apply each of these three strategies to create productive learning experiences for all students. She advocates that instructional leaders integrate the three practices into professional development for content-area teachers, instead of inundating content-area teachers with an array of textbook-reading strategies that might not be relevant to their particular subject areas.

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Teaching Reading in Mathematics and Science

Mary Lee Barton, Clare Heidema and Deborah Jordan

Of all the content-area texts that elementary and secondary school students read, mathematics and science are arguably the most difficult because of their conceptual density and unfamiliar style. Helping students with mathematics and science text is not the same as teaching students to read; rather, it's helping students make sense of—and learn from—science and mathematics text. The authors suggest a variety of reading and learning strategies that enhance reading to learn in three ways: activating prior content knowledge, mastering vocabulary, and making sense of unfamiliar text styles.

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A Culture of Literacy in Science

Donna Hooker Topping and Roberta Ann McManus

A middle school science teacher creates a culture of literacy in her classroom by engaging students in reading and writing. Strategies include a classroom library of nontextbook science readings, reading aloud from nontextbook science books, scaffolding the reading of difficult texts, and using standard language arts strategies—reading guides, KWL, SQ3R, and RAFT, for example. The school supports literacy by requiring all adults and students in the school to engage in sustained silent reading time once a week. By imparting the processes of learning and passion for literacy, the science teacher creates a community of readers and writers.

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Making Reading Relevant for Adolescents

Thomas W. Bean

Reading among adolescents is in decline, both inside and outside of school. The materials adolescents experience in school often do not reflect the issues and interests that are important to students and do little to motivate students to read for recreation. Educators must address this problem because time spent reading is related to academic success, vocabulary development, standardized test performances, attitudes towards reading for pleasure, and the development of knowledge abut the world. Some ideas to make reading appealing to adolescents include pairing classic literature with similarly themed young adult fiction; building a classroom library that addresses the curriculum and the needs of students; providing time for sustained silent reading; start book clubs; and using Venn diagrams, dinner party, and readers' theater techniques to explore issues in literature.

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The Internet Reader

Jim Burke

As educators begin to find useful ways to incorporate the Internet into the classroom, they find themselves aligning what students want to do—work online—with what educators want students to do: inquire, evaluate, investigate, and construct. The author provides questioning strategies to help students prepare to search the Internet and to critically examine their resources. He describes two “digital textbooks” that he has created to help students develop an understanding of how different texts—poetry, prose, video documentary, images—work and to help inspire discussions among students with weak academic skills.

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Questioning the Author: Making Sense of Social Studies

Isabel L. Beck and Margaret G. McKeown

Students often have a hard time making sense of their social studies textbooks—partly because these texts commonly lack explanation and connection among ideas and events. The authors describe Questioning the Author, an instructional approach that teachers can use to help students construct understanding as they read. This approach presents texts as “just someone's ideas written down,” and makes students aware of the fallible author who may not always succeed in creating an understandable text. As classes read through a segment of text, teachers stop to pose queries that prompt student discussions leading to a deeper understanding of information in the text. After more than 10 years working with teachers to implement this strategy, Beck and McKeown say that Questioning the Author enhances student engagement and reading comprehension.

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Aren't These Books for Little Kids?

Linda Webb Billman

Educators frequently perceive picture books, which are often marketed to young children, to be mostly simple illustrations and shallow text. In reality, many picture books—especially those related to historical events—are more appropriate for intermediate and secondary school students than younger students. Picture books usually contain 32 pages, pictures appear on every page or double-page spread, and both the text and pictures work together to create meaning. Picture books can bring depth to a topic, personalize events and people, and present challenging ideas to both advanced and remedial readers. The books can be used effectively with intermediate and secondary school students in a unit on World War II; the article includes classroom ideas and a bibliography of appropriate picture books.

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Learning in the Park

Sylvia C. Chard and Marilyn E. Flockhart

Teachers across North America are under pressure to spend more time on a wide range of reading and writing activities, in addition to addressing other content area. The Gray's Lake Park project helped four teachers with mixed-age classes of 4th and 5th grade students in a Des Moines, Iowa, elementary school respond to district demands for effective language arts programming. Using the project approach, their 12-week study of a local park offered diverse opportunities for students to learn and employ reading and writing skills as they observed wildlife, studied a small lake, considered the construction of a bridge, investigated the use and maintenance of the trails, and discussed community social and environmental issues. In addition to language arts, the project addressed language arts, history, geography, ecology, math, science, and health requirements in the district's 4th and 5th grades curriculums

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Reading, Writing, and Understanding

Vicki A. Jacobs

Many secondary content-area teachers are reluctant to integrate reading and writing in their instruction because they feel that reading and writing skills are add-ons to their central job of teaching content knowledge. The author discusses secondary reading-to-learn and writing-to-learn as processes that support an instructional goal common to all content areas: understanding. Staff development for content-area literacy, she writes, should make teachers aware of the ways various reading and writing strategies can support this central instructional goal.

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Putting Gel Pen to Paper

Michael M. Yell

Teachers know that students should write and write often. But, they ask, how can we get our students writing every day and still meet the requirements of a full (and growing) curriculum? What teachers need are strategies that engage students in daily writing and augment their learning by extending—rather than adding to—the curriculum. Such strategies, embedded in teachers' regular instruction, help students build concise, information-rich sentences and paragraphs that simultaneously express what they have learned and develop their writing skills. Teachers across the curriculum can use these strategies to get their students writing every day.

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Advanced Math? Write!

Sister M. Luka Brandenburg

Forcing students to demonstrate their comprehension of mathematical concepts through writing is difficult, but worthwhile. A teacher should start introducing writing assignments a few at a time, be firm with the students, make the writing assignments count for a grade, and forewarn colleagues of impending due dates. As a pay-off, students become mathematically literate, formulating and expressing their thinking concisely and ultimately deepening their understanding and retention.

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Seven Literacy Strategies That Work

Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey and Douglas Williams

Hoover High School in San Diego, California, was a school in trouble, with the county's lowest achievement scores. In 1999, a staff development committee of teachers, administrators, and San Diego State University colleagues identified seven literacy strategies for content area instruction across the curriculum: read-alouds (or shared reading), KWL charts, graphic organizers, vocabulary instruction, writing to learn, structured notetaking, and reciprocal teaching. The expectation was that every teacher would implement these strategies and that these strategies would be clear to students. The authors describe the continuous staff development, provide examples of how the strategies worked in classrooms of different subject areas, and cite the increased levels of student achievement.

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A Superintendent Returns to Her Roots

Marjorie E. Castro

A superintendent of schools returns to hands-on teaching as she mentors a group of 5th grade students for a Student Inquiry Project on architecture. Castro describes her feelings of apprehension, excitement, and gratification while working with the students on the research project, and ultimately confirms that a close involvement with all aspects of teaching and learning profoundly enriches not only the student, but also the educator.

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International Learning in a High School Academy

Mary Elin Barnish

The World Languages and International Studies Academy operates as a school-within-a-school, providing a global studies curriculum to approximately 200 high school students. The program focuses on world languages, international perspectives, technology, and an integrated curriculum. Features of the program include a one-and-a-half-period language block each day, enabling students to complete six years of Japanese, Spanish, or German; student exchange programs with sister schools in Japan, Germany, Mexico, and Spain; study of international business topics; and community service activities. The author discusses challenges that the program has encountered, including scheduling problems and tensions between Academy faculty and regular high school teachers.

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Tools, Not Virtues

Harry Stein

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Integrating Literacy with Content

John H. Holloway

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An Explosive Debate: The Bipolar Child

Steven C. Schlozman

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RAND Report on Reading Comprehension

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Letter to the Editor

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Your Turn

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ASCD Community in Action

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Web Wonders / Reading and Writing in the Content Areas

Christy Thorp

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Study Guide / EL Extra

Deborah Perkins-Gough

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