What Is Disciplinary Literacy and Why Does It Matter

while giving students valuable insights into the nature of science and scientific communication. One of the major benefits attributed to nominalization (and to certain uses of passive voice) is that it shifts the emphasis from social agents to natural agents in the consideration of causation which is a central premise in most scientific endeavors. In contract, history texts and literary texts are more likely to use active voice and they are less likely to focus on nominalized subjects. They, too, are interested in the analysis of causation, but understanding human agency is more central to their purpose. Again, by having students examine these disciplinary choices or relatively specialized patterns of language use, they may be better equipped to deal with the learning demands of the particular disciplines. (There are, of course, variations within social and scientific studies: for example, in most sciences human agency is attenuated, while in ecology and environmental sciences human causation is more important.) And these language differences are only a part of what distinguishes the disciplines. Another example of a disciplinary difference with profound implications for literacy has to do with the role of the author. Research has shown (Shanahan, 1992; Shanahan & Shanahan, under review) clear differences in whether or how those in the various disciplines think about author during reading. For example, it has been shown that in history reading, author is a central construct of interpretation (Wineburg, 1991, 1998). Historians are always asking themselves who this author is and what bias this author brings to the text (somewhat analogous to the lawyer’s common probe, “What did he know and when did he know it?”). Consideration of author is deeply implicated in the process of reading history, and disciplinary literacy experts have hypothesized that “sourcing”: (thinking about the implications of author during interpretation) is an essential history reading process (Wineburg, 1991, 1998) and studies show that it can, at least Disciplinary Literacy 7 under some circumstances, be taught to students in a way that improves their learning (HyndShanahan, Holschuh, & Hubbard, 2004). However, while historians (and history students) must consider a text’s authorial source, research has revealed a very different pattern of reading for scientists (Shanahan & Shanahan, under review). Interviews with chemists have shown that they do rely on author, but more as a topical or quality screen while determining which texts to read. Chemists admit that they use author when they are deciding what to read; they consider the lab an author may be associated with to determine whether a text would be worth the time. But, once reading begins, unlike the historians, scientists try to focus their attention specifically on the text; considerations of author, according to these chemists, should play no part in interpretation of text meaning, something demonstrated in both their think-alouds during reading and in post-reading interviews. This pattern of intentionally ignoring the author was even more evident in the reading done by mathematicians, who explained, almost stridently, that thinking about author would only be a distraction and that it could help in no way within the process of making sense of the text. And, to bring things full circle, whether the author should be considered interpretively has been a matter of great controversy within the field of literary criticism (English) for more than 50 years. Literary theorists have worked long and hard to kill off the author, or at least to elbow him/her aside during interpretation (Brooks & Warren, 1938; Fish, 1980; Foucault, 1979; Gadamer, 1975; Rosenblatt, 1978; Wimsatt & Beardsley, 1946). Thus, some literary critics argue for the close reading of “authorless” texts, much in the fashion of the scientific or mathematical readings described above, while other critics allow for some consideration of the author, at least for making sense of the author’s ideological stance (à la the historical readings already described). Disciplinary Literacy 8 These differences suggest that students must always read history with an eye to the author, while never reading math in that way. Students should use author sparingly in science reading, though never to make sense of the text. When reading literature, they should sometimes interpret the author along with the text and other times, stay to the words of the literature with no consideration of the author at all. The aim of disciplinary literacy is to identify all such readingand writing-relevant distinctions among the disciplines, and to find ways of teaching students to negotiate successfully these literacy aspects of the disciplines. It is an effort, ultimately, to transform students into disciplinary insiders who are able to approach literacy tasks with some sense of agency and with a set of responses and moves that are appropriate to the specialized purposes, demands, and mores of the disciplines. For our purposes here, however, the important distinctions are not the ones separating the disciplines, but those that distinguish content area reading from disciplinary literacy. We have described the idea of disciplinary literacy in some detail. Content area literacy, on the other hand, has been around longer, and is the focus of dozens of textbooks. We should be able to summarize their agenda more efficiently. It is evident from examining several decades’ worth of content area reading/literacy textbooks that the largely-agreed-upon purpose of this approach is to provide students with a collection of generic study skills that will, more or less, boost learning in all disciplines. These approaches help students to preview books (through examinations of tables of context and indices) and chapters (use of subheadings) and to use various print devices (e.g., italics, bolding, font and point variations) to make sense of text. They promote the use of purpose setting and predicting, along with a rich collection of reading processes or strategies (e.g., visualization, Disciplinary Literacy 9 summarization, clarification, questioning), and the use of particular study or teaching devices (e.g., Cornell note-taking, three-level guides, advance organizers). The content area reading agenda aims not so much to help students to read history as an historian might, but simply to read history with some grasp of the information, using a set of learning or study tools that may be implemented in any subject. Its focus is less on providing students with an insider’s perspective of a discipline (and with ways of coping with the unique properties of the disciplines), but rather emphasizes students as students or studiers and strives to provide them with the tools of the student. The Sources of Disciplinary Literacy The roots of the disciplinary literacy concept are three-fold: they can be found in the historical development of content area reading, cognitive analyses of expert readers, and functional linguistics. The history of content area reading has been excellently described (Moore, Readence, & Rickelman, 1983) and we will rely heavily on that treatment. Moore and his colleagues trace its history to the 1920s with the recognition of the importance of reading in content subjects. From the beginning, the emphasis of content area reading was on instructional applications of the relation of reading to content subjects. For instance, the National Committee on Reading explored this topic in the classic 24 th Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education (Whipple, 1925) which provided guidelines and sample lessons emphasizing how to find answers to questions, follow directions, select major ideas, remember, identify key words, self-question, and make notes. As a result of the recognition of the importance of reading in school subjects accorded by the National Committee of Reading, researchers began exploring the issue. According to Moore, Disciplinary Literacy 10 et al. (1983), the studies tended to focus on the identification of important vocabulary in the textbooks from the various subjects, studies of the availability and effectiveness of various instructional procedures, and correlations of comprehension measures based on general and subject specific texts. “Although these reports indicated various degrees of similarity between “general” and “specific” comprehension, all concluded that the subjects presented distinct reading demands” (Moore, Readence, & Rickelman, 1983, p. 429). Thus, despite the fact that their methods of research did not permit differences to be discerned, content area reading researchers typically promoted the notion that reading proficiency would be subject-distinct, and this idea of specialized reading has long been rhetorically honored in pedagogical treatments of content area reading, despite the fact that they have mainly endorsed general approaches to reading that were applicable across all subject matters. Thus, the ironical role that content area reading has played in the development of disciplinary literacy has largely been aspirational. It has pointed towards a theoretical conception of literacy processes specialized to particular disciplines, while fostering a fundamentally different approach: one based upon highly generalizable learning strategies or processes that can be easily adapted and used across different school subjects. A more substantive source for disciplinary literacy emerges from a series of expert reader studies that have been carried out during the past three decades in various disciplines (Shanahan & Shanahan, under review). Drawing on the expert-novice paradigm from the cognitive sciences, these studies have used observations and think-aloud protocols to identify performance differences. In this paradigm individuals are identified who are particularly proficient in some skill, in this case, in the literacy of a particu