In this essay, we described how we use mentor texts (MTs) to foster students' disciplinary literacy--reading, writing, thinking, and performing abilities in an area related to their problem of practice. We did this by carefully creating scaffolded learning experiences affording them with multiple, situated learning opportunities over time that…

Adolescent readers require a broad range of reading skills to deal with the challenges of reading complex text. Some researchers argue for a discipline-specific focus to address the low reading proficiency rates among secondary students. Disciplinary literacy attends to the different ways disciplines, such as science, generate and communicate…