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…

The current study examined the relations among key variables that underlie reading comprehension of expository science texts in a diverse population of adult native English readers. Using Mechanical Turk to sample a range of adult readers, the study also examined the effect of text presentation on readers' comprehension and knowledge structure…

This three-year study focuses on 42 pre-service teachers' perspectives on integrating literacy into their content area teaching. Pre-service teachers described time as an influential factor shaping their teaching practices, and, we found, that perceptions of time influenced pre-service teachers' reported ability and willingness to plan for and…

In this piece, the authors offer two illustrations of central features of disciplinary literacy teaching. One illustration describes an episode of history literacy teaching, and the other describes an episode of physics literacy teaching. Both examples show how teachers may support students' development of disciplinary inquiry, disciplinary…

When projects are the spine of a course, they are systematically sequenced one after the other, and they do the heavy lifting of the course. They teach its core content and skills. The author has been testing this model of course design for several years, aiming for experiential learning that is tied to deep rather than superficial learning of…

Reading comprehension refers to elementary children's levels of understandings of written text. Building on Bloom's Taxonomy (Bloom, Engelhart, Furst, Hill, & Krathwohl, 1956), children can understand text at various levels including the literal, inferential, application, and evaluation. When teachers build on the levels of reading…

Literacy is the foundation for success in school and society. An essential goal of every school is to help every student read, write and think critically. Dedicated teachers are the catalyst for reaching this goal. The Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) developed a literacy professional learning model to better support these dedicated…

We examined the response of high school students in Israel to biographical texts. Students were exposed to three sub-genres of biographical texts (a literary-biographical text, an autobiographical text and a scientific-biographical text). These texts all differ from the conceptual schema of ordinary school texts. The data were collected from 64…

Reading comprehension models are being implemented in content-area settings to boost reading achievement. Yet, little research explores how such models are incorporated into teachers' daily instructional practice. The authors used extended observations and interviews to examine the integration of Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR), an…

Recent studies support the use of differentiated instruction (DI) to improve literacy in content area classrooms. At the same time, research has found that few teachers implement DI purposefully or consistently. Accordingly, a case study design was used to explore middle school content area teachers' understanding and implementation of DI for…

Learning content-specific vocabulary is critical for students especially in content areas such as science. However, direct vocabulary instruction is lacking in many classrooms. This case study examined vocabulary instructional strategies within a 6th grade science classroom. The following questions were addressed: (1) What science vocabulary…

This article centers on the results of a two-year study of a museum-university partnership conducted with 81 secondary preservice student teachers enrolled in a large public university in the Midwestern United States. The focus is on preservice student teachers' experiences working in a large urban museum which also houses a public middle school…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of student-generated drawing and imagination on learning recall, learning transfer, and cognitive load, and also students' attitudes towards the learning strategies when learning a computer-based science text, compared to learning with provided pictures. The study used three groups: drawing…

The Common Core State Standards for English language arts expect that teachers will use narrative and informational texts to teach content area material across the curriculum. However, many teachers at all grade levels struggle to incorporate both kinds of text, especially given the vast amount of specialized content they are required to teach.…