In this experimental study we examined the effects of integrating teacher-directed knowledge-building and student-regulated comprehension practices in 7th- to 10th-grade English language arts classes. We also investigated the effect of instructional quality and whether integrating practices differentially benefitted students with lower entry-level…

The focus of this qualitative multi-year case study is on preservice teachers' experiences related to the development of their literacy practices in teaching high school science, math, social studies and other content area courses during their final field placement in a teacher education program. Results indicate tangible indicators of overall…

In October 2010, WestEd's Strategic Literacy Initiative (SLI) won an i3 "Validation" grant to scale up and validate the Reading Apprenticeship (RA) model in three core secondary content area classes: U.S. history, biology, and English language arts. SLI's proposal stated two goals. Goal 1: To transform academic literacy teaching and…

One path to improving adolescents' literacy skills is to integrate reading and writing into the content areas in which such work occurs. Although argumentative writing has been found to help students understand historical content and transform information, scholars do not know the influence of specific task structures on students' writing or…

The authors present a case study of a world history teacher's mediation of her students' world historical thinking and writing through unit-level cognitive tools. They analyze both scaffolding and disciplinary tools that the teacher constructed for her students in order to improve their world historical thinking, and the degree to which the…

In this study I explore one cohort of secondary history and social science preservice teachers' conceptions of disciplinary literacy in history and the extent to which these ideas influenced the reading instructional approaches they used with their middle and high school students. I investigate how these preservice teachers' conceptions…

This study investigated the online process of reading and the offline learning from an illustrated science text. The authors examined the effects of using a concrete or abstract picture to illustrate a text and adopted eye-tracking methodology to trace text and picture processing. They randomly assigned 59 eleventh-grade students to 3 reading…

The purpose of this study was to answer the following research questions: (1) Do secondary social studies pre-service teachers incorporate literacy strategies in their work samples during student teaching? (2) To what extent and under what conditions do secondary social studies pre-service teachers use higher levels of literacy strategies in their…

This study investigates how teachers interact with immigrant-origin youth in school-based contexts of reception that mediate youth's educational opportunities. One understudied context is sheltered instruction, where English learners (ELs) are placed into separate content-area courses to target their linguistic needs. This qualitative study…

This article discusses the benefits of using picture books with adolescent readers, describes strategies that can be taught with picture books, and provides examples of books the author has used. Some of the topics discussed include: reading comprehension, visual literacy, interactive read-aloud with facilitative talk, literary elements, and…

Secondary school teachers face remarkable challenges when they are asked to incorporate language objectives because the traditional approach to the education of English Language Learners (ELL) separates English language development from content instruction. The underlying assumption is that English language proficiency is a prerequisite for…

The purpose of this qualitative action research study was to explore content area teachers' understanding of literacy, the strategies they use in working with content materials to support their students' learning of content, and how collaboration with a literacy expert informs literacy instruction. In my work with content area teachers,…

In an attempt to address perceived shortcomings in traditional content-area literacy preparation, an interdisciplinary group of teacher education faculty developed an approach called "content-driven literacy" (CDL), which was applied to the design of courses to prepare preservice secondary science and social studies teachers. This article…

This article describes how a literacy learning community model was developed between two high school partnership sites and a large southern public university, and how teacher collaboration and shared learning across content areas in the first year impacted teachers' learning about literacy instruction and their school's vision for literacy.…

Content area teachers at the secondary level often complain that the students are unwilling or unable to read and comprehend the textbooks. Yet these teachers have seldom had instruction in the teaching of reading. They state that teaching of reading is someone else's job. They state that they need to progress through the entire textbook, and that…