Vocabulary is a building block of understanding, especially in science classrooms where language abilities are mixed. To reduce academic inequalities, approaches to vocabulary instruction need to demonstrate benefits for students across learning contexts. We summarize the results from the first unit, "Earth Systems and Catastrophic…

Students with intellectual disability often receive limited explicit instruction in comprehension strategies. The current study evaluated the effects of a multi-component literacy intervention designed to improve comprehension of high school students with moderate intellectual disability on adapted expository science text. The multi-component…

The transition from high school to college is challenging for many students, especially first-generation college students. College courses require disciplinary specific reading, writing, and thinking skills not often taught in high school, such as reading and analyzing complex texts and constructing original arguments in discipline-specific…

This single instrument case study illuminates the aesthetic transactions an adolescent male student constructs in response to an experimental Gothic studies reading unit implemented by his cooperating teacher over a sixth month period in his seventh grade ELA (English/ Language Arts) class. Ray is described as ''lazy' regarding academic reading…

Designed to help instructional leaders deliver effective training to teachers, this guide provides one of four evidence-based recommendations for supporting literacy among English learner students in grades 4-8. It includes practical application ideas and examples, as well as resources for immediate implementation. This guide is based on…

This article shares findings from the implementation of an ongoing National Professional Development (NPD) project that advances second language literacy and biliteracy in secondary content areas. The project is part of a research-practice partnership between a large public university and two school districts in south Texas that engages in-service…

What happens when middle and high school teachers who know their content very well are told they should be teaching reading and writing too? Is there a bit of resistance? A decrease in self-efficacy? An overturning of curricula? In "Disciplinary Literacy in Action," ReLeah Cossett Lent and Marsha Voigt show us a better way. In this…

The ability to comprehend science texts is not only an academic skill but a life skill. Currently, however, the majority of students across grade levels in the United States are reading below grade level "and" have science achievement below grade level. The text structure strategy, a reading comprehension strategy in which students are…

Teachers' collaboration and interaction experiences combine great opportunities to exchange knowledge and skills to boost the rigor of lesson plans and impact student learning. This study explores pre-service and in-service teacher collaborations and their interactions in an attempt to create a Scaffolded Reading Lesson SRL plan for grade twelve…

Presenting text in digital format with annotation supports may relieve some of the cognitive load that hinders inferential comprehension for students with comprehension deficits. Science texts are particularly difficult, as the content may not be within the knowledge repertoire of a reader. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects…

This study investigated the approximations of disciplinary literacy in high school English Language Arts students' writing. To study the development of these disciplinary conventions, the portfolios of written literary analyses were examined from fourteen twelfth-grade students over their last two years in high school. The conceptual framework for…

Designed to help instructional leaders deliver effective training to teachers, this guide provides one of four evidence-based recommendations for supporting literacy among English learner students in grades 4-8. It includes practical application ideas and examples, as well as resources for immediate implementation. This guide is based on…

This practitioner article describes the recent implementation of critical media literacy (CML) activities in secondary teacher education at a large university in the Southwestern United States. Preservice teachers in a content area literacy course analyzed a variety of media coverage of events that occurred near their university. Using an…

This study examined the outcome expectancy beliefs (beliefs in one's ability to impact students' reading development) of secondary teachers in their content area who were not trained in literacy pedagogy. Results of the study reveal that many in-service secondary teachers lag in reading outcome expectancy beliefs (RTOE).

Embedding discipline-specific literacy instruction within social studies content can assist a variety of students, including those with reading difficulties, to build higher-level reading abilities, increase knowledge acquisition, and improve their overall content learning. Moreover, many state learning standards already address the need for…