Literacy across the curriculum. ...

Paying attention to the literacy demands of each learning

area ensures that students' literacy development is strengthened so that it supports subject-
based learning. This means that: all teachers are responsible for teaching the subject-
specific literacy of their learning area.

Why are literacy strategies important?

Literacy strategies concern the ability to read, write, and understand text. ... Recent research
in reading instruction has identified six main strategies readers use to make sense of reading:
making connections, visualizing, inferring, questioning, determining importance, and
synthesizing.

What is the purpose of teaching literacy skills?

The ultimate goal of literacy instruction is to build a student's comprehension, writing skills,
and overall skills in communication. Ask yourself, how do I mostly convey the information and
knowledge to my students?
 Title: Literacy Across the Curriculum: Changing Paradigms

Resource Person: Dr. Nemah N. Hermosa, PRIMALS 7-10 National

Training of Chief Trainers

The speaker discussed the following salient points in the video:

1. Each discipline or subject area possesses its own purposes, and ways of using texts that
students should be inducted into. There are special skills and strategies needed for students to
make complete sense of texts from the disciplines. Therefore, instruction must facilitate students’
understanding of these kinds of text, especially in middle school and high school.

2. Literacy is about being able to make sense of and engage in advanced reading, writing,
listening, and speaking. Not to mention viewing, which is one other major communication area in
the new curriculum. It is this definition that we should keep in mind when we speak of literacy
across the curriculum.

3. As literacy skills are understood to be foundational to thinking, teachers are encouraged to

promote literacy as a means of developing thinking skills. However, despite their seeming
convergence and overlap, the terms content area literacy and disciplinary literacy actually refer
to two different theories.

4. Content area literacy is traditionally called content area reading. It is within the over-
all school reading program, which has three major components: developmental reading,
content area reading, and remedial reading. These components are present at all levels
of schooling, from kindergarten through G12.

Developmental reading involves teaching students how to read—the basic processes of

reading and their use in the students’ lives. In the early grades, the focus is on beginning reading,
which teach learners the fundamentals of reading and give them opportunities to become fluent
readers.

In the intermediate grades, developmental concerns shift to advancing students’ word attack
skills and their use of higher levels of comprehension. In high school, students need instruction in
how to work with expository writing, research skills, strategies for finding and using multiple
sources of information, and critical thinking.
 As students go up the curriculum, the emphasis gradually shifts from developmental reading
to content area reading. This refers to reading and writing in content subjects such as math,
science, social studies, and literature.

5. The advancing levels of literacy shows the student going up the curriculum ladder from basic
literacy, to intermediate literacy, and finally, to disciplinary literacy.

6. In merging the old and new paradigms the term content area reading has now given way to
disciplinary literacy. The operative word is “specialized” – that is, literacy skills specialized to history,
science, mathematics, literature, and other subject matter.

7. Specialized and advanced levels of literacy are characteristics of disciplinary literacy.

8. Skills in content area literacy are generalizable across different content areas, while those in
disciplinary literacy are specialized and unique to a particular discipline. Consequently, CAL
provides students with a “toolbox” of strategies to use with any kind of text. In the DL, strategies
depends on the demands of the text and purposes of the discipline.

9. Strategies in DL are aligned with the learning demands and purposes of the discipline. For
example, the use of textbooks may be essential in Science but may be irrelevant in literature.

10. In CAL, we need to learn terminology in all fields that are part of expected general
knowledge, and the same instructional technique, such as graphic organizers, would apply no
matter what the words. On the other hand, in DL, the focus is on the specialized nature of the
subject’s vocabulary.

11. For comprehension and making meaning in CAL, reading and writing are used to study/learn
information – reading to learn. The focus is on learning from text, e.g., not to read like a chemist
but to know how to study books, including chemistry books.

In DL, literacy is used to make meaning within a discipline. The focus is on specialized
problems of a subject area: cultural differences in how information is used, the nature of language
in that discipline, and its demands for precision.

12. CAL often encourages the use of literary text to enhance the learning of content in a
discipline, and to increase student motivation. A usual approach is the use of thematic units and
integrated curriculum.
 DL only focuses on disciplinary texts and for readers to confront the language of the discipline.
Science texts are more often abstract and dense, peppered with technical terms, the use of
nominalization and tightly knit language, and with focus on causation rather than intention.

13. In CAL, graphics are used as adjuncts; interpretive skills are general for pictures, tables,
charts, etc.; no differences across disciplines while in DL, graphics are needed for translation
skills; pictures differ in their role (describing/defining nouns, verbs (processes), relationships).

14. Disciplinary literacy is about teaching students to read like historians, scientists,
mathematicians, and literary critics.

15. For each discipline, students need to learn the specialist vocabulary associated with that area;
how to read and understand its texts; how to communicate knowledge and ideas in appropriate
ways; and how to listen and read critically, assessing the value of what they hear and read.