Content Area Literacy Instruction
Students will need advanced literacy skills, including the ability to understand and analyze a variety of texts and to write and communicate persuasively, to succeed in life after high school. The articles in this section will help teachers in the academic subject areas integrate literacy instruction into their practice.
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Literacy Instruction in the Content Areas: Getting to the Core of Middle and High School Improvement
Every content area, from chemistry to history, has unique literacy demands: texts, knowledge, skills. But how are these critical literacies learned, let alone taught?
Professional Development to Improve Adolescent Literacy
Beyond general best practices, what sorts of professional development will help teachers improve the literacy of their older students? This article by the National Council of Teachers of English advocates building professional communities among secondary school teachers, encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration and literacy among coaches.
Five Areas of Instructional Improvement to Increase Academic Literacy
How can content-area, non-reading-specialist teachers contribute to academic literacy? They can incorporate these five techniques throughout their lessons: (1) provide explicit instruction and supported practice in effective comprehension techniques, (2) increase the amount and quality of reading content discussions, (3) maintain high standards for text, conversation, questions, and vocabulary, (4) increase student motivation and engagement with reading, and (5) provide essential content knowledge to support student mastery of critical concepts. Find out why these strategies, and the literacy areas they represent, are so important.
Word-level Interventions for Struggling Adolescent Readers
This article, excerpted from the report Academic Literacy Instruction for Adolescents: A Guidance Document from the Center on Instruction, advocates that teachers spend less time focusing on specific reading fluency and accuracy targets, since those vary significantly depending upon the purpose of the reading, and instead use reading interventions with demonstrated impacts on adolescent fluency and accuracy.
Reading Comprehension Strategies for English Language Learners
Explicit teaching of reading comprehension skills will help students apply these strategies to all subject matter.
Critical Thinking: Why is it so hard to teach?
Learning "critical thinking skills" can only take a student so far. Critical thinking depends on knowing relevant content very well-and thinking about it, repeatedly. Here are five strategies, consistent with the research, to help bring critical thinking into the everyday classroom.
Reading and Writing in the Academic Content Areas
This issue brief from the Alliance for Excellent Education looks at the role every middle and high school teacher must play to help older students become fully literate, and puts forth a four-part agenda for improving literacy in the content areas.
Academic Language: Everyone's "Second" Language
Being able to speak English fluently does not guarantee that a student will be able to use language effectively in academic settings. Fluency must be combined with higher order thinking skills to create an "academic language," which allows students to effectively present their ideas in a way that others will take seriously. The author, an ELL teacher, describes her use of "protocols" (a cheat sheet of sentence starters) to build students' cognitive academic language proficiency.
Knowledge in the Classroom
Learning happens when we connect new information to what we already know. When children have limited knowledge about the world, they have a smaller capacity to learn more about it. Here are four ways teachers can build content knowledge that will expand the opportunity for students to forge new connections — and make them better independent readers and learners.
Professional Development: The Route to Reform
A discussion of factors-sustained "deep learning," connection to actual classroom instruction and collaboration with peers-that can help educators teach literacy within their content area.
