The Role of the Academic Disciplines in Fostering Literacy

Each academic discipline has its own literacy requirements that are related to "knowing" and demonstrating how much one knows about that discipline. Middle and high school courses in the disciplines also can contribute to students’ development of more general literacy skills. It is important to understand not only the literacy demands of the various disciplines but also the way that students learn how to perform in those disciplines and demonstrate their achievement within as well as across them. Such understandings can inform teachers, administrators, and policymakers about: 1) how writing, reading, and classroom discussion can work together to develop literacy skills; 2) the relationship between the literacy demands of national standards and the adequacy of current classroom practices and available materials related to preparing students to meet those standards; and 3) how students, especially those with limited English proficiency, learn how to productively participate in and learn from class discussions.

Three primary sets of studies addressed these questions.

• A large-scale quantitative study, examined ninth-grade English and social studies classrooms to determine the relationship between classroom discourse and student literacy achievement.  This study resulted in several reports and articles including
  
  - Towards an Ecology of Learning: A Case of Classroom Discourse and Its Effects on Writing Development (Report, 1998)
  - Talking about Writing, Writing about Talk: A Neglected Resource for Learning (Article, pp. 4-5, English Update Newsletter, Fall 1997)
  - Questions in Time: Investigating the Structure and Dynamics of Unfolding Classroom Discourse (Report, 2001)
  -  High School English: A National Portrait. (Article Abstract, 2002-3)
  -  The Production of Achievement Inequality in High School English (Article Abstract, 2002)
   
• The second study closely analyzed the literacy demands of the national science and mathematics standards and related curricula and includes the following reports and articles:
  
  -  Literacy Components in National Science and Mathematics Standards Documents: Communication and Reasoning (Report, 1998)
  -  Mathematics and Science Teachers' Experiences with Assessment as an Instructional Design Process (Online Article, 2001)
  -  The Unseen Social and Cultural Substance of Written Responses in Mathematics (Online Article, 2000)
  -  Bringing the Science Assessment Standards into the Classroom (Online Article)
  -  Do the National Mathematics and Science Standards Really Call for . . . Literacy? (Article, p. 2, English Update Newsletter, Fall 1997)

• And the third examined classroom interactions in several inner city classrooms to find the ways in which those students who stay in school learn how to take part in and learn from the subject matter discourse. This work has been reported in several articles, including
  
  -  A Special Issue of Linguistics and Education on “Popular Culture and Classroom Language Learning,”  14(3-4), 2003
  -  Negotiating Relevance: A Piece in the Puzzle of Academic Talk (Article, pp. 4-5 English Update Newsletter, Winter 1998)