Disciplinary Literacy and Responsible Reading

Teaching disciplinary literacy through historical inquiry: Training teachers in disciplinary literacy and historical inquiry instructional practices

Classroom dialogue is known to be linked to students’ learning outcomes. However, in the science education literature, there is no theoretical tool to characterise types of dialogues that specifically foster students’ disciplinary literacy and practices. Equipping science educators with a disciplinary coding scheme can enhance teachers’ competence in orchestrating productive classroom dialogue. Extending from the Toolkit for Systematic Educational Dialogue Analysis (T-SEDA), we constructed a SciT-SEDA that characterises domain-specific and domain-general dialogues through iterative analysis and examination of classroom data of four teachers, two of whom had received formal teacher training in science education while the other two had not. SciT-SEDA encompasses 20 dialogue categories that are distributed across 4 general themes regarding their functions in relation to dialogic space. We provide evidence that SciT-SEDA is sensitive in identifying differences between trained and untrained teachers. Hence, we propose that SciT-SEDA can be incorporated into teacher training programs that build science teachers’ competence in orchestrating classroom dialogue in promoting students’ disciplinary literacy and practices.

Much of what we know about disciplinary literacy is focused on applications for middle and secondary English, math, science, and history classrooms. Some even suggest that disciplinary literacy instruction, because of its focus on written discourse practices, cannot begin earlier than middle school. Very little has been written about what, if any, disciplinary literacy pedagogy might be applicable in the early grades. What if the key to moving forward in understanding the pedagogy of disciplinary literacy is to start with the youngest learners? This chapter provides a theoretical link between early childhood education and secondary disciplinary literacy practices. It outlines key practices of disciplinary thinking exemplified in intentional play pedagogy in early childhood classrooms. Connections between these key practices and applications in a secondary history classroom show how the foundations of disciplinary literacy are laid in early childhood.

ABSTRACTEducational reform needs to address the role of literacy in science if there is to be any hope of achieving the goal of literacy for all U.S. students. For reading to play a more prominent role in secondary science, teacher education programs need to develop and offer courses that familiarize preservice science teachers with disciplinary literacy. This study examines this question: What tacit reading strategies do preservice science teachers use to understand science texts? This study focuses on structured literacy activities designed to engage preservice secondary science teachers in reading 3 common genres of science texts. Analysis reveals that preservice science teachers use a variety of general comprehension strategies that are consistent with expert reading strategies. Also, preservice science teachers employ reading strategies that attend to genre-specific text features to understand texts. These findings could be used by science teacher educators to inform the design of science methods and disciplinary literacy courses that scaffold the development of pedagogical content knowledge necessary to teach reading as a disciplinary practice.

Purpose: To present small cases of teachers who undertook inquiry-based collaborative work to implement and refine disciplinary literacy instruction in various content areas. Design: Disciplinary literacy is explored alongside best practices in teacher professional learning, since disciplinary literacy is an instructional shift. This chapter addresses the question of how teachers might use an exemplary collaboration process to identify and test promising disciplinary literacy instructional practices. Findings: Findings from various research projects point toward inquiry and collaboration as promising mechanisms for refining instruction to make it more disciplinary in purpose and implementation. Practical Implications: The authors argue that disciplinary literacy is a relatively new conception of literacy skills in various content areas, and therefore jumping immediately to exemplary practices is unwise. Instead the authors recommend collaboration and inquiry as tools to generate and refine practices thoughtfully over time.

This study reports qualitative findings related to elementary preservice teachers’ perceptions and use of a six-phased planning approach, titled Planning for Elementary Digitally-Supported Disciplinary Literacy, to integrate digitally supported disciplinary literacy into lesson planning. Preservice teachers in this study were seeking PK-6 licensure and were enrolled in a semester-long graduate-level course focused on disciplinary and content literacy, with an emphasis on the integration of digital tools to support disciplinary literacy. The phased approach considered Core Disciplinary Practices to scaffold preservice teachers’ planning. An inductive qualitative approach was used to collect and analyze data. Thematic results explore preservice teachers’ negotiations of knowledge of print and digital texts and tools to plan for disciplinary literacy, preservice teachers’ perceptions regarding complexities of disciplinary literacy in elementary grades, and the idea of core disciplinary practices as a gateway for a reconsideration of literacy. These results provide implications for how elementary teachers might be supported in integrating disciplinary literacy into their classrooms in a manner that aligns with the goals and constructs of elementary education.

Purpose This study aims to examine the adoption of English medium instruction (EMI) in Moroccan higher education by exploring university students’ perceptions and experiences in an English-taught Health Sciences program at the University of Mohammed VI for Health Sciences in Casablanca. Design/methodology/approach The study follows a qualitative research design, drawing on the principles and techniques of Grounded Theory methodology. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with 20 undergraduate students enrolled in the EMI health sciences program. Findings Findings indicate that the participants perceive their EMI experience positively and advocate for its expansion in Moroccan higher education institutions (HEIs). Most students believed EMI improves their English proficiency and disciplinary literacy without compromising their content learning. Practical implications A phased implementation of self-selected EMI programs alongside existing programs is more appropriate for the Moroccan context to allow students to choose the medium that aligns with their language abilities and career aspirations. To support student success, English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses should be integrated into EMI programs, offering targeted language instruction to help students overcome language difficulties and enhance their disciplinary literacy. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first empirical investigation of EMI in health sciences in Moroccan HEIs. It contributes to the limited volume of research on EMI in Moroccan HEIs. Additionally, the study’s findings offer recommendations for lecturers, institutions and policymakers to enhance the effectiveness of EMI in the Moroccan context.

This case study investigated disciplinary literacy specific to the trades from a sociocultural perspective. Four community college faculty (diesel marine technology, mechatronics, and mathematics) participated in a disciplinary literacy learning community where they unpacked the discourse of their discipline, identified what it meant to be a member of their discipline, enhanced an assignment to address disciplinary literacy, and reflected on their experiences. We used open and axial coding and constant comparative analysis to analyze focus group interviews, faculty reflective journals, enhanced assignments, session documents, and researcher observations. The findings revealed that faculty strengthened their understanding of the role of literacy in their courses, used their discipline’s discourse to inform instruction, and implemented specific literacy practices to support students toward being insiders of the field.

This study examines how four university-based literary scholars in the United States read literary texts. Findings suggest that the scholars used four related literary literacy orientations in their reading: They attended to their affective experiences with literature, built recursive interpretations of literature, contextualized literature, and recognized and managed literary complexity. As broad-level disciplinary ways of navigating literature, these literary literacy orientations included the scholars’ meaning-making practices as well as their beliefs, feelings, and attitudes about literature and making sense of it. Findings support and build upon existing scholarship on English disciplinary literacies and offer paths for further research.

This paper explores how transmodalising pedagogy contributes to equitable STEM literacy education for emergent bilingual learners (EBLs). Attending to the urgent call for serving linguistically and culturally diverse learners in STEM classrooms and informed by the supporting theories and practices of transmodalising pedagogy, this paper provides a repertoire of transmodalising pedagogy to support elementary school EBLs’ STEM disciplinary content and literacy learning. Particularly, this paper shares two elementary teachers’ lessons in mathematics and science classrooms to showcase how transmodalising disciplinary literacy instruction for young EBLs can afford equitable access to STEM curriculum while engaging EBLs in disciplinary discourse practices.

This article develops a theoretical account of how the principles of integration and systemicity jointly structure high-quality instruction in the natural sciences at the secondary level. Rather than treating integration as a mere juxtaposition of topics, the paper frames it as an epistemic design choice that aligns disciplinary concepts, practices, and representations around phenomena whose explanation requires multiple lenses. Systemicity is construed as a way of reasoning about parts, relationships, feedback, and emergence across scales; the argument is that integration becomes coherent only when it is guided by systemic thinking so that content connections serve explanatory purpose rather than thematics. The study synthesizes work from systems theory, learning sciences, knowledge-integration research, and modeling-based inquiry to propose design heuristics that translate theory into classroom practice without fragmenting disciplinary rigor. Methodologically, this is an integrative review with illustrative design analyses of phenomenon-centered sequences in energy, homeostasis, and materials transformations. The discussion shows how coherence arises when crosscutting concepts and epistemic practices are sequenced to support conceptual change, transfer, and disciplinary literacy, and it examines implications for assessment, teacher knowledge, and the use of simulations and community partnerships. The conclusion argues that when integration is organized systemically, students’ explanatory writing, model use, and problem transfer improve because teaching mirrors the structure of scientific inquiry itself.

This paper focuses on the under-researched genre of PhD supervision meetings (but see Vehviläinen, Sanna. 2009a. Problems in the research problem: Critical feedback and resistance in academic supervision.Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research53[2]. 185–201; Vehviläinen, Sanna. 2009b. Student-initiated advice in academic supervision.Research on Language and Social Interaction42[2]. 163–190; Björkman, Beyza. 2015. PhD supervisor–PhD student interactions in an English-medium Higher Education [HE] setting: Expressing disagreement.European Journal of Applied Linguistics3[2]. 205–229; Björkman, Beyza. 2016. PhD adviser and student interactions as a spoken academic genre. In K. Hyland & P. Shaw [eds.],The Routledge handbook of English for Academic Purposes, 348–361. Oxon: Routledge; Björkman, Beyza. 2017. PhD supervision meetings in an English as a Lingua Franca [ELF] setting: Linguistic competence and content knowledge as neutralizers of institutional and academic power.Journal of English as a Lingua Franca6[1]. 111–139) and investigates knowledge construction episodes in PhD students’ discussions with their supervisors on their co-authored papers. In these meetings, all supervisors and students use English as their lingua franca (ELF). Such supervision meetings are made up of “social negotiation” and “collaborative sense-making,” providing a good base for learning to take place (Vygotsky, L. S. 1978.Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), which in the present context is the “enculturation” of the PhD student into the research community (Manathunga, Catherine. 2014.Intercultural postgraduate supervision: Reimagining time, place and knowledge. New York: Routledge). It is precisely these negotiation and collaborative sense-making practices that the present paper focuses on, in order to investigate knowledge construction practices. While there is an abundance of research in disciplinary knowledge construction and academic literacy practices from cognitive and behavioral sciences, knowledge about novice scholars’ knowledge construction practices is scant in applied linguistics (but see Li, Yongyan. 2006. Negotiating knowledge contribution to multiple discourse communities: A doctoral student of computer science writing for publication.Journal of Second Language Writing15[3]. 159–178). Even less is known about how PhD students may negotiate knowledge construction and engage in meaning-making practices in interaction with their supervisors. The material comprises 11 hours of naturally occurring speech by three supervisors and their students where they discuss the reviewers’ comments they have received from the journal. The predominant method employed here is applied conversation analysis (CA) (Richards, Keith & Paul Seedhouse [eds.]. 2005.Applying conversation analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), which includes both local patterns of interaction as well as “the tensions between [these] local practices and any ‘larger structures’ in which these are embedded, such as conventional membership categories, institutional rules, instructions, accounting obligations, etc.” (Have, Paul ten. 2007.Doing conversation analysis. London: Sage 199). The analyses here aim to show how the PhD supervisors and students discuss the reviewers’ comments with reference to (i) their own disciplinary community of climate science, and (ii) the domestic discourse community of the target journals (see also Li, Yongyan. 2006. Negotiating knowledge contribution to multiple discourse communities: A doctoral student of computer science writing for publication.Journal of Second Language Writing15[3]. 159–178). The preliminary findings of the analyses show a tendency by the PhD students to focus more heavily on the domestic discourse community of the target journals, especially when justifying their methodological choices. The PhD supervisors, on the other hand, base their meaning-making on the conventions of the disciplinary community of climate science, pointing out broader disciplinary community practices. These findings, highlighting a need to focus on novice scholars’ meaning-making efforts, can be used to inform PhD supervision in general.

In this paper I present a study of Hélène Cixous' bilingual text Vivre l'Orange/To Live the Orange (1989/1979), using a Descriptive Translation Studies approach. Cixous' text has been much commented on but, to my knowledge, not as yet from a Translation Studies perspective. Through a close comparison ofthe French and English texts, I illustrate that there are patterns of difference between the original text and the translation concerning the people/things distinction and concerning gender. Most previous commentators have treated the French and English texts as ifthey were the same. In contrast, I signal a kind of 'defeminization' in the English text that produces a definite thematic difference between the original text and the translation. I offer divergent interpretations ofthe significance ofthat difference.

This qualitative study used a theoretical framework grounded in the intersection of 21st century learning, critical literacy, and disciplinary literacy to examine how a high school science and math teacher selected and used texts in her classroom. Data from a semi-structured interview, instructional materials, and student work samples were analyzed. Inductive content analysis generated themes about discipline-specific practice and strategies that cut across both content areas. Results suggest that texts in content classrooms can be used to foster critical disciplinary literacy skills that build upon students' outside-of-school interests and their use of technology.

Every citizen has the right to be equipped with scientific literacy to understand and make informed decisions within the discipline of science. Educators can utilize core science teaching practices (CSTPs) to develop scientific literacy. In response, this study identified the CSTPs utilized by preservice elementary teachers (PSETs) to develop scientific literacy during their spring 2022 student teaching semester. Furthermore, this study identified contextual constructs that led to the utilization of the CSTPs to develop scientific literacy. The study used a qualitative exploratory case study using semi-structured interviews as the primary data. Surveys and artifacts were used as supporting secondary data. The identification of CSTPs and their contextual constructs were conducted using inductive content analysis. Afterward, the identified CSTPs and their contextual constructs were deconstructed, interpreted, and synthesized through the critical theoretical framework of disciplinary literacy. Relationships, time, school structure, and community were contextual constructs that enabled and disabled PSETs' utilization of CSTPs to develop scientific literacy. The contextual constructs are represented using the Framework to Develop Scientific Literacy (FDSL). The FDSL contain contextual constructs that enabled PSETs to utilize CSTPs through the sharing of power between the PSET and their cooperating teacher, school district, community, or teacher education programs. In contrast, contextual constructs that disabled PSETs include denying of power that negatively impacted the utilization of CSTPs to develop scientific literacy. The findings of the study call for teacher education programs to include contextual constructs as elements that impact PSETs' student teaching experiences to navigate power dynamics in authentic school settings. By identifying and using constructs as represented in the FDSL, teacher education programs can support PSETs' utilization of CSTPs to develop scientific literacy. In addition, this study calls for a reframing of power relationships between teacher education programs and their partnering school districts. By revealing the complex contextual nature of the PSETs' student teaching experiences, this study seeks to initiate discussion on how teacher education programs can support the practice of PSETs as they educate the next generation of scientifically literate citizens.