Running head: ADOLESCENT LITERACY Valencia

Adolescent Literacy in English Language Arts

Jennifer Valencia

Arizona State University

RDG 323: Literacy Process/Content Areas

Professor Trombley

06 September 2020
Adolescent Literacy in English Language Arts Valencia

The Importance of Adolescent Literacy Development

It is generally thought that students learn to read and write in the English classroom

because that is where students are taught skills that help them on their journey to read, write and

comprehend. While that is what happens in an English classroom, this idea has evolved past

limiting this development of literacy to the English classroom.

Content literacy focuses on the ability to use reading and writing to learn a topic in a

content, whereas in their article “Teaching Content-Area Literacy and Disciplinary Literacy”,

Ramona Chauvin and Kathleen Theodore explain that disciplinary literacy focuses on how

reading and writing are used in a content. Content literacy “teaches skills that a “novice” might

use to make sense of a disciplinary text” (Chauvin & Theodore 2015). It focuses on teaching

students a set of study skills that can be generalized across content areas. This can take the form

of rereading texts, taking Cornell notes, summarizing, using KWL charts, or other general

strategies. These strategies are meant to aid student learning in any one of their classes, which is

why content literacy could be considered a form of intermediate literacy since it is building

student knowledge and teaching them to navigate and make sense of the content they are

presented with. Disciplinary literacy is different in that it helps students build an understanding

of how reading and writing are used to build knowledge in a given discipline. The “how” is the

key point in disciplinary literacy because students are still using content literacy, their KWL

charts, their Cornell notes, their summaries to make sense of what they are learning. Disciplinary

literacy is the application of the general study skills within a discipline. This can look like the

specialized vocabulary each discipline requires, breaking down elaborate text structures or ideas
Adolescent Literacy in English Language Arts Valencia

specific to a discipline (Chauvin & Theodore 2015). In an English classroom, for example

students may use the note taking and summarizing study skill in order to break down a poem

stanza by stanza.

Developing adolescent literacy is important because it begins to build students’ critical

thinking skills, their problem solving skills, and it gets them collaborating and talking to each

other. These skills are crucial for student success since it allows them to learn how to problem

solve in school and that can also translate to their life outside of school and post graduation. It

also enables students to take control of their learning because disciplinary literacy creates an

environment where they are doing the work, they are asking the questions, and they are

discussing their findings (Fairfax Network 2017). In essence, they are guiding each other through

their learning and teachers are there to facilitate the process. For example, I recently created a

collaboration activity with a cross content group, so we had to create an activity that would work

across multiple disciplines. We decided to create something similar to literature circles but we

called it “synthesizer circles”. It breaks students out into groups of four and gives them each a

role in breaking down a reading. The roles include a word wizard, who takes note of unfamiliar

words and finds their definition, a connector who creates connections to previous knowledge and

experiences, an illustrator who creates a physical representation of an idea from the text, and

finally a facilitator, who works to lead the discussion and overall progression of the group. This

activity could be considered disciplinary literacy because students can use it in English, in

biology, in history, in economics etc. and it will help them break down the article into smaller

pieces and connect all the aspects of reading to help them understand a concept in their
Adolescent Literacy in English Language Arts Valencia

discipline. In their article “What Is Disciplinary Literacy and Why Does It Matter?” Timothy

Shanahan and Cynthia Shanahan discuss the benefits to students across all disciplines,

“traditional reading comprehension strategies and content area reading approaches have tended

to be most beneficial for the lowest-proficiency readers” (Shanahan & Shanahan 2012).

Adolescent Literacy in English Language Arts

In English students need to have knowledge of language structure and how it comes

together to create meaning. In secondary education students will need to have a more advanced

understanding of literacy because they will be asked to write essays, read more complex things,

and go further into those readings. Though to get to that point, students must be able to overcome

the challenges of reading comprehension, reading for interpretation and understanding content

specific vocabulary.

Students may struggle with reading comprehension because they have a hard time

decoding certain words or making connections to the text that could allow them to familiarize

themselves with its content. In an example that Emily C. Rainey gives in her article,

“Disciplinary Literacy in English Language Arts: Exploring the Social and Problem-Based

Nature of Literary Reading and Reasoning” she explains how one teacher saw their students

struggling with reasoning and interpretation to understand their readings and in order to help in

this challenge for students, they designed an approach that scaffolds students’ prior knowledge

and experience. “Lee designed instruction to leverage her students’ familiarity with using

symbolism in African American English and their other shared discourses and practices to

accomplish her instructional goal with canonical literature” (Rainey 2017). By opening up this
Adolescent Literacy in English Language Arts Valencia

new way of approaching a text to students, the teacher also opened up the way they learn and

apply their knowledge. Making connections becomes critical in a student’s learning process,

which is why activities like the synthesizer circles, and presenting students with new ways to

look at things benefits them. It forces them to stop and think about familiarities in their readings

and through this, they also get to break down vocabulary that in turn helps them complete their

understanding of the reading. Another teacher in Emily C Rainey’s article makes use of images

to aid students in understanding a reading, saying that “when we read pictures about slavery as

mere illustrations, we miss the really rich meanings that multimedial text had at the time”

(Rainey 2017). This is part of what they call literary puzzles, where students get to use different

mediums to make sense of readings and it also allows them to make the connections and

interpretations more directly, as opposed to asking students to think of a connection from their

own experiences. This works because there are multiple ways to answer the puzzles, and they are

open for interpretation by the students. This aids in fostering their critical thinking skills and

understanding the content.

In the study, “Experts and Novices Reading Literature: An Analysis of Disciplinary

Literacy in English Language Arts”, Todd Reynolds and Leslie S. Rush recruited freshman

students and professors to “read out loud and speak about their reading process in a think-aloud

procedure” (Reynolds & Rush 2017). The study found that the students had a harder time

hypothesizing to build their interpretations of what the poems were saying, though when

compared to the professors, this was to be expected. What they did note however was the

difference in how the participants engaged with the text. Though the students were also breaking
Adolescent Literacy in English Language Arts Valencia

the poem down and hypothesizing as they read, the professors took a step further in always going

back to connect the smaller bits of the poem to making sense of it as a whole. “No matter what

aspect of the text they were engaged in, they found a way to move forward with some kind of

interpretation that could help them understand the text in more complete ways” (Reynolds &

Rush 2017). Another thing that kept students from fully being able to understand the text and

make their own interpretations was vocabulary within the poem, though most students did say

that they either looked up the word or used context clues. One thing that could help students

would be to present to them acronym tools such as SOAPSTONE, which asks about the speaker,

occasion, audience, purpose, subject and tone. This would help students to break down the poem

into key characteristics and then use it to put together a meaning for them.

Coming Together as a Team

These examples serve to show why adolescent literacy is important. Timothy Shanahan

and Cynthia Shanahan explain that “Strategies that guide one to think more effectively in a

discipline-specific manner could guide such students to go beyond a superficial understanding

and to grasp deeper and more sophisticated ideas” in their article “What Is Disciplinary Literacy

and Why Does It Matter?” (Shanahan & Shanahan 2012). As educators, we need to ensure that

we are implementing strategies that aid in content literacy because that is what translates into

other classrooms. In English, we also need to be aware of the struggles that students face when it

comes to reading and writing because it is fundamental to their continuous literacy development.

It is important to foster their basic understanding of what they read through different strategies

from providing them with tools, such as the synthesizer circles and visual aids to encourage their
Adolescent Literacy in English Language Arts Valencia

understanding of their readings. If they can get a firm grasp on these different strategies and how

to use them, then making connections or analyzing a problem will feel familiar to them when

they have to do it in another discipline. Carol Gilles, Yang Wang, & Danielle Johnson, in their

article “Drawing on What We Do as Readers: Discovering and Embedding Strategies Across the

Disciplines” discuss the idea of a team of different disciplines coming together to help students.

“The entire team made a conscious effort to call students’ attention to making content

connections, each team member personalized connections to their discipline” (Gilles, Wang &

Johnson 2016). This is beneficial to students in that it continues the learning students do in one

classroom to another. That is why it is imperative that teachers come together and consider the

ways that they can help their students as a team.

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References

Chauvin, R., Theodore, K. (2015). Teaching Content-Area Literacy and Disciplinary Literacy.

SEDL Insights​, 3(1), 1-10.

Fairfax Network- Fairfax County Public Schools. (2017).​ The Power of Literacy: Read, Write,

Think, Discuss- Disciplinary Literacy​ [Youtube].

Gilles, C., Wang, Y., & Johnson, D. (2016). Drawing on What We Do as Readers:

DISCOVERING AND EMBEDDING STRATEGIES ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES.

Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy,​ 59(6), 675–684. ​https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.489

Rainey, E. (2017). Disciplinary Literacy in English Language Arts: Exploring the Social and

Problem-Based Nature of Literary Reading and Reasoning. ​Reading Research Quarterly​,

52(1), 53–71. ​https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.154

Reynolds, T., & Rush, L. (2017). Experts and Novices Reading Literature: An Analysis of

Disciplinary Literacy in English Language Arts. ​Literacy Research and Instruction,​

56(3), 199–216. ​https://doi.org/10.1080/19388071.2017.1299820

Shanahan, T., & Shanahan, C. (2012). What Is Disciplinary Literacy and Why Does It Matter?

Topics in Language Disorders,​ 32(1), 7–18.

https://doi.org/10.1097/tld.0b013e318244557a