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Disciplinary Literacy in ELA

Dylidia Brown
Arizona State University
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Disciplinary Literacy in ELA

Adolescent literacy is a critical step from content literacy into disciplinary literacy. These

are basic secondary level methods that make secondary education possible. They include

organizational literacy such as Venn diagrams, Cornell notes, and graphic organizers; feedback

systems like KWL charts, exit tickets and bell work; cross content strategies like summaries,

reports and research. As students advance further through their schooling, they will need more

specialized literacy skills to navigate the courses they are taking and the areas they begin to

specialize in because “The linguistic and epistemological differences among the disciplinary

communities of practice result in salient content-specific literacy demands” [ CITATION Eng19 \l

1033 ]. Disciplinary literacy then, is needed now more than ever as the world of literacy is

changing at an alarming and exciting rate. Disciplinary literacy may have once been something

students developed in college but is now essential at a younger age. Supporting disciplinary

literacy is about building on content literacy and training students to be young scholars by

developing their own access to the specialized language and thought processes in different

disciplines. It is putting the students on the path of scholarship by opening up the proverbial

doors of opportunity and inviting them to think, speak and write like the scholars and

professionals in those highly specialized communities. There is a trendy term being used, and

overused, right now “unpack- Let’s unpack that question/statement.” This is an indication that

that the question or statement is expressed in highly disciplinary terms and concepts and to

understand what is even being said there needs to be background ideas, histories, concepts and

supporting information laid out for even a cursory understanding of the complex statement. It’s

almost like the statement is in a different language. Teaching disciplinary literacy allows students

to speak and read that different language.

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Supporting disciplinary literacy in an ELA classroom will involve integrating higher

order thinking and language with which to approach, examine, process, apply and create

literature and academic writing. In ELA many students struggle with the ability to recognize the

intended audience and author’s message. They need to learn to build upon their content literacy

of summarizing basic elements and consider the relationship between the author and their

intended audience and the purpose for the text. They will need to practice asking critical

questions about the audience and what elements in the text are used or omitted to connect with

that intended audience. Using mentor texts and multimodal artifacts for students to “identify and

evaluate how their creators used particular forms of language, images, or sounds to appeal to

intended audiences”[ CITATION Wil17 \l 1033 ] grows the students ability to apply different critical

theory to texts. This new skill isn’t enough, students need to know what they might do with it.

How it will be useful to them as they engage the greater world beyond the classroom. In

preparing lessons for students which bolster disciplinary literacy, ELA Teachers need to

remember to ask “Are today’s students able to use reading and writing to acquire knowledge,

solve problems, and make decisions in academic, personal, and professional arenas? Do they

have the literacy skills necessary to meet the demands of the twenty-first century?”[ CITATION

Sus12 \l 1033 ]. This inquiry helps to ground the content and lesson activities in concentrated and

powerfully didactic experiences for students.

A different area of concern is the tendency, for some educators, to become isolated and

selfish in their focus but “Partnering with others to plan across disciplines propels students to use

literacy skills for knowledge acquisition across content areas” [ CITATION Eng19 \l 1033 ]. This is

an effective way for team teachers to work together to support learning in all areas across

content. Coordinating content topics for students allows cross content vocabulary and literacy to
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be supported, differentiated and reinforced. Educators in all disciplines need to take the time to

explain how a word or process works in their area because Students may use the same word in

several disciplines, but they mean different things and it’s not just the term that changes but that

“Disciplines also differ in the way language is used, that is, in the linguistic structures

disciplinary experts use to convey knowledge to each other.”[ CITATION Eng19 \l 1033 ]. In ELA a

summary would be an overview of the text/media and include special attention to literary devices

used to affect the meaning of a passage. In History it could include the assumed or hoped out

comes of the actors in a scenario and the actual events and the distance between the intended and

actual outcomes and the effects they caused. However, in science a student summarizing an

experiment would not use any literary devices or assumptions about the scientist conducting an

experiment. The summary would be academic and mechanical structured as a lab report.

“Disciplines also differ in the way language is used, that is, in the linguistic structures

disciplinary experts use to convey knowledge to each other."[ CITATION Eng19 \l 1033 ]

A growing need in adolescent literacy is acutely developed in ELA by expanding what is

traditionally understood as literature into new fields such as film, memes, music lyrics,

performances, communications, advertising and a plethora of digital artifacts. These, and many

other fields, all require a disciplinary level literacy in ELA in conjunction with other disciplines.

The students will stop up from summarizing a text or media to synthesizing several medium and

texts. This includes skills of verification, authenticity, accuracy and relevance as well as higher

order skills in inference and decoding or encoding messages, all of which students struggle to do

and to understand why they need to do it. Each of these higher order skills require multiple

deep-dive explorations and explanations into what they are, how they work and how to apply

them. Guiding learners through this discovery process is the responsibility of the instructor. The
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teacher must be able to assess the students’ disciplinary literacy level in order to effectively build

on it. This process of discovery and assessment must be repeated often in order for a student to

fully gain an understanding and control over the ideas, processes, movements and differences in

each of the higher order systems. Establishing disciplinary literacy also reinforces content

literacy and allows the student to coalesce their language and products under more dense

verbiage. This intense idea packing creates academically dense communications that require a

reader, viewer or listener to pay more concentrated attention in order to process the complex

ideation involved in the disciplinary language.

There is a hidden benefit to developing disciplinary literacy which is always a concern

for educators of adolescents and that is their social wellness and awareness. Disciplinary literacy

actually increases the ability of students to become more stable in their social standing because

“Part of the socialization is to value and understand that the written record of their reading and

writing can help them in talking with others and in developing their own thinking and future

writing.” [ CITATION McC \l 1033 ]. ELA curriculum and literature is the discovery and expression

of the self and the relationship each person has with the others in their life. Teaching disciplinary

literacy, especially in ELA fosters the environment where students “Know that they have the

right and responsibility to ask questions, justify their own responses with evidence from texts,

and challenge other’s ideas as well as the teacher’s ideas.” [ CITATION McC \l 1033 ]. Students

learn to formulate their thoughts into lucid statements and questions that give them legitimacy

grounded in discipline instead of someone who is just saying words without any weight of

evidence. Adolescents need access to that legitimacy to navigate the digital world Literacy has

changed because people live in a digital world and learning to read is no longer enough to give

fair access to the centers of power, instead, “To be literate today means being able to use reading
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and writing to acquire knowledge, solve problems, and make decisions in academic, personal,

and professional arenas.” [ CITATION Sus12 \l 1033 ]. Students are faced with a whole digital world

that they must navigate in order to participate in their community in any meaningful and

influential way. Adolescents will turn to digital sources for information that earlier generations

would have held in their memory or looked up in a book. Those who have access to and the

ability to navigate and shape the digital world, digital elites, and have a digital literacy will

dominate the power center of our world because “We can easily imagine such digital elites

developing skills that many low income students do not even know exist”[CITATION Bur13 \p 28 \l

1033 ].

ELA curriculum may continue to cover the same texts that they have always covered, but

in a new way. The students will grow in their communication skills and begin to develop group

literacy. They will engage in the texts using more critical lens’ and learn to read to learn how to

use texts to serve their own self-discovery, their communities and synthesize an idea across

multiple texts to create a cohesive and comprehensive understanding. They will learn digital

literacy and learn to take their place among those who hold and wield power by knowing when

and how to question. They will be able to stand among those elites and professional communities

because they have become not only literate, but literate in the disciplines that shape and move the

world.

References
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Burke, J. (2013). The English Teacher's Companion (4th ed.). Portsmouth: Heinemann.

(2019). Engagement and adolescent literacy [Position statement and research brief]. International
Literacy Association. Newark: International Literacy Association. Retrieved from
https://www.literacyworldwide.org/docs/default-source/where-we-stand/ila-engagement-and-
adolescent-literacy.pdf

Goldman, S. R. (2012, Fall). Adolescent Literacy: Learning and Understanding Content. THE FUTURE OF
CHILDREN , 22(2), pp. 89-116. Retrieved from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ996190.pdf

McConachie, S. M., & Petrosky, A. R. (n.d.). Disciplinary Literacy Design Principles by Core Academic
Area. Content Matters: A Disciplinary Literacy Approach to Improving Student Learning.
Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, USA: University of Pittsburgh of the Commonwealth System of Higher
Education. Retrieved from
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/9781118269466.app1

Wilson-Lopez, A., & Bean, T. (2017). Content area and disciplinary literacy: Strategies and frameworks.
Newark : International Literacy Association. Retrieved from
https://www.literacyworldwide.org/docs/default-source/where-we-stand/ila-content-area-
disciplinary-literacy-strategies-frameworks.pdf?sfvrsn=e180a58e_6