Disciplinary Literacies and Learning to Read for Understanding: A Conceptual Framework for Disciplinary Literacy

This article, which includes co-authors and Reading Apprenticeship leaders Will Brown, Gayle Cribb, and Cynthia Greenleaf, discusses how to design goals for what students need to know – and be able to do – in three disciplinary areas — literature, science, and history. For each discipline, a team of researchers, teachers, and specialists in that discipline engaged in conceptual meta-analysis of theory and research on the reading, reasoning, and inquiry practices exhibited by disciplinary experts as contrasted with novices. Each team identified discipline-specific clusters of types of knowledge which gave rise to discipline-specific goals and tasks involved in reading across multiple texts, as well as reading, reasoning, and argumentation practices tailored to discipline-specific criteria for evidence-based knowledge claims. The framework of constructs and processes provides a valuable tool for researchers and classroom teachers’ (re)conceptualizations of literacy and argumentation learning goals in their specific disciplines.