READ: A Strategy-Based Approach to Disciplinary Literacy Development

Abstract

Many first-year college students are underprepared for the academic tasks required in foundational courses in STEM, professional studies, and other disciplines. Conventional teacher-centered approaches targeted mainly at delivering content knowledge are insufficient to address the increasing literacy demands for students to engage in discipline-specific thinking, discourses, and practices. To tackle this problem, it is critical to integrate disciplinary literacy instruction into the content area classrooms. However, merely encouraging content faculty to use literacy practices and strategies cannot fully address the problem; it is more productive to build a disciplinary literacy program (Moje, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 52, 96–107, 2008). In this chapter, we introduce Reading Effectively Across the Disciplines (READ), a multimodal program in which literacy and content specialists collaborate with the primary goal of fostering content area learning through both general and discipline-specific literacy strategies. We provide an overview of the program’s innovative approach to learning, particularly its structure and implementation to serve a diverse student population. Specifically, we focus on how the program’s components, which include faculty development, discipline-specific assessments, peer-led team learning, and an online platform work together to achieve our goals.