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Reading & Writing in the Content Areas

No matter how well students can sound out words and read simple texts by the time they finish elementary school, their progress can easily come to a halt when they reach the middle grades. In fact, many children make good progress learning to read in the first few years of school only to experience what researchers call a "4th grade slump" — a sudden tailing off of progress and, too often, the confidence that goes with it.

Typically, 4th grade is the point in the curriculum when the curriculum branches out among the content areas — especially math, science, English, and social studies — and where reading and writing assignments become longer, more demanding, and more academic. In order to prepare for that transition, and for the remainder of their time in school, students need a different kind of literacy instruction, focused not on the mechanics of reading, or even on the basics of comprehension, but rather on the very specific ways in which well-educated and highly literate people use language to communicate, both in specific academic content areas and in broader, more public formats, such as newspaper columns or political debates.

If students are to become sophisticated readers and writers, they will need plenty of opportunities to read and write many different kinds of texts. Moreover, their teachers must do more than just assign them to read and write — they must show them, explicitly, what it means to read a text carefully, or what it looks like to argue a point persuasively in writing.

For decades, researchers have observed that precious little reading or writing actually goes on in most content area classes. Instead of requiring students to read actual scientific papers and historical documents, and instead of assigning students to write and re-write many kinds of essays, reports, and other materials of their, the vast majority of teachers assign only brief readings, mainly from textbooks, and short, formulaic writing assignments.

If the nation's students are to go beyond the basics of literacy, then the nation's secondary school teachers must acknowledge that they are more than teachers of facts, figures, dates, and procedures. They must acknowledge that they are more even than teachers of mathematical, historical, scientific, and literary ways of thinking about and seeing the world. They also must teach their students to read and write and communicate like mathematicians, historians, scientists, literary critics, and educated members of society.