Teaching Reading and Writing in the Content Areas
By Rafael Heller, Ph.D
The role of content teachers

"Currently, few middle or high school educators ever receive more than a token amount of training in literacy instruction, and few see themselves as teachers of reading and writing at all. Instead, at the secondary level, most teachers tend to regard themselves as teachers of subject areas, such as biology, American history, or algebra. Even English teachers — who might be assumed to be responsible for reading and writing instruction — tend to define themselves first and foremost as teachers of literature.

It should come as no surprise, then, that researchers have found that precious little reading or writing goes on in most content area classes.¹ Instead of requiring students to read actual scientific papers and historical documents, and instead of assigning students to write and re-write many kinds of essays, reports, and other materials, the vast majority of teachers assign only brief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, though, then 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.

Finally, while not every teacher can be expected to do the job of a reading specialist, all teachers should be trained in certain essentials of literacy instruction, and all teachers should be expected to support students' overall literacy development.

Specifically, all teachers should learn how to provide effective vocabulary instruction in their subject areas; all teachers should learn how to provide instruction in reading comprehension strategies that can help students make sense of content-area texts; all teachers should learn how to design reading and writing assignments that are likely to motivate students who lack engagement in school activities; and all teachers should learn how to teach students to read and write in the ways that are distinct to their own content areas."

How Smart Readers Think

No matter what subject you teach, what grade you are teaching, or the kids education background, your students are going to be all over the map with their reading skills. Most often than not, teachers ask their students to read passages to the class. There are always kids that constantly raise their hand to read and there are others that immediately shrink into their chairs, wanting nothing to do with reading out loud. A lot of this boils down to what the students believe their ability to be and their confidence behind their reading skills.

As teachers, the most important thing to realize is that, no matter what subject you are teaching, you are always to educate and guide students to better their reading ability. Every subject has different ways of interpreting text and requires a different set of skills and thinking for the reader to fully understand the text. This is why it is crucial to comprehend the stages of reading and fully taking in all information. Something as simple as reading the title of a passage can provide prior knowledge for the reader to then to fully interpret the meaning behind what you are about to read.  

Prior knowledge is what creates understanding. It is crucial, as a teacher, to help your students learn how to activate their prior knowledge so they can take new information and remember it. Students use new knowledge, attach it, and connect it with prior information they already knew. By doing this, it allows the student to remember what they read and find a better understand of the meaning of the text. Teachers are a crucial piece of the puzzle when it comes to always guiding and showing student how to use these skills to read and then understand what the passage is saying.