Supporting Content and Disciplinary Literacy Success for Adolescents With LLD: A Blended and Contextualized Morphological Awareness Strategy Approach

Abstract

Purpose: As adolescents progress through the upper grades, reading and writing demands become increasingly challenging for students with and without a language and literacy deficit (LLD). The literacy education community recommends that reading and writing instruction be infused in the academic curriculum and emphasizes disciplinary literacy practices. Disciplinary literacy may be too advanced for adolescents with LLD who have not yet mastered foundational written language skills. Method: A discussion is provided for how general strategy instruction, also referred to as a content area or a content literacy approach, might be integrated with disciplinary literacy practices for adolescents with and without LLD. We specifically present how morphological awareness intervention, with an explicit focus on meaning structure and related language analysis of words, can be linked to learning academic vocabulary. Our blended approach includes both content and disciplinary literacy strategies in the context of the academic science curriculum. Conclusions: Adolescents with and without LLD require ongoing support of their literacy development well beyond the elementary school years. It is important that this support include not only mastery of foundational general strategies to access complex text content in a proficient manner but also active and explicit reflection on the social complexities of text as it relates to specific disciplines. Together, such instruction and intervention, when directly applied to the academic curriculum, can help older students of all abilities achieve the optimal comprehension and learning required for academic success.