Widening the Role of Text for Disciplinary Literacy Instruction

Abstract

This chapter will examine the role of multimodal texts to support students' disciplinary learning. Disciplinary literacy is based on a premise of access to advanced ways of thinking and doing as contextualized by individual disciplines. The authors put forth a framework of disciplinary literacy that combines habits of thinking such as thinking strategies, habits of practice or the actions experts engage in, beliefs experts hold about the discipline, and language use and vocabulary in the discipline. Disciplinary literacy in the classroom utilizes all these components to help students read, write, and think similar to ways that experts do in order to help them move past memorizing information and instead engage in authentic disciplinary argumentation and problem solving.