Disciplinary Literacy

Disciplinary literacy, as practiced in the United States, is the teaching of literacy within the specific disciplines of mathematics, science, English language arts and social studies, defined as the reading, rereading, investigating, speaking and writing needed to learn and build complex content knowledge appropriate to a given discipline. Rather than teaching generic reading skills apart from subject content, it asks teachers to present material through real-world examples and connections that reflect students' everyday lives regardless of race, gender or socioeconomic status, coaching students to use the same reading, writing and reasoning practices that professionals within each discipline actually use, though some crossover with general reading-skill instruction, such as vocabulary work, still remains. The approach grew out of the Common Core State Standards, the Next Generation Science Standards and the C3 Framework for Social Studies, all of which push for reading and writing complex texts within each discipline rather than through a single generic literacy curriculum.