This chapter presents a qualitative study answering the questions of what content area pre-service teachers' perceptions were on using writing with culturally and linguistically diverse students. Through open and axial coding of the artifacts, two major themes were found: 1) pre-service teachers saw writing as a tool to support students' social and emotional learning in their classrooms, and 2) pre-service teachers planned to use writing as a tool to support students' thinking about their disciplinary content. The researchers discuss the implications of these findings including a promise of teachers who are sensitive about the socio-emotional learning of the students and the need to provide explicit tools and spaces for teaching language acquisition skills.
TopUnpacking Disciplinary Literacy
The goal of disciplinary, or content, literacy instruction has been to increase students’ ability to write, listen and speak as they read and learn content from different subjects. Disciplinary literacy recognizes the unique listening, speaking, reading, and writing needs, or language needs, of each content area. Therefore, strong and explicit disciplinary literacy instruction is essential to a student's future success. Shanahan and Shanahan (2008) define disciplinary literacy as “literacy skills specialized to history, science, mathematics, literature or other subject matter” (p. 44) and position it as the most complex literacy skill stemming from basic and intermediate literacy skills in their model of literacy progression. They argue that this type of advanced literacy instruction embedded within secondary content area classes calls for explicit literacy certification standards, relationships between content area experts and resources to practice in varied contexts. Tovani and Moje (2017) break down disciplinary literacy work as
- 1.
Engaging students in the practices of the discipline (e.g., framing a problem, investigating, analyzing data);
- 2.
Eliciting and acquiring the necessary knowledge to carry out those practices using content literacy strategies as tools;
- 3.
Examining the words, phrases, and discourses that enable disciplinary work; and
- 4.
Evaluating why, when, and how disciplinary language and discourses are useful and why, when and how they are not. (p. 41)
While all four language domains of speaking, listening, reading, and writing are essential to strong literacy skills, the domain that consistently lags is writing. In the 2011 Nation’s Report card, 24% of 8th and 12th grade students performed at the proficient level in writing, and 3% performed at the advanced level, while the remaining 73% of students performed at basic or below basic levels (U.S. Department of Education, 2011). However, even with this data, writing instruction in content areas has not received the attention it needs, particularly in secondary settings where basic literacy instruction is not provided (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008). Additional studies have shown that secondary language arts students are not often required to craft writing of a substantial length across the course of a school year (Graham et al., 2014; Kiuhara et al., 2009; Matsumura, et al., 2015). These same studies also show that students are doing even less writing of sustained length and analytical thought outside of their English language arts classrooms.
A concern of who is negatively affected most by this apparent lack of writing instruction is of particular interest to us. Shanahan and Shanahan (2008) posit that the three views of why disciplinary literacies exist, including to preserve a power base, natural outgrowth, and a reflection, support that discipline-based texts “serve to advance knowledge while at the same time serving to maintain a field’s hegemony” (p. 48). This means that those who are not a part of that hegemony, such as culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) populations, are unjustly precited to have heavy and specific literacy demands to acclimate to be proficient in that subject.