Adolescent Literacy, Field Tested —
Abstract of

Chapter 19
Mentoring Literacy Practices in Academic Disciplines

Doug Buehl

Middle- and high school teachers are typically introduced to generic literacy practices during inservices and workshops. Teachers should regard such literacy techniques as prototypes—instructional examples for embedding comprehension strategies into teaching their content. Teachers will need to examine the literacy practices of their content areas in order to customize general literacy strategies into disciplinary-specific versions that will guide students into thinking like insiders in their subject area. Disciplinary literacy practices recognize that adolescents are expected to successfully interact with increasingly more sophisticated and complex texts, and that generic literacy practices need to be tailored for the more advanced reading and writing skills of specific academic disciplines. This chapter outlines how a powerful generic strategy, Questioning the Author, can be refined to mentor students to pose “insider questions” in two academic disciplines: English/Language Arts and Biological Science.

Buehl, D. (2009). Mentoring Literacy Practices in Academic Disciplines. In S.R. Parris, D. Fisher, & K. Headley (Eds.), Adolescent Literacy, Field Tested (pp. 228-238). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.