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Adolescent Literacy Development in Social Science

Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College

Karina Higuera

Arizona State University

RDG323: Disciplinary Literacy Paper

Date Submitted: September 5th, 2021

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Importance of Adolescent Literacy Development

One of the biggest challenges students will face throughout their school years is learning

how to become completely literate. Most students learn how to read from a young age, but

school has taught them to just read and that’s it. With being fully literate, students not only learn

the content of what they are reading, but also learn how to expand their abilities to truly

understand what they are reading and how to articulate their responses. However, that can’t

happen if teachers are not supporting their students in an environment where they can see that

growth. Students should have the resources and space available for them to feel comfortable with

the readings in order to get that connection. The International Literacy Association states in their

article, “Engagement and Adolescent Literacy”, that students need a diverse selection of texts in

order to feel comfortable because having a different perspective shines a different light on the

content. In most school settings, students just need to respond to questions about their readings

that they are guided to, being fully literate allows students to grow and find the answers

themselves. As they learn the importance of being literate, the students will see how this is not

only for their English class, but rather all subjects they take in high school. This will also

progress into their university years as well.

Disciplinary literacy is literacy, but differs from each discipline (otherwise known as

content areas). Disciplinary literacy also asks three main questions; what is knowledge in this

discipline, how is knowledge created and what evidence could be used for that specific

discipline? So students have to consider these three main questions as they go through their

readings and as they move up in their schooling years, the answers should become more

complex. Once they enter college, they will have a specific discipline due to the major they’re

studying. Whatever the case, however, they still need to know how to read their texts. But taking
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away the college aspect of disciplinary literacy, we focus on adolescents in high school first to

see where they can engage with the texts and actually become interested in school. Now just like

students, no discipline is exactly the same either, “One characteristic of academic writing is the

frequent use of nominalization, which is the transformation of grammatical constructions like

complex phrases or verbs into a noun (Harmon, Hedrick, & Wood, 2005; Moje, 2008). In science

texts, nominalization is used to create technical vocabulary, resulting in a telescoping effect in

which students must remember an increasing information load as they read a textbook (Shanahan

& Shanahan, 2008; Unsworth, 1999)” stated by the International Literacy Association. My area

of discipline is history, so there are a lot of readings and many different perspectives on those

same events.

Historical Literacy

Many standards that states expect are heavily focused on science, math and English, but

they also have standards for social studies. How students are being taught in school has always

been a concern for parents, even decades ago and history is no exception. Robert Bain “Every

generation has pointed to some crisis in history education, and then placed part of the blame on

the education of history teachers. For example, many nineteenth century educators thought

history instruction was dismal, "convinced," as G. Stanley Hall argued, "that no subject so

widely taught is, on the whole, taught so poorly, almost sure to create a distaste for historical

study—perhaps forever” (Using Disciplinary Literacy to Develop Coherence in History Teacher

Education: The Clinical Rounds Project, page 01), which basically means that history teachers

are so poorly taught about their discipline that the way they teach the subject, shows it. And

because the subject matter is so poorly taught, many students are uninterested in pursuing it. He

explains this took place in the 19th century, meaning that this is almost 200 years of history
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teachers making the subject look terrible. And right now, teaching is no better than back then

because the education of teachers in the making hasn’t changed. Content knowledge,

pedagogical methods, and practical experience have been what makes up the education of

teachers for the last 50 years, however, teaching programs have gone downhill due to the fact

that different institutions would argue one method was more important than the others, making

the education of teachers across the country skewed. So as future history teachers are learning

how to teach history, every single one of them is being taught something different. Albeit

important in their own concentrations, it makes future teachers horrible history teachers because

no one is talking to each other. So how can we expect students to make that connect with their

readings when the ones teaching them weren’t?

Adolescent Literacy

Teachers aren’t the only ones who aren’t prepared for the next part of their life.

According to Bain’s study, over eight million students fall behind in their grade level reading and

they underprepared for college. Almost a quarter of high school students can’t do the work for

their introduction classes and many more aren’t ready for the workforce. Literacy proficiency in

kids is highly focused on but students in secondary education are left behind to struggle. Since

schools tend to focus on only the lower grades, students stay applying that same knowledge

across all their studies well into high school so school becomes boring. We learn from a young

age to simply answer questions to a reading to test our proficiency and nothing is done to get

more complex answers from the students. Why should students try to develop those in depth

answers when not needed? All they need to focus on is passing those standardized tests. In order

for students to grow, they need to have advanced work. Students have to work through bigger

texts by using what Moje and Speye identified as being semantic, disciplinary, discursive and
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pragmatic knowledge and adding these to the students’ interests in the readings. Although

students are expected to grow as they progress from elementary to high schools, their texts don’t.

And it will be impossible for them to learn history if they cannot read texts adequate for their

age. And when working with history, students aren’t only working with texts but everything that

comes with history, such as the artifacts, data, etc. Historians have to work through all of the past

to see what is true, so those in school have to see what is being written in a different light as well

because even within our own textbooks being completely different from what really happened.

These readings have to be left up to not only historians interpretation, but the students

have to dive in the readings to find what the author really wants them to know, “ Such variety

also shapes history in the secondary schools, even if all the student reads is a tertiary text, such as

the history textbook. Open almost any chapter in any American textbook published in the past

thirty years or so, and you will find a smorgasbord of different types of texts for history students

to read, interpret, and use in making sense of the past. In addition to the main print text, most

publishers fill chapters with pictures, graphics, data charts, maps, primary source inserts,

narrative or problem-framing sidebars, photographs, political cartoons, as well as primary and

secondary source” (Bain, page 518), so the students need to make the connection between the

context of the climate surrounding the era and the possible views of the author. It is so crucial for

everyone learning history to know the context of everything they are examining.

Conclusion

History teachers unfortunately are not teaching students how to read those texts and

distinguish them from every other text. We need to teach students what we want them to learn,

they can’t do it themselves. Students should be able to find the context and content of what they

are reading, they also should be able to know when to apply it to their readings. They need to
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have prior knowledge of the subject in order to enhance their studies. This is not only specific to

history/social studies as all discipline areas face the same problem. But in order to understand

history students have to make these connections. History is all about interpretation of the

readings and seeing if there was any other influence on literally everything. It is so important in

this area of discipline to know what you are studying and how to answer the questions that arise.

Being fully literate is something students should strive for as it will not only help them

throughout their high school years, but have them prepared for the next step in their life, whether

that be college or straight to the workforce.

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Works Cited

Bain, R. B. (2012). Using Disciplinary Literacy to Develop Coherence in History Teacher

Education: The Clinical Rounds Project. The History Teacher (Long Beach, Calif.),

45(4), 513–532.

International Literacy Association . (n.d.). Engagement and Adolescent Literacy.

https://www.literacyworldwide.org/docs/default-source/where-we-stand/ila-engagement-
and-adolescent-literacy.pdf