Don’t Let Content Area Reading Experts Confuse You About Disciplinary Literacy

Shanahan:

What does the paper get wrong? Well, for starters it evidences almost a total lack of understanding of the disciplinary literacy project. Beyond that its analytic framework is either inappropriate to the purpose set for it or it is so badly implemented that the “results” are laughable, the analysis is biased, and the conclusion that disciplinary literacy is really just content area reading is a position maintainable only if one ignores the sources of the research, the purposes of the research, the nature of the research, and the research findings themselves—and this paper manages to do all of that. (Other than that the two concepts are almost identical!)