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ABSTRACT
Learning in secondary content areas involves at least some interaction with complex disciplinary texts. The engagement requires discipline-specific reading/writing skills that go beyond those students have mastered in the elementary grades. This advanced literacy ability, or disciplinary literacy, is best fostered through a pedagogy that is informed by sound linguistics theory, responsive to student needs, and embedded in meaningful disciplinary experiences. Such a pedagogy, with its focus on how language is used in disciplinary meaning making, has the potential to promote knowledge building and advanced literacy development at the same time.
Acknowledgments
This paper is based on two keynote talks presented at the International Forum on Systemic Functional Linguistics (Peking University, Beijing, China, October 20-21, 2018) and the annual meeting of the American Reading Forum (Sanibel Island, Florida, December 5-8, 2018).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
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Notes on contributors
Zhihui Fang
Zhihui Fang (Ph.D., Purdue University) is currently the Irving & Rose Fien Endowed Professor of Education in the School of Teaching and Learning at the University of Florida, USA. He has published widely in the areas of language and literacy education, English teacher education, and functional linguistics in education. His recent research explores varied ways knowledge is constructed through language across different school subjects, the challenges these ways of using language present to reading comprehension and written composition, and pedagogical strategies for addressing these challenges.