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Disciplinary Literacy And Information Literacy: Parallels And Paradigms, Ginni Fair

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

Current literature on the teaching of reading and writing in the context of a content area has transitioned from “content area literacy” to “disciplinary literacy.” Content-Area literacy focuses on students’ ability to use reading and writing in order to learn the subject matter in a content area classroom. It emphasizes reading strategies that are generalizable for reading informational texts across multiple content areas. Disciplinary literacy, on the other hand “emphasizes the unique tools that the experts in a discipline use to participate in the work of that discipline” (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008).

Often, educators differentiate between “learning to read/write” and …