Writing and Reading in the Content Areas

Today, less than one-third of America’s high school students read or write at

grade level. Among low-income students, the figure is fewer than one in six (Perie et al., 2005). In a typical high-poverty urban

school, roughly half of incoming ninth-grade students read at a sixth- or seventh-

grade level (Balfanz et al., 2002).

Content Writing

• Today’s Learning, explore writing in the content areas.

• EQ: How is writing connected to comprehension?

Reading Writing Connection?• Traditionally, in early elementary students are taught to read nursery

rhymes, storybooks, and other simple texts, which help them to practice the basic mechanics of reading.

• Around 4th grade educators start the expectation that students will shift from learning to read to reading to learn.

• Then, teachers begin to assign longer and more content-rich materials, and students are expected to read for information, to gather facts, remember details, look for main points, follow directions, and so on.

• But reading assignments do not just become longer and more full of content; they also become varied in their style, format, vocabulary, purpose, and intended audience.

Traditionally, after 3rd grade students will be……

• learning to skim some kinds of books quickly, checking for main points and broad themes, or searching for fine details.

• reading skeptically, or questioning the author’s assumptions, or analyzing the writer’s style.

• Reading different content for information tapping into entirely different sets of vocabulary, jargon, and background knowledge.

• Connecting reading with writing; writing in many styles, applying a myriad of discipline-specific conventions and rules.

• learning that chemists, historians, mathematicians, journalists, and members of every other profession have their own characteristic ways of talking, reasoning, arguing, presenting their thoughts, and responding to critics.

Literacy Goals in Content Area Reading • Students engage in sustained reading• encourage and require reading of primary sources/

real-world materials. • Show students, explicitly, what it means to be a

good reader or writer in the given subject area. • Teachers model/discuss how to read for

information, how to write for content, how to interpret information.

• Students should discuss what they have read, how to write, or how to interpret, analyze, or otherwise respond to texts.

So…..

• Content teachers provide instruction in the reading and writing skills that are specific to that content area because……………..…… student writing, in any content, is a window into how students think about the concepts they are learning.

Content area classrooms should extend and sharpen writing skills.

Examples of content writing:• Civil War Newspaper• Solar system web pages• lab reports, • immigrant journals, • science fair abstracts, • play scripts, • R.A.F.T. papers, • biographies of scientists, • interview questions, • timeline narratives, • response-note taking formats, • storyboards for film or slide presentations • Websites: ReadWriteThink.org and ReadingQuest

Writing in Science

• http://youtu.be/-M6nSjmugS8

• http://youtu.be/dsUXA9ewvYc

Narrative Writing

• Used when reporting about an event or an incident, describing an experience, or telling a story.

• tells a story about something that happened or explains a series of events.

• Events are written chronologically.

Persuasive Writing:

• Writer attempts to convince readers to agree with an opinion.

• emphasizes and clarifies the topic’s significance by briefly mentioning the current event or recent publication, that prompted the writer to discuss the topic.

• The rest of the piece consists of the writer’s argument in favor or in criticism of a position.

• A persuasive writing piece begins with a thesis, or statement to be proven, summarizes the position and provides further detail as necessary to amplify the essay’s points.

• An essential component of a persuasive writing piece also includes writing of an opposing viewpoint.

Expository Writing• Expository (informative) writing purpose to convey

messages, instructions, and ideas. • It involves communicating information at various

levels of understanding, such as describing information, explaining or interpreting information, clarifying a process, or evaluating information.

• Used to write how-to manuals or other form of instruction, an explanation of a natural or technological process (an outline of the evaporation cycle, for example, or how to rebuild a car engine), a comparison of two similar subjects.

Expository cont.…….• students write exactly what they're going to

say in their first sentence.

• They explain how they're going to prove it in their first paragraph.

• They write it simply and easily in the body paragraphs and sum it all up in the conclusion.