Why the Language Arts in the Content Areas?

• Reading, writing, listening, speaking, viewing, and visually representing are integrated components of language arts.

• When students experience all forms of literacy, they ultimately learn how to learn.

• Students become literate and develop into independent self-educators who can acquire all types of content information on their own.

• Reading promotes writing, which in turn promotes more reading.

• Students take charge of their learning by interacting with text materials in a variety of ways.

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Supportive Research

• “Studies indicate that the most logical place for developing reading, writing, and thinking competencies is in the content areas, such as social studies and science.”

• Literacy in content areas helps prepare students for complex textual concepts that can go a long way in helping them comprehend needed information.

• Once students have acquired content literacy, the process of building new knowledge is greatly facilitated.

• Content literacy: the ability to use reading, writing, speaking, listening, viewing, and visual representing for the acquisition of new content.

• Typical daily instruction allows such students to actively construct knowledge through the use of reading activities.

• This approach to learning content gives students the opportunity to make discoveries and to think for themselves.

A Purpose for Real Reading and Writing

• “Real language”: Students should read material that is worth reading.

• A young person’s experience with text should be literacy events (reads what they want to read).

• Integrating the language arts into the content areas establishes a clear purpose for learning.

• The content of the curriculum provides students with a reason for acquiring information.

• Teachers need to help students create a connection between school and real-life situations.

• When the language arts become tools for understanding, creating, and communicating information, students have the opportunity to practice, refine, and extend the literacy skills they already possess by engaging in something meaningful.

​Constructing Content Knowledge

• Active involvement in reading and writing about a topic leads to the construction of new knowledge that is added to the student's knowledge based.

• In turn, this growing knowledge base helps students to understand any new information they encounter.

• Cyclical process: the more background knowledge a student possesses, the easier it is for that person to implement literacy activities to integrate new content, thus increasing the base of knowledge and facilitating the continued use of literacy strategies.

• The content goals relate to the significant amount of information in the text, while the process goals relate to what the student needs to do to acquire that knowledge.

• To attain both goals, the emphases prior to reading should be on activating each student's prior knowledge.

 

Text Considerations

First thing to consider is the impact of different types of text on the students.

​Organizational Patterns

Cause-Effect: shows the causal relationship between two sets of ideas and facts.

Comparison-contrast: focuses on the similarities and differences that are evident in the topics of particular passages.

Enumeration: the author describes important information about a particular topic.

Sequence: putting ideas and topics into a particular order.

Problem-solution: shows how a problem develops and then outlines the solutions to the problem.

​Readability

• How readily or easily a text can be read is called readability.

• Readability also refers to the characteristics of the reader as well as aspects of the written text.

• How difficult a text is depends upon the length of the sentences, the complexity of the words, the language, the writing style, and the layout or appearance of the material.

• Each reader's prior knowledge of the content, purpose for reading, vocabulary understanding, interests, and attitudes all affect how well he or she is able to understand a text.

• Readability formulas: generally graph the average length of the sentences and the average number of syllables per word in a text.

• The Fry readability graph is one of the most accepted and widely used formulas.

• The Lexile system rates texts from beginning readers through the college level.

Text and Reader Interaction

• To determine how suitable textual material is for particular students, consider the interaction that should occur between the reader and the text.

• The teacher should examine the background knowledge or experience of the reader, the purpose of the material, its relevance, interest, and appropriateness, and the overall predictability of the text for the reader.

• Cloze test: (interactive strategy) words are systematically deleted and the student must predict the correct word for each deletion.

 

Helping Students Build Information

1. Within the integrated curriculum, you need to help students develop comprehension and communication competencies:

2. Understanding and effectively using the specific vocab,

3. Developing strategies to guide and facilitate individual comprehension.

4. Knowing how and when to implement such strategies.

5. Being able to use a variety of resources to reinforce and support comprehension.

6. Developing writing as a learning tool for comprehension and communication.

​Teaching Activities

• Graphic organizers

• Illustrating and writing what I learned

• Writing hypotheses

• Paragraph frames

• Comparing and contrasting two creatures

• What I learned

• Guided reading procedure (GRP)

• Semantic mapping

• Semantic feature analysis

• Possible sentences

• K-T-W-L-E

• Guidance Strategies

• Survey, question, read, retell, and review (SQ3R)

• Directed Reading-Thinking Activity

• Writing songs based on informational text

• ReQuest

• Text pattern reading guides

• Social Literacy Activity

• Point of View and social literacy

• Debate

• Multiliteracies presentation

• Connecting fiction with nonfiction

​Assessment and the Integrated Approach to Literacy and the Content Areas

• In the integrated approaches using thematic units, you no not assess learning with teacher-made tests and correctly answered worksheets.

• Assessment must be authentic in nature and based on what students actually do in a variety of contexts at different points throughout the instructional year.

• Assessment methods include checklists, anecdotal records, learning logs, dialogue journals, portfolios, teacher conferences, peer assessment, and self-assessment.

​Reflection
Due to an increased emphasis in the areas of mathematics and language arts, there has been a decline in teaching of other subject areas such as, science, social studies, music, and art. Mathematics and language arts have been two main skill areas tested within the last few years, and other subject areas have been overlooked by test creators who are not deeply involved in the classroom environment. When I was in school, these overlooked areas were some of my favorite things to learn about. Even today, as I am transforming into an educator, I have learned that teaching these long lost subjects are my favorite things to teach. I believe that teachers today are some consumed with getting their “numbers right” and “teaching the test” that they forget about the crucial life skills that other subjects teach students. There is a way to teach the fundamental skills in mathematics and language arts AND incorporate art, music, science, and social studies- it is all about balance and just the right mix. For example, at The Learning Academy, I have had my students read about the early American Explorers (social studies) while teaching sequencing of events (language arts).