Experts and Novices Reading Literature: An Analysis of Disciplinary Literacy in English Language Arts

Operationalizing and validating disciplinary literacy in secondary education

“…Active engagement, or the cognitive dimension, includes the mental work necessary to interpret, analyze, and critique a text from a critical perspective. In order to fully understand a piece of literature, a literary critic constructs both literal and inferential understandings of a text through close reading (Reynolds & Rush, 2017 ). Close reading puts the text at the center of reading and requires readers to analyze the literal content (i.e., characterization, setting, and plot), the inferential (i.e., figurative language, diction, narration, and structure), and the interpretative (i.e., the reader’s personal experiences and literary theory) to make meaning (Hillocks & Ludlow, 1984 ; Lee, 2007 ).…”

Disciplinary literacy in religious education: the role and relevance of reading

“…Reading in the disciplines requires knowledge of the way information is created, shared, and evaluated for quality within the specific discipline (Shanahan 2017). Reading in a discipline may even require students to master several different disciplinary specific lenses belonging to different subfields, such as analysing a literary text through a New Historical lens or a Critical Theory lens (Reynolds and Rush 2017). A disciplinary literacy approach to learning is therefore about understanding how students gain access to these discourses (Moje 2010) and whether they perceive their identities as disciplinary outsiders or insiders (Wickens et al 2015).…”

Teaching Digital Literary Literacies in Secondary English Language Arts

“…Teaching students how to participate in the larger disciplinary community of literary studies is within the purview of secondary English teachers. Supporting students’ disciplinary participation stands in contrast to, as one team of researchers put it, “the typical sort of pen and paper exercise that often occurs in English classrooms, where students are asked to read a text and then answer questions, work on vocabulary, and develop ‘themes’” (Reynolds & Rush, , p. 214). A focus on disciplinary participation invites students into a dynamic conversation that they can take part in shaping over time, whereas a focus on independent seatwork may wrongly communicate to students that reading literature is an isolated exercise in which the ultimate goal is to comprehend and recall details of the text or to luck upon a theme that the teacher or textbook editors seem to already know.…”

“…Like other disciplines, literary studies has its own unique literacy practices, forms of knowledge, and conventions that enable participants to generate literary knowledge (Lee, ; Lee, Goldman, Levine, & Magliano, ; Reynolds & Rush, ). Literary arguments often focus on interpretive meaning and aesthetic quality in literary works and take into account the histories of interpretation that have come before.…”

“…Like other disciplines, literary studies has its own unique literacy practices, forms of knowledge, and conventions that enable participants to generate literary knowledge (Lee, 2007;Lee, Goldman, Levine, & Magliano, 2016;Reynolds & Rush, 2017…”