Single Person Focal Journal Club

Teachers and content area reading: Attitudes, beliefs, and change

Summarize: Leigh Hall's article "Teachers and content area reading: Attitudes, beliefs, and change" starts off showing research that proves that middle and high school students will be able to comprehend content area readings greater when provided with instructions for reading. The issue is that many teachers do not realize that reading instruction within their content area is different from an English teacher's job. If teachers do not understand this, then most of them will cover reading the same ways that they were taught. Calling for a study around the reasons that pre and in-service content area teachers may or may not guide reading to help researchers and teacher educators build a more sound approach toward the different content area reading strategies. 

Make Connections: When reading this article, I made connections with the idea I learned in LLED 3530 that many teachers instruct based on their experience. This idea is shown with the pre-service science teacher's statements of them deciding to become science teachers because they did not believe it would take higher abilities in reading. To then being tested when their students lacked the proper reading ability for their grade level, the pre-service science teachers had stated that they believed reading was important. However, they shut down when faced with this issue, even blaming past teachers instead of attempting a solution towards their student's inability to comprehend scientific text. 

Critique: The article highlights the importance of all teacher's knowing how to instruct reading for their content areas. I expected the in-service teachers to be more likely to support reading because of their experience. Still, I found it odd that the studies lasted two years for them, while pre-service teacher studies only lasted a semester. It would have been interesting if the study was reversed so that pre-service teachers would have more exposure to see if their beliefs around instructing reading would be on par with the older teachers or higher. 

Importance: In all, this article is Important because teachers get to see how supportive reading is for student's understanding of a specific content area if they are appropriately guided. The research points to the idea that a single class around incorporating literacy is not enough, which I believe shows the extra steps educators need to take so that instructing reading within whatever content area. Relates to my future role as a teacher because I will not have classes centered around literacy strategies for science, so I must seek out resources that will be beneficial for my students reading whether it's from workshops or other teachers.

Word Count: 425