Demystifying Academic Reading

Foundational and accessible, this book equips pre-service and practicing teachers with the knowledge, understanding, and tools they need to help students in grades 4 - 12 develop reading proficiency in the core academic subjects of literature, history, science, and mathematics. Applying a disciplinary literacy approach, Fang describes the verbal and visual resources, expert strategies, and disciplinary habits of mind that students must learn in order to read carefully, critically, and purposefully across genres and content areas. He also shows how teachers can promote language learning and reading/literacy development at the same time they engage students in content area learning. With informative synthesis and research-based recommendations in every chapter, this text prepares teachers to help students develop discipline-relevant and discipline-specific discursive insights, cognitive strategies, and ways of thinking/reasoning that are essential to productive learning across academic subjects. It also provides teacher educators with approaches and strategies for helping teachers develop expertise in academic reading/literacy instruction. In so doing, the book demystifies academic reading, revealing what it takes for students to read increasingly complex texts with confidence and understanding and for teachers to develop expertise that promotes disciplinary literacy. This state-of-the-art text is ideal for courses on reading methods and academic/disciplinary literacy and eminently relevant to all educators who want their students to become lifelong readers and learners.