Teaching Content is Teaching Reading

Part of my Summer Institute training for TNTP includes a Literacy Course.  Not for me to become literate, but to teach me how to include and promote literacy skills in my classroom.  Perhaps the first reaction I, and many others, had is "But I'm a math teacher...".  As I have learned, literacy is something that cuts across all content areas.  You can't succeed in life without strong literacy skills and you can't succeed in math without them either. 

The video above, Teaching Content is Teaching Reading, comes from Dr. Daniel Willingham, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia who studies the application of psychology to education.  The video makes a good argument for the importance of learning about the world and learning in many different content areas in order to improve reading comprehension. 

Research has found it is critical to attain decoding and fluency skills (being able to pronounce and read the letters of words without hesitation) by the third grade. Once those skills are in place, kids can begin to focus more on building vocabulary and improving comprehension skills.  It is very hard to work on vocabulary or comprehension when a student is still unable to read and decode the letters.  For a lot of young readers, or struggling readers, too much focus is put on improving reading skills alone, without focusing on improving overall background knowledge.  This is why it is important to teach literacy skills across all content areas.  In order to improve reading comprehension, it is vital to just know lots of things.  Knowing about history, science, math, sports, culture, religion, social studies, literature... all of these things that make up our world, is a key to greater understanding. 

In my next post, I will further explore the importance of literacy in the content areas by looking at a tools that helps you find reading materials appropriate to a student's reading level.