Rhetorical Reading and the Development of Disciplinary Literacy across the High School Curriculum.

Education researchers and literacy specialists have responded to declining reading scores among high school students by calling on teachers across subject areas to teach "disciplinary literacy," which introduces students to the ways discipline-specific knowledge is produced and communicated and teaches students to apply different reading strategies depending on the discipline from which a text originates. Disciplinary literacy programs have the potential to raise reading achievement among high school students, but they put English Language Arts (ELA) teachers in a paradoxical position: on the one hand, ELA teachers are discouraged from teaching general reading strategies that fail to account for discipline-specific text features, but on the other hand, ELA teachers are discouraged from teaching the discourse conventions of math, science, history, and social studies because they lack the specialized knowledge of teachers in those subjects. This paper proposes that "rhetorical reading," a construct that sparked a flurry of CAC studies some twenty years ago but that never influenced high school instruction, could be the solution to this impasse. Rhetorical reading is a strategy common to all academic disciplines but by its very nature demands discipline-specific adaptations when applied to specific subject areas. Those of us who help train future English Language Arts (ELA) teachers are often frustrated by the isolation of English instruction in high schools. Generally considered a discrete subject area, ELA has rarely influenced literacy practices in other subject areas such as math, science, or social studies. This situation may be changing with the emergence of "disciplinary literacy," a term coined recently by education researchers and literacy specialists (e.g., Lee & Spratley, 2010; Moje, 2008; NCTE, 2011; Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008) to describe programs that introduce students to the ways disciplinespecific knowledge is produced and communicated and teach students to apply different reading strategies depending on the academic discipline from which a text originates. Disciplinary literacy programs have taken off in recent years, and their influence can even be found in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), which not only require literacy instruction across content areas but also recommend that this instruction account for the discipline-specific nature of academic texts. For example, the math standards ask students to "construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others" (2010b, p. 6), whereas the science standards expect students to "analyze the author's purpose in providing an explanation, describing a procedure, or discussing an experiment in a text" (2010a, p. 62). The history/social studies standards call for students to "evaluate authors' differing points of view on the same historical event or issue by assessing the authors' claims, reasoning, and