Literacy Across the Disciplines

Across the country, schools and districts are asking teachers to weave literacy into every subject. State standards increasingly highlight cross-curricular learning and call for content and disciplinary literacy, signaling that reading and writing are essential not just in English language arts but also science, social studies, math, and beyond.

For teachers, however, this can feel like a big ask. How do you balance literacy with content instruction? How do you know when to focus on strategies versus discipline-specific practices? Why should we teach these approaches to our students? And how do you make sure multilingual learners are supported along the way?

In this blog we’ll unpack three complementary approaches — content integration, content literacy, and disciplinary literacy — to clarify how they fit together, why they matter, and how teachers can apply them in practical ways. We will also address how to incorporate disciplinary literacy in the classroom.

When seen as a continuum, these approaches support students from the earliest grades through high school, ensuring that literacy becomes the connective thread that enables every learner to access, analyze, and communicate across disciplines.

Making Sense of the Terminology

When we talk about literacy across the disciplines, there are a few terms that often arise as part of the conversation: cross-curricular, content integration, content literacy, and disciplinary literacy. These terms are related but not necessarily interchangeable and understanding their differences can help teachers utilize them more effectively in K-12 classrooms.

What Is Content Integration?

Content integration refers to embedding disciplinary content such as science, social studies, or math into literacy instruction so that students build knowledge and vocabulary while practicing reading and writing. Closely related is cross-curricular instruction, which emphasizes making intentional connections across subjects. Integration often becomes the bridge for cross-curricular work, showing students how literacy links learning across disciplines.

What Is Content Literacy?

Content literacy is the instruction and use of general literacy strategies, such as predicting, summarizing, making inferences, or asking questions, that can be applied to texts in any subject area. Its purpose is to equip students with flexible tools for making sense of a wide range of texts.

What Is Disciplinary Literacy?

Disciplinary literacy goes a step further. It involves teaching students to read, write, and think like experts in a specific subject. A historian might question a document’s source, a scientist might analyze evidence in a lab report, and a mathematician might use precise symbolic language in a proof. The goal is to teach students the unique ways of knowing, thinking, and communicating in each discipline.

Literacy Across Disciplines: The Research

In order to understand why the push for literacy across disciplines is increasing, it’s critical to look at the research that supports it. A growing body of evidence shows that content integration, content literacy, and disciplinary literacy each play a unique role in student learning.

Content Integration Research

Content integration is supported by the idea that reading comprehension depends heavily on background knowledge. Willingham (2018) has argued that students cannot fully understand what they read without a strong base of knowledge.

Cervetti, Hwang, and Wright (2016) found that when literacy was integrated with science instruction, students not only developed stronger scientific understanding but also improved their reading comprehension. Similarly, Vaughn et al. (2013) demonstrated that middle school students in an intervention blending social studies and literacy outperformed their peers in both content knowledge and comprehension.

At the elementary level, Fuhler, Farris, and Nelson (2011) showed how pairing historical artifacts with picture books provided students with rich inquiry-based experiences that deepened both content understanding and literacy engagement. Guthrie’s work on Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (2004) adds to this evidence, demonstrating that instruction that combines motivation, background knowledge, and strategy instruction leads to higher comprehension outcomes.

Taken together, these studies affirm that integration, particularly in the elementary grades, ensures that literacy development and knowledge building go hand in hand.

Content Literacy Research

Content literacy, by contrast, focuses on the use of generalizable literacy strategies to make sense of texts across subjects. Research by Pressley (2000) and Duke and Pearson (2002) demonstrated that strategies such as summarizing, predicting, and monitoring comprehension can significantly improve reading outcomes in upper elementary and middle grades.

Shanahan and Shanahan (2008) positioned content literacy as an intermediate stage of literacy development: more advanced than basic decoding, but not yet as specialized as the discipline-specific practices of experts. Yet the limits of this approach become clear in adolescence.

Vaughn et al. (2013), for instance, noted that comprehension strategies alone were insufficient for students tackling the dense, abstract texts of social studies, pointing to the need for more content-specific scaffolds. Thus, content literacy provides a useful bridge in the upper elementary and middle years, but it cannot fully support the specialized demands of disciplinary texts.

Disciplinary Literacy Research

Disciplinary literacy is much more advanced on the spectrum of literacy development, emphasizing the ways experts in different fields construct knowledge through texts.

Shanahan and Shanahan (2008) argued that adolescents need to learn to “read like historians, scientists, or mathematicians” rather than relying only on general comprehension strategies. Moje (2011) similarly called for apprenticing students into authentic disciplinary practices, positioning literacy as inseparable from subject-matter learning.

In science, Houseal (2016) connected disciplinary literacy practices to the Next Generation Science Standards, showing that engaging students in evaluating claims and evidence strengthens both literacy and conceptual understanding. In history, Sam Wineburg’s work revealed that historians approach sources by questioning authorship, context, and corroboration, all skills that can be taught to adolescents. Patterson et al. (2017) found that when language arts and social studies teachers planned collaboratively around source-based tasks, students engaged in deeper inquiry and more meaningful literacy practices.

Research also underscores the importance of disciplinary literacy for multilingual learners. Uccelli et al. (2015) demonstrated that cross-disciplinary academic language proficiency, such as unpacking dense syntax, or reasoning with evidence, predicts reading comprehension even after controlling for vocabulary.

Similarly, Siffrinn and Lew (2018) argued that explicit attention to disciplinary language and discourse is “particularly important for English learners” since traditional supports often emphasize general vocabulary rather than the specialized literacies needed to fully engage with subject-area texts.

From Research to Practice: Applying the Three Approaches in the Classroom

Here are some example strategies for each of the three approaches that teachers can use in the classroom to help build literacy skills across disciplines.

Grades K–5: Content Integration

In the elementary years, content integration ensures that background knowledge is being built alongside literacy skills. Embedding a variety of texts from all subjects into reading and writing lessons helps all students build the background knowledge and vocabulary they need for comprehension growth. For multilingual learners, integration is especially powerful because it situates new language in meaningful, content-rich contexts.

For example, in a fourth-grade unit framed by the guiding question “How do living things adapt to the world around them?” literacy instruction integrates both science and social studies content. Students read an informational article explaining how landforms and climate influence the way people build communities, a narrative describing how a family adjusts to life near a river, and a scientific diagram showing how animals adapt within a food chain. These texts build background knowledge on ecosystems, geography, and human-environment interaction, while reinforcing vocabulary such as adaptation, habitat, and climate.

Through discussion and writing, students return to the guiding question, with multilingual learners supported by visuals, cognates, and sentence frames as structured opportunities to use new academic language. In this way, content integration reflects the principles of integrated ELD where students learn disciplinary concepts and academic English simultaneously, with literacy serving as the bridge.

Grades 4–8: Content Literacy

As students move into upper elementary and middle school, content literacy becomes central: teachers explicitly teach general strategies such as predicting, summarizing, questioning, and making inferences and coach students to apply them to content-area texts.

With a social studies text, for example, a teacher might model how to preview headings, dates, and maps to predict what the section will explain. As students read, the teacher can think aloud to ask causal questions like, What happened? Why? What evidence supports that? Students can be prompted to mark cause-and-effect signal words in the margins and pause at each subheading to summarize the gist in one or two sentences using vocabulary from the text.

Targeted vocabulary instruction and sentence frames give multilingual learners structured support as they practice phrasing predictions, questions, and summaries in English. A frame such as Because ___, ___ happened, so ___ helps students express cause-and-effect relationships clearly while reinforcing academic language. These supports make the strategies doubly valuable: they strengthen comprehension of the text while also building proficiency in academic English.

Grades 6–12: Disciplinary Literacy

By high school, students must go beyond general strategies to engage in the authentic reading and writing practices of each discipline. Historians source and corroborate documents, scientists evaluate claims and evidence, mathematicians work with precise symbolic language, and literary critics analyze author’s craft.

In practice, in a high school history class for example, disciplinary literacy means showing students how to dive into a primary source document like a speech and think deeply about who wrote it, when and why. Teachers can think aloud to model how to identify things like an author’s perspective, bias or reliability, just like historians do when determining meaning of a text.

For example, a teacher could say, As we read this text, we can ask questions like: Who wrote this speech? What was going on at the time? What message were they trying to communicate? As students read, the teacher can guide them to notice perspective and word choice, by saying: Highlight a phrase that shows the speaker’s goals. How does the word choice reflect the messaging they’re trying to convey?

The teacher can also introduce another primary source like a newspaper article from the same time period that reports on the event and explicitly model how to compare the two texts and think through them like a historian.

For multilingual learners, disciplinary literacy opens the door to mastering the specialized academic language of each field. As the teachers guide students in comparing two conflicting accounts of the same event, they can model how to use specific vocabulary and language, for example by saying“One source suggests”, to express uncertainty.

A science teacher might structure lab write-ups with the Claim-Evidence-Reasoning framework, giving students both the conceptual tools of science and the language scaffolds they need to explain their ideas. In math, teachers can explicitly draw attention to how terms like mean or slope carry technical meanings, helping multilingual learners distinguish between everyday and disciplinary usage.

Strengthening Literacy for All Students

Content integration, content literacy, and disciplinary literacy form a continuum that strengthens literacy for all students while ensuring multilingual learners have equitable access to grade-level content. Integration in the early grades embeds language in rich content, content literacy strategies in the middle grades provide portable tools across subjects, and disciplinary literacy in high school apprentices students into the language and practices of the disciplines.

References

• Cervetti, G. N., Hwang, H., & Wright, T. S. (2016). The role of science in reading instruction: Learning from disciplinary research. The Reading Teacher, 70(4), 381–389.
• Duke, N. K., & Pearson, P. D. (2002). Effective practices for developing reading comprehension. In A. E. Farstrup & S. J. Samuels (Eds.), What research has to say about reading instruction (3rd ed., pp. 205–242). International Reading Association.
• Fuhler, C. J., Farris, P. J., & Hatch, L. (2011). Building literacy skills across the curriculum: Forging connections with the past. The Reading Teacher, 65(3), 194–206.
• Guthrie, J. T., Wigfield, A., Barbosa, P., Perencevich, K. C., Taboada, A., Davis, M. H., Scafiddi, N. T., & Tonks, S. (2004). Increasing reading comprehension and engagement through Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction. Journal of Educational Psychology, 96(3), 403–423.
• Houseal, A. K. (2016). Disciplinary literacy through the lens of the Next Generation Science Standards. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 59(6), 663–668.
• Moje, E. B. (2011). Developing socially just subject-matter instruction: A review of the literature on disciplinary literacy teaching. Review of Research in Education, 35(1), 46–67.
• Patterson, A., Wickens, C. M., & Bean, T. W. (2017). Leveraging literacies through collaborative source-based planning and instruction. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 61(2), 143–151.
• Pressley, M. (2000). What should comprehension instruction be the instruction of? In M. L. Kamil, P. B. Mosenthal, P. D. Pearson, & R. Barr (Eds.), Handbook of reading research (Vol. 3, pp. 545–561). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Shanahan, T., & Shanahan, C. (2008). Teaching disciplinary literacy to adolescents: Rethinking content-area literacy. Harvard Educational Review, 78(1), 40–59.
• Siffrinn, L., & Lew, M. (2018). Building disciplinary language and literacy in elementary teacher training. The Reading Teacher, 72(3), 349–359.
• Uccelli, P., Galloway, E. P., Barr, C. D., Meneses, A., & Dobbs, C. L. (2015). Beyond vocabulary: Exploring cross-disciplinary academic-language proficiency and its association with reading comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly, 50(3), 337–356.
• Vaughn, S., Swanson, E. A., Roberts, G., Wanzek, J., Stillman-Spisak, S. J., Solis, M., & Simmons, D. (2013). Improving reading comprehension and social studies knowledge in middle school. Reading Research Quarterly, 48(1), 77–93.
• Willingham, D. T. (2018). The reading mind: A cognitive approach to understanding how the mind reads. Jossey-Bass.