A Different Type of CAR



Content Area Reading (CAR) is a concept that I have been aware of but never knew what to call it. There are two main extensions of CAR, content literacy, and disciplinary literacy, each of these are fairly similar but different at the same time. Content literacy "...refers to the ability to use reading, writing, talking, listening, and viewing to learn subject matter in a given discipline." (Vacca, 2002a pg.16) Disciplinary literacy "... is having an impact on the way researchers and educators think about literacy and learning in content areas." (Buehl and Moore, 2009 pg.16) In layman's terms content literacy is the ability to read a certain material regardless of the subject matter. On the other hand, disciplinary literacy is the ability to take what you have read and know what it means from the stand point of someone who is a specialist in that content area. The best example I can give is when you think about someone reading the Bible. An average individual who reads the Bible is using content literacy to understand a surface level of meaning behind a certain scripture. Someone who reads with disciplinary literacy can take the same scripture as the person who practiced content literacy and get a vastly more in depth look of the true meaning of the scripture.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tasha's with a Tweak

I really enjoyed Tasha’s role play strategy. It gave an insightful look at who the characters were even though we had not read the book, the raw emotion of the play put us in the character’s shoes and allow us to have some sort of an emotional connection with them. I could use this strategy ion my content area when it comes to History. There are many plays that are based upon historical events that would allow us to change things up from the everyday textbook activities. One way that I may tweak this assignment is to get them to read the play and then create their own dialogue in a modern-day speech. In order to do this, they would have to cooperate and have a sound knowledge of the information that was going on in the play.
Read more

Today in Class...

There are plenty of strategies that can be used to help students learn how to comprehend something that they have read. Today we spoke about writing to learn activities such as micro themes, Point of View Guides (POVGs), unsent letters, and an assortment of other strategies that can be used with any classroom setting. The one that we used today was a Biopoem it was a really interesting way to get the reader to interact with a classmate as well as having to grasp what the text is about. What made this assignment so cool to me was that we did not read from a mundane textbook but from a children's book with illustrations and all. In order to complete the biopoem my partner and I actually had to read the book, it was not one of those assignments where you could just skim through and find the answers, another thing that I like is that no two students will really have the same poem, there will be similarities but different aspects of the book will stick out to each student thus maki...
Read more