This document discusses strategies for improving students' reading to learn skills across subject areas. It summarizes five articles that explore using reading strategies in science, social studies, and math to help students understand content material. Some highlighted strategies include having students identify main ideas, vocabulary, and questions after reading; using graphic novels and note-taking methods; implementing KWL charts and teaching word prefixes and morphemes. The document advocates for teachers in all subjects to incorporate these reading strategies to help students learn and make connections between different academic areas.

1. Running head: READING TO LEARN 1
Application: Reading to Learn
Sondra D. Bryan
American College of Education

2. READING TO LEARN 2
Application: Reading to Learn
One of the greatest focuses of Education today is getting students to read at high levels.
We encourage our students to read as much as they can and to gain as much understanding from
their reading. While reading is emphasized in the English classroom, it can be taken for granted
in other areas of the school. Students need to be using strategies for reading outside their
literature classes and apply them to their readings in science, social studies and even math.
Students can use strategies that helped them learn to read and begin reading to learn.
Our school is a bilingual school in the Dominican Republic, and we work hard to get our
students to read English at level. For majority of our students, Spanish is spoken at home and
school is the only exposure they have to English. This can create holes in our students
understanding and cause frustration as they move up in grade level without a strong foundation
in reading. To help our students become stronger readers, I would like to focus on students
reading to learn skills. I would like our students to be motivated to read because in reading
material, they are learning new ideas and phenomenon. They can read a story about a past
historical figure and apply their ideas to other’s ideas today. They can read about a part of the
solar system, become an expert and share their understandings with the rest of the class. Hines,
Wible, and McCartney stated that “Good literacy skills make it easier to learn science, but
science topics can also be used to teach literacy skills that will translate well to other subjects”
(2010, p.44). All subjects could benefit from better literary skills, as well as the students. In this
paper I reviewed five articles about improving literacy skills in students to help them become
better readers by understanding what they are reading through pretext and vocabulary strategies.
The first article by Hapgood and Palincsar is about Science connection to literacy. Their
argument is students’ reading comprehension increases when they are reading to learn, having a

3. READING TO LEARN 3
content goal, rather than a performance goal. Their article included two instructional methods I
found interesting and applicable to any grade in secondary. This first is called Science IDEAS by
Romance and Vitale (cited by Hapgood and Palincsar, 2007). In this, “teachers integrate reading
comprehension instruction and writing tasks that encourage students to think deeply about the
topics being studied” (p. 58). When students are given a reading, they should have guided
instruction about how to approach the text in order to get out as much information as possible.
This includes asking students for the main idea in the text, new vocabulary they came across and
writing down questions they formed when reading. Research cited by Hapgood and Palincsar
stated students achieved high levels on science test and reading comprehension on nationally
normed test. Teachers also saw a positive change in their students. The students were more
confident in their ability to read and had positive attitudes about reading.
The second instructional method is called Guided Inquiry supporting Multiple Literacies
(GLsML). In this model, “teachers guide students in sustained inquiry about specific topics
usually centering on physical phenomena” using first and second investigations (Hapgood and
Palincsar, 2007, p. 58). The firsthand investigations would be students writing about what they
have observed during their experiment and secondhand would be discussing what they read from
someone else’s experiment. As the teacher would guide the students through these experiences,
they would discuss the objectives of the experiment, process and sometimes inquiry further with
“what if” questions. Students will have an increase of content knowledge and scientific reasoning
in the end.
The second article is by William Brozo called from Manga to Math (2007). This article
explained how informative graphic novels could fill in students’ background knowledge in
science, social studies and math. Broze explains that using informative manga can “motivate

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students to engage with informational text, expand students’ knowledge of content and concepts,
and equip them with text-processing tools” (2007, p. 59). One strategy he shares is called Split-
Page Note Taking by Fisher, Brozo, Frey, and Ivery (in press). In this strategy, students divide
their page from top to bottom into two columns, the first being one-third and the second two-
thirds. In the first column, the students place the big ideas, key dates, names, questions and the
like from the story. The second column will hold all the paraphrasing or abbreviations. With this
strategy, students can create clear, orderly notes based on the information they read. Students
also learn to use inductive and deductive prompting, recall, and be able to paraphrase an idea.
The third article by Phillips, Bardsley, Bach and Gibb-Brown (2009) focus their article
called “But I teach Math!” The journey of middle school mathematics teachers and literacy
coaches learning to integrate literacy strategies into the math instruction focuses on how to help
secondary teacher who have extensive training in their area of study, but not in language and
literacy skills or special needs strategies. The article gives teachers two useful strategies to
improve literacy skills, KWL chart and mini lessons on prefixes. In the KWL chart, the teacher
places the chart divided into three sections, K-what you know about the topic, W- what you want
to know about the topic, and L- What you learned about the topic. With the teacher, students will
explain what they already know about a given topic and what they want to know more about.
This helps the students organize their thoughts and gives them a sense of direction. At the end of
the topic, students will discuss with the teacher what they learned.
The second strategy was the mini lesson prefixes. In math, like other subjects, there are
prefixes that show up regularly in geometry. Phillips, Bardsley, Bach and Gibb-Brown (2009)
focus on prefixes in front of normal polygons. They suggest teachers do a mini lesson on what
each of the prefixes mean and allow students to make connections between the prefixes and the

5. READING TO LEARN 5
terms they already know. This allows students to use what they know about one term and apply it
to another. Like triangle has three vertex and a tricycle has three tires.
The fourth article also talks about focusing on the parts of each vocabulary word. In the
article by Fisher and Blachowicz (2013), they focus on new words students encounter in math
and science by focusing on the morphemes, a unit of a language that cannot be broken down
such as a prefix, roots and the like. Fisher and Blachowicz (2013) explain how the vocabulary in
math and science is “more complex, refer to more unfamiliar and complex concepts and are more
densely packed in the text than in language arts” (p. 47). Their instructional strategy focuses on
helping students understand how to break down the large words they come across and build them
back up. Their first strategy is decomposing the words into their prefixes, roots, suffixes, and the
like. Teachers give students a word and the students break down the morphemes and determine
what the word means. Derivation is more difficult and could be used at the end of a topic to
reinforce new words. Teachers give students a list of prefixes and a list of roots to combine and
make words. This could also be used to create word families and connect their meanings.
The last article focuses more on vocabulary across all disciplines. Before going through
the two strategies, Bintz gives five factors to keep in mind from Flanigan and Greenwood (2007)
when deciding which strategies to use when introducing vocabulary. These factors to keep in
mind are 1.) The students you are teaching. 2.) The nature of the words you decide to teach. 3.)
Their instructional purposes in teaching each of those words. and 4.) The strategies you emply to
teach the words (as cited by Bintz, 2011). The first strategy I found interesting was Word
Questioning. In this strategy “teaches vocabulary and promotes critical thinking” (Bintz, 2011, p.
48). The students create a web of the word by defining, analyzing, synthesizing and evaluating
the target word. Teachers can prompt students by asking questions like, “What do you think this

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word means”, “What is an example and a non-example?”, “How does this word fit with other
words and concepts you know?”, and “What makes this an important word for me to know?”
(Bintz, 2011, p. 48).
The second strategy I found interesting in the article was Words Sorts for Expository
Text. This is a great vocabulary strategy for classes like social studies or science. This strategy
would be used before a teacher passed out a nonfiction text. . I would present this to our staff at
a team meeting and ask them for ways they could implement it into what they are already doing.
In the future I would suggest it before the beginning of a new topic or unit as a way to introduce
it. Some call this a mystery piece, getting the students excited and guessing what they theme
could be.
In the upper grades, we teacher sometimes take our students reading abilities for granted.
They come to us knowing how to read and write and we simply expect them to know how to do
everything. We need to back up and understand our students’ abilities and build on them to make
them even better readers. We need to give them the tools in all classes, so they are able to not
just read through a paper, but be able to apply the ideas and conclusions to what is being
discussed in their classes. This could create an amazing learning environment where the students
are themselves excited to see how everything works together and our disciplines are not mutually
exclusive of each other, they are all related.

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References
Bintz, W. P. (2011). Teaching vocabulary across the curriculum. Middle School Journal, 42(4), 44-53.
Brozo, W. G. (2013). From Manga to Math. Educational Leadership, 71(3), 58-61.
Fisher, P. J., & Blachowicz, C. L. (2013). A Few Words about Math and Science. Educational
Leadership, 71(3), 46-51.
Hapgood, S., & Palincsar, A. S. (2006). Where literacy and science intersect. Educational
Leadership, 64(4), 56.
Hines, P. J., Wible, B., & McCartney, M. (2010). Learning to read, reading to learn. science. 328(5977),
447
Phillips, D. C. K., Bardsley, M. E., Bach, T., & Gibb-Brown, K. (2009). " But I teach math!" The journey of
middle school mathematics teachers and literacy coaches learning to integrate literacy strategies
into the math instruction. Education, 129(3), 467-473.