10/26/2012
Teaching Reading in the Content Areas
Tom Sticht International Consultant in Adult Education
The Fall 2012 issue of the Reading Hall of Fame Newsletter includes a tribute to Harold “Hal” Herber, who died June 6, 2012. Herber was the author of the seminal textbook on contextualized reading instruction by integrating reading instruction into the academic content areas of science, history, social studies, vocational education, and other content. His 1970 textbook, Teaching Reading in the Content Areas, was aimed at the teaching of reading comprehension strategies within the context of academic content in the K-12 system, particularly at the middle and secondary school levels.
I first became acquainted with Herber’s work in the early 1970s while working on the design and development of an adult literacy instruction program for the U. S. Army. In the course of this curriculum development project I studied earlier literacy programs developed for Army personnel during World Wars I and II. I was struck by the extent to which Herber’s ideas about integrating the teaching of reading and academic content in the public schools reflected the approaches to the teaching of reading to adults in the two World Wars.
In WWI, Cora Wilson Stewart, founder of the famous Moonlight Schools in Kentucky, wrote the Soldier’s First Book to teach illiterate recruits reading and writing. In this book she integrated the teaching of literacy with the teaching of important military content. This was consistent with her approach to teaching literacy for adults in the civilian population in Kentucky. In that approach she taught literacy within the content knowledge areas of farming, health, soil conservation, and other important life areas. Her approach was explicitly based on her understanding of the importance of teaching literacy and content knowledge together. In 1922, in her book Moonlight Schools for the Emancipation of Illiterates, she stated, “…each lesson accomplished a double purpose, the primary one of teaching the pupil to read, and at the same time that of imparting instruction in the things that vitally affected him in his daily life”(p. 71).
In WWII, Paul Witty developed reading programs for illiterate or poorly literate adult recruits and once again followed the approach of Cora Wilson Stewart and integrated the teaching of literacy and mathematics within the functional contexts of daily military life. This allowed the students to learn both literacy skills and important job content knowledge in an integrated manner.
In both WWI and WWII, the teaching of reading and military content knowledge in an integrated manner could be termed “teaching content in the reading area”, because the primary purpose was to teach reading. This is different from Herber’s approach of “teaching reading in the content areas”, where the primary purpose of the instruction is to teach the knowledge content, while secondarily teaching reading strategies and skills. However, the latter was the focus of another reading program developed for the U. S. Army, this one for higher level, college level reading.
During World War II the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) needed personnel with knowledge of chemistry and physiology to deal with chemical and biological warfare. They sent more highly literate troops to colleges to learn these subjects but found that many lacked the reading and study skills needed for college level reading and study. So the Army got Francis Robinson, professor of psychology at Ohio State University, to develop a study skills training course for Army personnel. Robinson developed the famous SQ3R formula (Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review), outlining the most widely used reading comprehension and study skills method in the world. It deals with what the reader does before reading (Survey,Question) , during reading (Read, Recite), and after reading (Review). This general approach, sometimes called the active reading strategy, forms the basis for many of the approaches for improving reading comprehension in what Herber and others have called teaching reading in the content areas in the K-12 system and which are taught in college as developmental (remedial) reading courses.
Interestingly, there is now a massive movement, funded by over 100 million dollars from charitable foundations and the federal government, to contextualize the teaching of reading and writing integrated within academic and vocational courses. And the newly funded center for adult literacy research has Mark Conley, a former graduate student of Hal Herber’s, as one of its major research associates. In his 2008 book, Content Area Literacy: Learners in Context, Conley continues the work of helping teachers advance students’ learning by contextualizing the teaching of literacy within the functional contexts of important subject matter content knowledge.
tsticht@aznet.net