"Rhetorical Reading and the Development of Disciplinary Literacy Across the High School Curriculum"

James Warren's "Rhetorical Reading and the Development of Disciplinary Literacy Across the High School Curriculum" is a position paper, not a study. He responds to a problem he himself constructs, which is a paradox he identifies for ELA teachers.

But to discuss that paradox, first we have to distinguish between content and disciplinary literacy. The former seeks to return to the same literacy skills that students learn in elementary school for the sake of learning how to read in the content areas in high school. However, as Warren notes, this strategy has proved neither popular nor effective. He gives two reasons for why this might be the case. One: the strategies are for comprehension in general, and the disciplines ask students to do much more than simply understand texts in the content areas. Two: teachers just don't want to do it; they see it as taking away time from the teaching of content. On the other hand, disciplinary literacy has proven more effective and more popular. In effect, disciplinary literacy strives to teach students the different disciplinary epistemologies early on, rather than waiting to college. And this strategy has proven much more popular and effective, probably because teacher now see themselves as "replicating what science or math educators usually do rather than appropriating routines from reading education" (qtd in Warren, 2013, p. 4). Despite this popularity, however, the move to disciplinary literacy, according to Warren, puts ELA teachers in a paradoxical position: "on the one hand, they will be discouraged from teaching general reading strategies that fail to account for discipline-specific text features; on the other hand, they will be discouraged from teaching the discourse conventions of math, science, history, and social studies because they lack the specialized knowledge of teachers in those subjects" (p. 2). Later, he goes on to say that,

despite the superiority of disciplinary literacy programs, content area literacy—and its reliance on the autonomous text—does offer one clear advantage for ELA teachers: a more clearly defined role, albeit a role that makes nearly impossible demands. After all, if academic texts require no specialized disciplinary knowledge but instead simply require the right comprehension strategy to unlock their inherent meaning, then ELA teachers with expertise in comprehension strategies become the most important literacy specialists on campus. Not only can ELA teachers teach students these reading strategies but also they can train subject area colleagues in how to teach them. But in disciplinary literacy programs that depend on the specialized knowledge of subject matter teachers, the role of ELA teachers threatens to dwindle to teaching the discipline-specific reading practices of literary scholars. Even if ELA teachers were content with this more limited role, the fact is that they are generally charged with much more: teaching literacy per se. There is a danger, then, that ELA teachers, despite the unrealistic demands of staying in role that makes them responsible for all ELA learning, will revert to general reading strategies, thus reinforcing the presumption of textual autonomy these strategies entail, unless they are equipped with authentic disciplinary reading practices that are applicable across disciplines and customizable to specific disciplinary practices. (p. 5)

It seems to me like Warren is making an argument at two levels. At one level, he claims that it's not professional desirable to be reduced to teachers of literature. Literary criticism doesn't seem to embody enough cultural capital for him--or, what is more likely, for administrators. At another level, though, he seems to say, let's get real. ELA teachers are still going to be "considered the 'language people'" (p. 2), despite however more palatable teaching disciplinary literacy is for content-area teachers. So, given that ELA teachers de facto status at the language people in practice, we might as well ensure that they're not teaching general reading comprehension skills. Instead, we should have them teach rhetorical reading, since it "appears to be a universal practice among disciplinary experts" (p. 6). In fact, a good chunk of this article consists in Warren justifying how rhetorical reading could work in an ELA, rather than a CAC, context.

Two unrelated notes. I thought it was interesting how the U.S. produces good readers in elementary school, but then how they become much worse by fourth grade:

Separate, explicit reading instruction has rarely extended past elementary school, though, perhaps due to the widespread assumption that "basic reading skills automatically evolve into more advanced reading skills" (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008, p. 40). This assumption has not been borne out by data, however. Beginning around eighth grade, reading scores among U.S. students plateau, and by the time these students graduate from high school, they perform worse on reading assessments than their counterparts twenty years ago and fall into the bottom half of international rankings (Grigg, Donahue, & Dion, 2007). A recent policy brief by NCTE (2011) summarizes the situation bluntly: "Fourth graders in the U.S. score among the highest in the world on literacy assessments, but by tenth grade the same students score among the lowest" (p. 15). 

Slightly off topic, but

We know from reading research that rhetorical reading is a universal habit of academic experts that seems to develop "naturally" as one is socialized into an academic discipline, and it would be foolish to think that we can replicate this process in the classroom. But this observation can lead to passivity among English instructors, to a feeling that rhetorical reading and disciplinary literacy "will happen or it won't, with or without us." Early research on disciplinary literacy programs indicates that we can do more than sit back and wait. (Warren, 2013, p. 7)

I just wanted to connect the idea that some educators assume that "basic reading skills automatically evolve into more advanced reading skills" (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008, p. 40) with the idea that "rhetorical reading is a universal habit of academic experts that seems to develop "naturally" as one is socialized into an academic discipline" (Warren, 2013, p. 7). Together, I take these two quotes to mean that, just because students can develop these skills naturally, doesn't mean that they do in each and every case. For many, perhaps, the skill has to be cultivated.

Another aspect of this article I found useful was the distinction between strategy and practice:

One reason rhetorical reading fits so well into disciplinary literacy programs is that it is not so much a content area "strategy" as it is a disciplinary "practice." I am borrowing the distinction between "strategies" and "practices" from Moje (2008), who clarifies that general reading strategies are analogous to tools—they may aid in the acquisition of knowledge, but they do not constitute aspects of that knowledge (Moje & Speyer, 2008). For example, a common strategy in content area literacy programs is the use of KWL tables, in which students record what they "know" about a topic, what they "want" to learn from a text, and what they "learned" after reading. KWL tables may aid comprehension of a difficult text in, say, biology, but biologists do not use KWL charts as part of their work in biology. It might be argued that biologists have automated a sort of KWL process and thus this strategy is a valid disciplinary habit, but KWL tables, like most general reading strategies that characterize content area literacy, were developed by reading researchers to facilitate comprehension and recall among beginning readers (Ogle, 1986). In other words, KWL tables were not developed inductively based on observations of expert readers and were never intended to simulate a habit of experts. (Warren, 2013, p. 6)