I believe that the resistance to teaching reading in the content areas exists because teachers have had little experience teaching or learning reading with non- fiction texts themselves. Teachers often teach the way they have observed their own teachers throughout their life as a student. From elementary school through high school, my teachers usually stuck to basal readers with the occasional novel during reading and then moved onto text books for science, math and social studies. Our classroom libraries consisted of mostly fictional books with the occasional “Highlights” magazine here and there. When majoring in Elementary Education in college, teaching reading in the content areas was not emphasized. Again this remained separate. As I have progressed in my career over the past eleven years, I have seen more and more elementary school teachers using a variety of texts when teaching content areas. Unfortunately, the basal reader remains the staple of most elementary classrooms during Reading itself so students aren’t making the connection and using the reading strategies they have learned when reading textbooks in other subjects.
I believe that a lot of teachers try not to leave the comfort zone of what they have always known. Teachers need to take a step back in order to realize that the students today can’t continue to be instructed in such a departmentalized fashion. Integration is the key. Various sources should be used across the curriculum in order to provide students with a well rounded understanding of subject matter. For example, technology is an integral part of today’s society, so it is essential that teachers incorporate the teaching of how to comprehend and locate information on the web.
Reading specialists can help educators understand that teaching reading strategies in the content areas will actually make their jobs easier and more rewarding. You can spend a lot of time trying to explain what a textbook says as a content area...