Winter Storm Lunch Talk: Ana Taboada Barber (CHSE)

"United States History for Engaged Reading (USHER): A Content-Area Literacy Intervention in Social Studies"

Content-Area literacy has been discussed as a framework for middle school literacy which may lead to the more advanced thinking tools used in disciplinary literacy, in high school and beyond. In this presentation I make the case for the necessity of a content-area literacy framework for middle-school struggling readers, especially English Learners (ELs), who struggle with accessing content while developing oral English proficiency. Through empirical findings from our three-year USHER project I share my perspective on the usefulness of content-area literacy as a preliminary step for disciplinary literacy in the later, high school grades.