tandfonline.com – Improving literacy and content learning across the curriculum? How teachers relate literacy teaching to school subjects in cross-curricular professional development

ABSTRACT

This study examined how teachers relate literacy teaching to their ordinary subject teaching in professional development settings. The study is conducted within the large Swedish professional development program the Literacy Boost (in Swedish “Läslyftet”), which can be viewed as an example of an international focus on reading ability beyond early and beginning reading. Such a focus may be well-grounded, but it also raises concerns of how teachers of different school subjects are addressed in such programs. The findings of this study show that participating teachers express four approaches of relating literacy teaching to subject teaching, indicating different types and degrees of coherence between professional development content and teachers’ teaching practice. While all teaching activities described by teachers aimed at improving students’ general literacy, this was mostly done in the form of additional activities rather than being embedded in the ordinary teaching concerning curricular objectives of school subjects. These results suggest that differences in how texts are used and interpreted in different school subjects should be given higher priority in the design of both content and form of professional development programs to better support subject teaching.