"Ways with Words"

Reading and writing is much more than a collection of basic skills. Reading and writing are essentially social and communicative practices (Bruffee, 1984). Each act of reading or writing involves socially developed and culturally embedded ways of using text to serve particular social or cultural purposes (Moje, Dillon, & O'Brien, 2000; Gee, 1999; Hourigan, 1994; Lee, 1995; Scribner & Cole, 1981; Street, 1984). All texts are shaped by specific conventions and structures of language, and proficient reading of all texts therefore demands the use of these conventions to navigate layers of meaning (Cope & Kalantzis, 1993; New London Group, 1996; Scott, 1993). Additionally, the resources and processes used by proficient readers are influenced by the specific contexts and situations in which reading occurs and the social
functions that it serves (Courts, 1997; Gee, 1996; Heath, 1983; Scribner & Cole, 1981).

The implications of this view for the literacy learning of diverse populations of students are profound. Increasingly, students come from a variety of economic, linguistic, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds, bringing significantly different experiences and expectations about how to initiate and sustain conversations, how to interact with teachers and peers, how to identify and solve different types of problems, and how to go about particular reading and writing tasks (Greenleaf, Hull, & Reilly, 1994; Lee, 1995; Moje, Dillon, & O'Brien, 2000). In addition, literacy practices become increasingly specialized throughout the school career, reflecting the broader literate, scientific, or historical conversations that characterize the academic disciplines (Applebee, 1996; Eeds & Wells, 1989; Grossman, 1990; Grossman & Shulman, 1994; Harste, 1994; Langer, 1995; Langer, Confer, & Sawyer, 1993; Lemke, 1990; Rabinowitz & Smith, 1998; Wilson & Wineburg, 1988; Wineburg, 1991; Wineburg & Wilson, 1990). Academic literacy at higher grade levels therefore requires particular interpretive and communicative competencies, or specialized "ways with words" (Heath, 1983) for skilled participation as a reader or writer (Bartholomae, 1985; Gee, 1996; Hull, 1989; Rose, 1985).

For these reasons, learning to read at early grade levels will not automatically translate into higher level academic literacy. Instead, literacy researchers have argued that for all students to learn to perform high-level, academically linked literacy tasks, teachers will need to make explicit the tacit reasoning processes, strategies, and discourse rules that shape successful readers' and writers' work (e.g., Delpit, 1988, 1995; Fielding & Pearson, 1994; Freedman, Flower, Hull, & Hayes, 1995; Gee, 1996, 1999; Hillocks, 1995; Pressley, 1998). Our own work with students from richly different backgrounds has underscored the necessity of not only telling students what to do and providing engaging and authentic opportunities for them to do it, but also painstakingly and explicitly showing them how, building bridges from their cultural knowledge and language experiences to the language and literacy practices valued and measured in school and society.

Helping students master academic literacy practices, however, does not mean a return to isolated skills-based instruction. Rather, ample studies over the past few decades have demonstrated that integrating the explicit teaching of comprehension strategies, text structures, and word-level strategies into compelling sense-making activities with texts increases student reading achievement (Baumann & Duffy, 1997; Beck, McKeown, Hamilton, & Kucan, 1997; Borkowski, Carr, Rellinger, & Pressley, 1990; Dowhower, 1999; Duffy et al., 1994; Fitzgerald, 1995; Goatley, Brock, & Raphael, 1995; Guthrie, McGough, Bennett, & Rice, 1996; Hillocks, 1995; Keene & Zimmerman, 1997; Pearson, 1996; Pressley et al., 1992; Pressley, 1998; Roehler & Duffy, 1991; Rosenshine & Meister, 1994). These researchers argue that for the reading and reasoning processes of the academic disciplines to become part of the repertoires of a broader population of students, teachers need to engage all students in complex academic literacy tasks while at the same time providing the explicit teaching and support necessary for students to perform these tasks successfully (Pearson, 1996,).

Drawing from both sociocultural studies of learning and cognitive studies of expert and novice performance on a variety of complex mental tasks, some researchers have adopted the metaphor of "cognitive apprenticeship" to describe a type of teaching designed to assist students in acquiring more expert, or proficient, cognitive processes for particular valued tasks, such as reading comprehension, composing, and mathematical problem-solving ( Bayer, 1990; Brown, Collins, & Newman, 1989; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Lee, 1995; Rogoff, 1990). In an apprenticeship, an expert practitioner or mentor draws on his or her expertise to model, direct, support, and shape the apprentice's growing repertoire of practice. Apprenticeship also generally involves learning while doing. It is hard to imagine learning to paint without actually working with canvas and brush, or learning to jump hurdles without getting out on the track.

When the desired proficiency is a cognitive practice such as composing or comprehending a text, the invisible mental processes involved in the task must be made visible and available to apprentices as they actually engage in meaningful literacy activities (Freedman et al., 1995; Pearson, 1996). To help students develop as readers and writers, then, teachers must begin to create "literacy apprenticeships," engaging students in meaningful and complex literacy practices while demystifying these literacy practices (Brown et al., 1989; Lee, 1995; Schoenbach, Greenleaf, Cziko, & Hurwitz, 1999).

This conception of literacy apprenticeship also suggests that the best teachers of specific discipline-based literacy practices are those who themselves have mastered these practices. These include the subject-area teachers and academicians who have acquired scientific, historical, mathematical, or literary discourses during their own educational careers. We argue, therefore, that for all students to attain high-level literacy, apprenticeships that demystify the literacy practices and discourses of the academic disciplines must be embedded in subject-area instruction across the curriculum, rather than becoming the sole purview of the English department. For subject-area teachers to embrace this work, they must reconceptualize subject-area teaching as an apprenticeship into discipline-based practices of thinking, talking, reading, and writing (Applebee, 1996). To assist teachers in constructing this new conception of teaching and, specifically, of reading in the content areas, we have developed an instructional framework, Reading Apprenticeship, derived from the socially and cognitively complex view of literacy and drawing on the core metaphor of cognitive apprenticeship described above.

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