Abstract: Since the formal education cannot be expected to provide individuals with sufficient knowledge to last a lifetime, educators need to help learners develop knowledge, skills, and predispositions essential for independent learning. Reading in content areas whose primary purpose is to help learners acquire content literacy or the ability to use reading (and) writing for the acquisition of new knowledge from materials required in their subject is one way of preparing students to be independent learners.
KeyWords: reading in content areas, content literacy, independent learners, learner-centered instructions.

Science and technology, and other areas of knowledge alike, have been developing in a very rapid way. This continuing explosion of knowledge poses
increasingly higher literacy demands to formal education, whose primary job is to prepare learners for productive citizenship.
Since the formal education cannot be expected to provide individuals with sufficient knowledge to last a lifetime (Herber, 1970), educators have now turned their attention to alternative efforts to help learners to develop knowledge, skills, and predispositions essential for independent learning. One way of promoting this development is through teaching of reading in content areas with the primary purpose of helping learners acquire the necessary strategies to use reading (and writing) for the acquisition of new knowledge from the materials required in their subjects. In the words of McKenna & Robinson (1990,1993), the purpose of the content area reading is the development of "content literacy."
This article will (1) unpack the notion of content literacy and what the content-area reading entails, (2) elaborate on the principles derived from relevant research on reading and writing on which the notion of content literacy is based, and (3) propose instructional strategies.

CONTENT LITERACY: DEFINITION, REQUIREMENTS
McKenna & Robinson (1990, 1993) define content literacy as the ability to use reading and writing for the acquisition of new content in a given discipline. Such an ability includes general literacy skills (e.g., understanding what a text means, locating central ideas in the text, etc.), content-specific literacy skills (e.g., reading conventionalized symbols in math; map reading in the social studies, etc.), and prior knowledge of content of the subject matter. General reading skills allow comprehension across different subject matters, specific content knowledge allows the construction of a deeper level of understanding within a subject mat-ter, and background knowledge enables learners to relate what is read to what they already
know (Perfetti, 1991).

As mentioned earlier, the notion of content literacy suggests that learners' understanding of the content presented in all subjects could be substantially enhanced through appropriate writing assignments and supplemental reading (McKenna & Robinson, 1990, 1993). This will happen only after the learners can understand the informational content of what they read. In other words, to use Adler & Van Doren's (1972) hierarchy of reading abilities, the learners must first be able to comprehend what the text says ("elementary reading") before they can process the information at the higher levels ("inspectional," "analytical," and "syntopical" reading), such as those required in the notion of using writing and supplemental reading as a learning tool.

While, at face value, critical reading in content area seems to focus on what readers do to the text, it does not mean that the texts themselves are not important. The texts are important because they play a role as the "interface" between specific knowledge and general comprehension ability, and they also pose some demand to the learners. Muth (1987) has observed that content area texts which are expository, as opposed to narrative, in form are characterized by such features as heavy concept load, technical vocabulary, hierarchical patterns of main ideas and details, and unfamiliar content.

To assist learners in comprehending this kind of "subject matter genre" (Perfetti, 1991), content area reading must be taught functionally in that both the skills and processes needed to learn from text are integrated with the learning of content (Bean & Readance, 1989).

WHAT CONTENT AREA READING REQUIRES OF LEARNERS
According to Perfetti (1991), subject matter genre reflects a mix of under-lying conceptual factors and the sorts of text forms that those conceptual structures readily allow. This means that subject matter genre, which contains both form and content, poses to its readers demands which are different from a different genre, such as narrative, with which elementary grade children are familiar. More specifically, Catterson (1990) has identified three major types of school texts with their unique conceptual and textual structures, which require different approaches from readers' part: information-focused, concept-focused, and processfocused texts. Commonly found in Social Studies text, information-focused prose generally presents information organized in logical subcategories and uses the rhetorical patterns of cause/effect, list/enumeration, comparison/contrast.
Graphics, when available, are generally used to emphasize ideas which are already stated verbally.

In contrast, concept-focused prose, which is commonly used in Science text, presents the topics within a book chapter in the order from simpler to more complex concepts; and the description of experiment and explanation of scientific processes are presented subsequently to foster scientific thinking. Different from those two rhetorical types mentioned earlier, process-focused prose, which is generally found in mathematics texts, targets its informational content at the development of problem-solving processes in the readers.
Responding to this rhetorical constraint, the author of math text typically "moves" in the following direction: explaining concept, providing sample problems with step by step solutions, and then providing a number of problems for the readers so that they can test their problem solving.

In addition to those different textual and rhetorical features, some other demands are also present: those related with specialized vocabulary and disciplinespecific concept (Bean & Readance, 1989). In sum, content area texts pose differing demands because each body of
knowledge has its own framework, consisting of facts, concepts, generalizations, and scriptal knowledge (Singer & Simonsen, 1989) and they therefore require on the part of learners different interpretive strategies, such as setting specific purposes before reading, anticipating what the text says and how it presents the information on the basis of the learners' knowledge of text types and their purposes, and evaluating the relative value of the information presented in the text. (This article only a summary, to get the full text please visit TEFLIN JOURNAL link http://journal.teflin.org/index.php/teflin/article/view/173 or contact admin web, use the contact form).

TEFLIN JOURNAL Vol 12, No 2 (2001)

About author: Bachrudin Musthafa, School of Teaching and Learning The Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio