ABSTRACT
Since the late 1960s, secondary literacy research has sought to inform rather than to be informed by practice. Cognitively based experimental studies have served as a rationale for a wealth of instructional strategies used to promote and integrate reading and writing into various content disciplines. This body of experimental research has made an impressive contribution to our understanding of basic reading comprehension processes, and we owe a debt to the researchers who contributed to that corpus. Nevertheless, the research-true to the positivist epistemology undergirding it-largely ignored or neutralized the contexts in which secondary school teachers and adolescents live and learn as it attempted to analyze cognitive processes. In fact, practices related to curricular, pedagogical, cultural, assessment, classroom, and disciplinary contexts-contexts that are highlighted throughout this book-were treated as variables to be controlled.
