Improving Disciplinary Literacy Through Reading Interventions: A Systematic Literature Review

With growing recognition of the importance of discipline-specific literacy in learning, the review identifies instructional strategies, empirical measures, and student outcomes associated with DL. A PRISMA-guided database search yielded 39 studies that met inclusion criteria.

Findings show that interventions mainly target reading, writing, and reasoning skills, with strategies differing by school level: younger students benefit from scaffolded and multimodal approaches, while older students employ self-regulated and metacognitive strategies. Cognitive, linguistic, and sociocultural perspectives inform DL’s theoretical framing, but no shared operational definition exists for assessment. The review highlights gaps in rigorous empirical studies, especially randomized controlled trials, and the lack of standardized tools to evaluate DL across disciplines.