Content area literacy and disciplinary literacy are umbrella terms that describe two approaches to literacy instruction embedded within different subject areas or disciplines. Under a content area literacy approach, students learn reading and writing processes that are common across disciplines. As part of content area literacy instruction, teachers explicitly model these processes, then provide opportunities for students to practice them independently and in small groups. Under a disciplinary literacy approach, students use literacy to engage in goals and practices that are unique to each academic discipline. For instance, in the discipline of physical education, one goal is to maintain a healthy lifestyle, and physical activities are practices that help students to achieve this goal. In the discipline of engineering, one goal is to meet human needs such as clean drinking water, and engineering design processes are practices that help students to achieve this goal. As part of disciplinary literacy instruction, students learn how to use texts-- such as exercise instructions or labeled drawings of a water filter--in the service of disciplinary goals and in the context of disciplinary practices. Content area literacy and disciplinary literacy are not mutually exclusive approaches to literacy instruction. On the contrary, students can practice common literacy strategies, in addition to using more discipline-specific frameworks and practices, as they read and write texts. Furthermore, literacy instruction works best when teachers rigorously connect educational standards to their students' interests, backgrounds, home languages, and families. This brief provides a table which offers possible examples of how students can use both generic literacy strategies and discipline-specific interpretive frameworks to support their participation in different disciplines.