Teaching reading for content

In the 3rd chapter of, Do I Really Have to Teach Reading, the idea of learning to read in different content areas is presented. I can see how teacher's of more application based content areas such as science and math could become frustrated with the idea of teaching reading. The reality of it though is that we are teaching students how to read Math or Science, which is quite different from reading English or US History. At first, when considering teaching students to read in Math, I initially thought, "why should I teach students to read...won't they learn that in English?" However it's not English reading I am teaching them but Mathematical reading. How an English expert reads a word problem and how a Math expert reads a word problem are completely different? In teaching students how to read Math, they will learn how to make sense of the content, vocabulary, theorems, graphs, and how to read and break down a word problem. These are just a few examples of how I can teach students to read Math. In chapter 4 they discuss how one can use multiple texts to help with struggling readers. For the most part, students in high school who struggle with reading generally have a difficult time due to not understanding vocabulary or having a lack of background knowledge or the material is simply uninteresting. Providing students with varying texts that match their reading abilities enables them to grasp the content required of them and hopefully increase their reading abilities in the long run. Tovani makes a valid point that students shut down and essentially stop reading when they struggle to understand something or the reading is very dry and boring. I can relate to this for when I read something required of me and it is boring, I become easily distracted and have to re-read the text two and sometimes three times over. I also tend to shut down if the text is filled with technical words...I find medical journals and law journals particularly difficult to read and try to skim through them, skipping over the technical terms hoping to make sense of the content. I agree with her strongly that if we don't make additional text available to students we are only hindering their learning and passing the problem along to someone else.