The purpose of this study was to determine the topics being studied, theoretical perspectives being used, and methods being implemented in current literacy research. A research team completed a content analysis of nine journals from 2009 to 2014 to gather data. In the 1,238 articles analyzed, the topics, theoretical perspectives, research designs, and data sources were recorded. Frequency counts of these findings are presented for each journal. Chi-square tests of independence revealed statistically significant differences among the topics, theoretical perspectives, designs, and data sources across the nine journals. These results suggest that the field of literacy research may be fragmented, which has been a concern for literacy researchers since the paradigm wars of the 1980s and 1990s. We urge the literacy research community to continue to demand rigorous research, but to do so in a way that appreciates the power in viewing and studying teaching and learning from diverse perspectives, using diverse methods, and with recognition that a foundational aspect of rigorous research is the match between research questions asked and research methods used.
Graphic novels in the K-12 classroom are most often used to motivate marginalized readers because of the lower text load and assumption of easy reading. This assumption has thus far been unexplored by reading research. This qualitative multiple-case study utilized think-aloud protocols in a new attention-mapping activity to better understand how expert readers use intentional attention shifts to make meaning in graphic novels. Four expert graphic novel readers, and four expert print-dominant readers, between ages 16 and 20 were asked to trace their attention across the opening pages of five graphic novels and to predict what the story was about. Utilizing digital video recordings as the primary data source, analysis included creating a visual representation of each reader’s attention patterns, time used, as well as the complexity and accuracy of his or her predicted stories. Findings indicate that the expert graphic novel readers initially attended to visual elements to gain an understanding of genre, character, and possible plot points. Only after attending to the illustrations did they decode the written text, and finally synthesized the two. The expert print-dominant readers predominantly attended to written text effectively but did not use illustrations to support or extend their understanding or meaning making in the text. This study complicates current assumptions about the ease of reading graphic novels by observing expert-print dominant readers and expert graphic novel readers negotiate written text and illustrations.
This conceptual review addresses the bifurcation of content area and disciplinary literacy by examining each as regimes of truth. We look specifically at the ways in which both approaches comprise, in Foucault’s terms, "regimes of truth" within their respective epistemological domains. Following a brief history of adolescent literacy, extant research is considered. By employing a theoretical framework based on Foucault’s notions of "connaissance" referring to a particular corpus of knowledge, and "savoir" or knowledge in general, research and discourse surrounding the current debate over content area literacy and disciplinary literacy are taken up to deconstruct stances within these domains with the aim of a reconstruction that captures the affordances of both. Suggestions for moving the field out of this binary through a collaborative focus on interdisciplinary approaches are discussed.
Representational logic cannot account for the entanglements of all that matters in making new media: feeling bodies, vibrant matter, feeling bodies and vibrant matter all moving and at different rates. In the currently shifting communicative landscape, where mobile technologies are the primary means for youths’ digital production, all this movement, all this moving matter, is integral to generating fuller, more (than) human expressions of youths’ new media making. This article therefore develops a non-representational theory of new media making through an intra-action analysis of five adolescents making a digital book trailer while moving within and across three locations. As guiding poststructural methodology, intra-action analysis attuned the authors to moments when bodies-materials-place became perceptibly entangled in the drawing of boundaries and exclusions. Analysis expresses how emergent (re)shapings of boundaries and exclusions across production settings were concurrent with a process of privileging text-based/media-based ideas and thereby various students’ becoming agencies and capacities to act as new media makers. The article concludes arguing that poststructural attention to literacy in the making matters as an ethical imperative for researchers and educators. Literacy in the making enacts boundaries and exclusions that participate in ongoing discursive-material practices, which have potential to produce histories differently in as yet unimagined futures.
This study explores the lived experiences of incarcerated fathers "being-in-text" with their children. It draws on Husserlian and Heideggerian notions of intentionality that are partly deconstructed by Derrida and further "posted" by Vagle’s notion of post-intentionality and Barad’s posthumanism. Of particular interest is a week-long prison-based mural project—framed in terms of multimodal, existential, identity work—that provided material support for fathers’ ontological shifts from being prisoners to being fathers in phenomenal time and space. The study revealed that being-in-text was lived as a contingent and suspenseful "being-in" time and space, oriented in a "being for" children, even as other forces of being-in-prison discouraged fathers from looking up toward horizons beyond prison walls. These dehumanizing forces of prison were a form of blind loyalty—a looking down and away from life outside prison and narratives of belonging. The study further revealed a possibility for becoming fathers as prisoners looked up into the eyes of (present and imagined) family members. Literacy events provide contexts for prisoners to be answerable to their children. But being-in-text and being-in-prison are lived as a singular and constant tension of "staging" that raises ethical concerns about the risks and costs of these ontological shifts. From this, an appeal is made for a nuanced valuing of prisoners as subjects rather than objects, and for further exploring a "posted" phenomenology’s role in literacy research and social justice work.
Digital technologies make possible new avenues for sharing and accessing literacy research and practices worldwide. Among the myriad of options available, web seminars have become popular online learning venues. The current investigation is part of Global Conversations in Literacy Research (GCLR), a longitudinal and qualitative study now in its fifth year. As a critical literacy project, GCLR investigates how a web seminar project uses developing technologies to disseminate innovative literacy research and present professional development that critically shapes literacy practices. With this in mind, the current study seeks to understand the following: (a) What kinds of knowledge sharing interactions (KSIs) occurred in GCLR web seminars focused on critical literacy? and (b) What types of community and social practices occur in web seminars? Data included synchronous chat transcripts from across seven web seminars, interviews with participants and speakers, and website analytics. Data analysis followed the constant comparative method and R, an open-access software that analyzes both qualitative and quantitative data. The study resulted in two findings: Three types of KSIs emerged: whole group, between individual, and smaller, nested affinity groups; and GCLR emerged as a distinct online community with unique social practices. KSIs generated and supported collaborative opportunities to exchange ideas, co-construct knowledge, offer practical classroom applications, and gain insight about important critical literacy issues. As an online networked space that brings together participants interested in critical literacy issues, GCLR represents an innovative type of situated practice with an aim to develop what we call online Networked Spaces of Praxis (oNSP).
This case study examines the multimodal literacy practices of 11-year-old Nigel as he plays with assemblages of people, objects, and practices in his storywriting. The study asks "How does following the seemingly off-task multimodal literacy practices of one pre-adolescent youth across his home-community-school terrain provide insight into contemporary literacy learning and instruction?" Using assemblage theory, the article maps a period in time, the early months of his fifth-grade experience, when one boy approached the literacies privileged in his classroom with what appeared to be a certain amount of disregard, while engaging in personal literacy practices that were both rich and, at times, subversive. The analysis maps the people, signs, material objects, events, and places in the unfolding of Nigel’s play with two symbolic figures, the line rider and the stick man. Viewed across time and place, Nigel’s textual and embodied play with these figures demonstrate ways a young adolescent, fully immersed in and engaged with his digital and material world, "overwrites" official texts and produces rich stories that go unnoticed by the adults around him. This unfolding took place in unpredictable ways, and as it occurred, literacy practices that brought intellectual and visceral engagement, pleasure and pride, and agentive recourse to Nigel in his practice of literacy came into focus. The emergence of Nigel’s inscriptions across multiple terrains provides insight into ways in which a socio-material perspective, with its focus on the role of affect and the body, may assist us in re-thinking multimodal writing development.
Studies suggest that individuals with a parent who attended college or a university are more likely to attend themselves. Scholars have also argued that academic success at the highest levels requires the acquisition of a large vocabulary and fluency in multiple discourses, and that forming habits of reading various kinds of texts outside of school may be necessary. Using interviews with 40 individuals who completed advanced degrees and whose parents did not attend college, this study examined factors that may have influenced their independent reading habits. We found that each of our participants developed strong habits of recreational reading and was motivated at least in part due to relationships with various sponsors of literacy, including parents, grandparents, siblings, friends, neighbors, librarians, teachers, and church members. Social challenges to recreational reading were also noted by participants, including the challenge of learning to code switch with family members and others.
This longitudinal study examined whether the implementation of a Spanish-English paired literacy approach provides an academic advantage to emerging bilingual students over a sequential literacy approach. The study employed a quasi-experimental design. It compared the biliteracy outcomes of third-grade emerging bilingual learners participating in paired literacy instruction from Grades K-3 (n = 167) to those of students from the same schools who received sequential literacy instruction in K-2 and started to participate in the paired literacy model in third grade (n = 191). Students’ writing and reading were assessed in both languages using informal measures; third-grade reading scores on a high-stakes state assessment were also examined. Independent-samples t tests were conducted to compare means on the four measures (Spanish and English writing and reading), and Cohen’s d was calculated to generate effect sizes for each assessment in each language. Frequencies were run to determine the percentage of students who met or exceeded the state test performance standards. Findings indicate that the paired literacy group scored considerably higher than students in the comparison group on all measures. Furthermore, differences between groups were statistically significant for each outcome measure in each language with moderate to large effect sizes (0.42 to 0.90). Also, a larger percentage of students in the paired literacy group met or exceeded the state test performance standards. These findings suggest that paired literacy instruction leads to stronger literacy outcomes in both languages than sequential literacy. Implications for practice and future research are provided.
Using participatory action research, the first researcher functioned as co-teacher in a fifth-grade class in a large northeastern city public school. The researcher and classroom teacher guided 28 students working in book clubs to compose digital stories in response to historical fiction. The research questions were: (a) What interpretations did students have of their historical fiction novels through the mediational tools of digital storytelling? (b) How did the dynamics of the book club structure contribute to the students’ interpretive work? Data sources included students’ process and product work, video and audio recordings of work sessions, reflective notes and journal, a semi-structured interview with the teacher, and stimulated recall interviews with three case study book clubs. Both researchers used multimodal analysis, particularly the concept transmediation, concepts of interpretation in reader response, and grounded theory, informed by activity theory, to analyze data. Findings show students’ expression of and limits to interpretation in the multimodal ensembles of their digital stories. The purposeful use of digital technology generated ongoing problem solving. Activity systems expanded students’ learning by generating collaborative zones of proximal development, a dialectic among mediational tools, and opportunities to take on roles that shaped students’ identities and repositioned who they could be in this learning community. The study shows the value of project-based multimodal responses using digital technologies in collaborative groups to develop students’ comprehension of literary texts. The study suggests an alternative to writing-to-learn practices that dominate the implementation of the Common Core State Standards, and that high-stakes tests reify.
Through a qualitative analysis of data collected over four years of design-based research on the implementation of a reform-oriented mathematics curriculum, this study describes two sixth-grade teachers’ changing views of the role and place of reading in mathematics instruction. The findings reveal the evolution of the teachers’ perspective on mathematics instruction from one that did not include reading toward one in which reading was viewed as integral to students’ mathematics learning. The teachers’ views on reading in mathematics at the end of the project lend empirical support to theoretical propositions for a disciplinary literacy approach to mathematics instruction. At the same time, their views nuance such propositions by highlighting differences between the reading demands of school mathematics texts and those of disciplinary texts.
The language teens use in digital spaces—from social network posts to instant message chats to text messages—often does not adhere to Standard Written English (SWE). Their digital writing involves a combination of written and conversational languages and often has a digital thumbprint that distinguishes the writer. As a means to understand this digitalk, we conducted a mixed method study that not only examines the conventions of digitalk, but also explores the impetus behind teens’ languages choices. Over the course of 2 years and three rounds of data collection, we investigated the digital language use of 81 adolescents (Grades 7-12) from urban and suburban, public and private schools in a large metropolitan area. Data provide insight into the conventions of digitalk and the reasons these features of language have been conventionalized within adolescent digital communities. Ultimately, we see teens engaging in purposeful writing that may differ from SWE, but, nonetheless, shows an awareness of audience, efficiency in communication, expression of personal voice, and inclusion in a community of practice.
Framed in theories of social semiotics, this descriptive multiple case study examined six middle school teachers’ use of gestures during one school year as they each taught two different subject areas: earth science, language arts, mathematics, and/or social studies. The data, which included field notes and photographs from 354 lessons and 151 video-recordings of lesson segments, were analyzed using constant comparative methods and multimodal concordance charts. The analyses indicated discipline-specific differences in types of gestures, frequency of gestures, and centrality of gestures to the teachers’ messages. Earth science depended on a variety of iconic and deictic gestures, the latter of which was also common in mathematics. Communications in language arts and social studies commonly included non- essential action gestures that mimicked the movements of characters and historical figures. This study modifies existing claims of the importance of gestures in teaching, suggesting that gestures can play relatively central or minor roles in communicating disciplinary concepts. It concludes with implications for disciplinary literacy instruction that more rigorously accounts for the role that gestures play in disciplinary learning.
Drawing upon notions of symbolic representation and transcultural repositioning, this study uses visual and critical discourse analyses to examine a multimodal photo essay created by seventh- and eighth-grade immigrant youth in an English as a New Language (ENL) class. Collectively titled "I am from aquí and allá" by the students, the photo essay was installed as a public exhibit for an Open House culminating a year-long literacy inquiry the students called "the culture project." Through analyses of students’ images and captions, I point to examples of symbolic convergence: the practice of bringing together the multiple sites/sights of students’ diasporic identities; offering others alternative sites/sights from which to understand them; and creating new sites/sights from which to position themselves to learn, participate, and contribute to change. The article discusses how this particular multimodal artifact suggests the need for further dialogue about the value of local, learner-centered literacy pedagogies and practice in a time of increasing commercialization and standardization of curriculum, instruction, and assessment.
The aim of this article is to expand the dialogue about how contemporary scholarship on the intersections between youth, literacy, and popular culture might inform literacy teacher education. Specifically, this article is designed to (a) orient literacy teacher educators who may be somewhat unfamiliar with this particular line of scholarship to a few of its major concepts and K-12 classroom implications and (b) propose several ways this line of scholarship might open up possibilities for literacy teacher educators to help pre-service literacy teachers develop culturally responsive teaching practices. To address these goals, this article first provides an introduction to several common ways popular culture has been theorized. From this introduction, the article explains the following three concepts within contemporary scholarship that investigates youth engagement with popular culture: (a) popular culture as a site of identity formation for youth; (b) popular culture as a context for literacy development; and (c) popular culture as a vehicle for sociopolitical critique and action. In addition, this article illustrates pedagogical implications these concepts have for K-12 literacy education, including how literacy instructors adopt ethnographic stances toward youth engagement with popular culture to reposition youth and ascertain their popular culture funds of knowledge, bridge standard literacy curricula to students’ popular culture funds of knowledge, and develop literacy curricula to facilitate students’ sociopolitical critique and action. Finally, this article explores how this line of scholarship may open up spaces within literacy teacher education for K-12 pre-service literacy teachers to grapple with the politics of literacy pedagogy.
In 2006, The Wyoming state legislature allocated monies to fund Instructional Facilitators (IFs) in schools around the state. This interview study, developed through situational analysis, explores the roles and responsibilities of IFs in Wyoming secondary schools, and the contextual factors of those schools that impact the work of IFs, particularly those whose work is focused on literacy coaching. Findings from the study include descriptions of common work roles, individual coaching with teachers, providing staff development to groups of teachers, and collection, analysis, management, and interpretation of data. Contextual issues of teacher enrollment and embeddedness in school professional development structure are also presented as of great importance to IFs, and recommendations for IFs’ work in schools, as well as for future research are presented.
Obstacles, and instructional responses to them, that emerged in two middle school science classes during a formative experiment investigating Internet Reciprocal Teaching (IRT), an instructional intervention aimed at increasing digital literacy on the Internet, are reported in this manuscript. Analysis of qualitative data revealed that IRT enabled students to explain and demonstrate appropriate strategies for locating and evaluating information on the Internet when they were asked to do so. However, students did not use these strategies or they quickly abandoned them when working independently or in small groups during inquiry projects. Data revealed three obstacles that inhibited efforts to promote consistent, independent use of strategies: the teacher’s role in student inquiry, the structure of inquiry projects, and students’ previous strategies. Results suggest notable challenges to implementing instruction that inculcates dispositions among middle school students leading to consistent, independent use of appropriate strategies for locating and evaluating information on the Internet. Implications for practitioners, policy makers, and researchers are discussed.