2009 Adolescent_Literacy_Predoctoral

Dramatic demographic shifts due to increased immigration to the United States present challenges for US institutions, particularly schools, as they struggle to adapt to the changing needs of their student populations. Developing academic literacies in students who are learning English is one of the pressing challenges faced by many schools across the country, particularly secondary schools where the content and language demands are more complex and language minority students have less time to catch up to their English- dominant peers. Adolescent English learners are a heterogeneous group, however, and approaches to improving their educational outcomes are more or less successful depending on students’ first language literacies, prior schooling experiences, proficiency in English, and other factors. Research that contributes to improved instruction for language minority adolescents must therefore identify the needs of particular subgroups of adolescent English learners in order to develop appropriate instructional strategies and programs. The research proposed here will contribute to the knowledge base on adolescent literacy and language minority education by investigating the language and literacy needs of a particular group of adolescents who face the challenges of adolescent literacy development in particularly acute ways. This study will document the needs of latecomer students—language minority students who enter the US school system for the first time as teenagers, and matriculate late in the school year. Latecomer students find themselves behind not only their native English-speaking peers but also other English learners at their schools. Their teachers are often unsure of how to incorporate these learners into the social and academic life of the classroom, as well as how to catch them up on all they have missed while keeping the rest of the class on track. Through the ethnographic study of a high school ESL program, I will identify the characteristics of latecomer students and the challenges they and their teachers face in the development of language and literacies in English. This will include participant observation, interviews, document collection, purposeful sampling of student work, and the selection of three to four latecomer students for focused study. I will identify strategies that students and teachers use to cope with these challenges and the ways in which instructional strategies and practices at the school and classroom level help or hinder the successful acquisition of language and literacy for latecomers. In doing so, I hope to understand how best to meet these challenges and to suggest a repertoire of instructional strategies and policies at various levels that facilitate the development of academic literacies for latecomer adolescents and their integration into the social and academic life of the secondary school.

Byeong-Young Cho, University of Maryland

How New Are “New” Reading Strategies? An Examination of Adolescents’ Internet Reading Activity

Research that describes and explains new literate activities can be a foundation of effective literacy instruction that helps adolescents become strategic and critical Internet readers. The goal of this proposed study is to examine adolescents’ reading strategies on the Internet, and to compare these strategies with traditional, print-based strategies. It is situated at the nexus of traditional and new reading strategies. A major premise of this study is that the understanding of the strategies required in new reading environments should build upon the accumulated knowledge of reading strategies investigated in research on conventional print-based reading. Constructively responsive reading strategies in reading single print forms of texts (Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995) serve as a reference point to compare and contrast Internet strategies with conventional print reading strategies. Research on reading multiple texts; hypertext processing; reading comprehension online; reading multimodal texts; and reading with critical stance is informing the examination of Internet reading strategies. Data is collected with verbal reports, complemented by recorded computer screen interactions and participants’ responses to Website evaluation scales. Data analysis uses a matrix that coordinates and triangulates all data sources in a temporal order over the course of reading. Identified strategies are then compared with those described in the compendium of reading strategies used with traditional texts. Results of this research will provide an account of adolescents’ reading strategy use in an Internet reading task environment and a comparison of strategies used in Internet reading and traditional, print-based reading. Results will also serve as a prologue for consideration of reading strategy instruction for Internet environments.

Dennis Davis, Vanderbilt University

Comprehension Strategy Instruction for Upper Elementary and Middle School Students: A Critical Synthesis and Meta-Analysis

Comprehension strategy instruction is widely accepted among researchers as a crucial component of literacy pedagogy for upper elementary and middle grades students. However, there is little evidence that effective and sustained strategy instruction has made its way into typical classroom practice. Part of the problem may be that researchers who study strategic reading instruction hold various understandings of how strategies should be selected, taught, practiced, and assessed. This variability makes it difficult to identify the critical elements of strategy instruction that should be translated into practice. What is needed is a nuanced—and critical—understanding of the various ways strategic reading pedagogy has been implemented and studied over the past three decades. The purpose of the proposed project is to synthesize what is known about strategic reading pedagogy through a statistical meta-analysis of research on comprehension strategies instruction for young adolescents in grades 4-8. The questions addressed in this study include: (1) What instructional frameworks for teaching strategic reading have been studied in these grades, and which ones are most effective? (2) Which instructional arrangements and contexts are associated with maximal effectiveness? (3) Which student populations have been included in these interventions, and who benefits most? and (4) Which outcomes are most affected by strategy instruction? This meta-analytic review will include intervention studies published between 1980 and 2009 in which students in grades 4-8 are taught to use two or more comprehension strategies. The collected studies will be coded using a systematic data extraction scheme developed to address the central questions of the review. Information related to the characteristics of the student sample and instructional and methodological characteristics of each study will be compiled in a database. In addition, numerical effect sizes for each study for each major outcome measure will be computed (e.g., reading comprehension, reading motivation/attitude, strategy knowledge, strategy use, and comprehension monitoring). The mean effect of comprehension strategy instruction on each of the targeted outcome constructs will be calculated to provide an overall summary of instructional effectiveness. Then, a series of moderator analyses will be conducted to explain the sources of between-study variability for each outcome. These moderator analyses will systematically compare the effect sizes of different groups of studies (e.g., studies of different instructional duration) to identify the characteristics of strategy instruction associated with maximal impact. By identifying questions and conceptual issues that need further examination, this review will provide strategic jumping-off points for researchers interested in text comprehension instruction. Also, this review will provide detailed understandings of the elements of strategic reading pedagogy associated with maximum impact, which can then be used to make specific recommendations for improving reading instruction in upper elementary and middle school settings.

Myrrh Domingo, New York University

Bridging In-School and Out-of-School Literacy Practices: Examining Digital Technologies and Multimodality to Promote Socially and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy

Globalization and digital technologies have come to transform the interactions between readers and texts, and among teachers and students. With this change, I argue for pedagogical approaches that adapt to the social and semiotic diversity of the 21^st century. Rather than imposing standardized literacy instruction, this research aims to improve literacy outcomes by promoting socially and culturally responsive pedagogy that bridges school-based and out-of-school literacy practices. This two-part ethnographic study will examine the use of digital technologies and multimodality both within and beyond the school context. In the first part of this study, I theorize about how the "Pinoys”— a group of Filipino British youth—harness the power of digital technologies and multimodality to cultivate literacies in their daily lives. In the second part of this study, I investigate how a group of in-service teachers employs digital technologies and multimodality to carry out literacy instruction. As such, the following research questions guide this work: How are youth navigating across diverse cultural and linguistic communities given their distinct digital and multimodal practices? In what ways do teachers develop literacy instruction that integrates digital technologies and multimodality? Considering the varied digital and multimodal practices of youth and teachers, how might we bridge in-school and out-of-school literacy to promote socially and culturally responsive pedagogy? This study engages in three types of analyses. First, open-ended and focused thematic coding of all observational field notes, transcribed interviews, and participant reflective journals, will be analyzed and coded. Discourse analysis tools will be used to analyze characteristics of socially and culturally responsive literacy practices in-school and out-of-school contexts. Lastly, multimodal analysis will be applied to account for the layering of modes (e.g. image, gesture, sound, writing, speech) within the “Pinoys” and the teachers’ multimodal designs and digital practices.

Chantal Francois, Harvard Graduate School of Education

“If I Had to Make a Symbol for Grant Street on a Map, I Would Draw a Book”: A Study of an Urban School’s Sociocultural Context of Reading

The proposed study aims to investigate how school context plays a role in the literacy experiences of students and the professional experiences of teachers and administrators. The sociocultural context of reading comprehension provides a useful framework for understanding how settings, instructional practices, and students’ interactions with texts and activities all impact the process of reading comprehension (RAND, 2002). Psychologists, organizational theorists, and other social scientists corroborate that contexts matter; their work has demonstrated how settings impact adults’ orientation to the work they do in schools (Bronfenbrenner, 1970; Feldman & Pentland 2003; Wenger 1998) . Yet seldom does empirical evidence combine our multiple understandings of contexts to portray how a setting might influence the beliefs, reading instructional and learning practices, and identities among all actors in a learning organization. Broadening our scope of context—to include both adult and student experiences in a school— can allow for a more accurate portrayal of how students’ reading experiences and achievement are shaped by, and shape, the practices of all members in the organization. This approach is critical given that across urban schools nationwide, 80% of 8^th graders fail to read at proficient levels, confirming that such settings are unable to help students develop the literacy skills they need the most—those related to reading comprehension (Biancarosa and Snow, 2004; NCES, 2007). In 2003, Grant Street Secondary School (a pseudonym), a 6^th- through 12^th- grade public school in the Northeast, implemented a school-wide literacy program for its students. This program had the dual goals of developing teachers’ capacity to teach literacy and improving reading comprehension among its students, most of whom were struggling readers. Consequently, students’ standardized reading test scores improved and teachers and administrators describe the school as exhibiting a “culture of reading”. My dissertation intends to explore the context of Grant Street as it pertains to students’ reading experiences and the staff’s efforts to support those experiences. My research questions are: 1.) How does the reading growth of individual Grant Street students change over time? Do students who are not meeting learning standards in reading follow a different trajectory than those who are just partially meeting learning standards? And 2.) What are the current organizational practices designed to provide a sociocultural context conducive to growth in reading performance and motivation? How do various organizational members (i.e. students and staff) perceive and experience these practices? This study has the potential to describe how an urban school serves as a sociocultural context that nurtures the interaction among adolescent readers, the texts they read, and the activities through which they read texts.

Avishag Reisman, Stanford University

Reading like a Historian: A Literacy-Based History Curriculum Intervention with Adolescent Struggling Readers

In this mixed-methods study, public school teachers from five urban classrooms will be trained to implement a seven-month literacy-based history curriculum with eleventh-grade struggling readers. The study asks whether the findings on expert historical reading can be brought to bear in urban public school classrooms, where students read well below grade level. Two decades of research on historical reading have identified not only discipline-specific reading strategies used by historians, but also instructional scaffolds that prompt students to interpret historical documents. However, this work is almost exclusively small-scale, with small samples and brief interventions. This experimental study, with five treatment and five control classrooms, and over 200 eleventh grade students, represents the first large-scale curriculum intervention that centers on domain-specific historical reading. The curriculum features modified historical documents, vetted reading instruction methods, and innovative activity structures that provide the necessary supports for disciplined historical inquiry. The curriculum rests on three theoretical assumptions. First, the approach views historical reading as fundamentally intertextual. The intervention shifts the grammar of the history classroom, from one where a single document—the textbook—embodies all historical knowledge, to one where historical knowledge results from the interpretation and evaluation of multiple documents. The second theoretical assumption is that students must see cognitive strategies explicitly modeled before they understand how to use and practice them. Third, the curriculum radically modifies documents, both lexically and syntactically. Though originals will be available to all students, these adaptations are the only way to expose struggling readers to the voices of historical figures. This study uses mixed-methods to capture the effects of the proposed curriculum on student historical reading and general reading comprehension. Because no quantitative measures exist for historical reading, I have developed a 30-question multiple choice and constructed-response Historical Reading test, as well as a 20-question multiple choice Transfer of Historical Reading test, with items that ask students to apply historical reading skills to contemporary issues. Both measures have been piloted and validated. I have including pre-tests in the design under the assumption that groups will remain nonequivalent, and will also use school-based data, if necessary, as covariates. In addition to the general reading comprehension test (Gates-MacGinitie) and the two historical reading tests, I will administer a content test comprised of released multiple-choice items from California’s state history assessment. Qualitative data, in the form of videotaped classroom observations, will afford me a closer look at student historical reasoning and understanding. Videotaped classroom observations will be transcribed and coded for evidence of disciplinary historical reading and interpretation. If successful, this study will show that literacy instruction need not be confined to the Language Arts classroom. This intervention will serve as a model that can be leveraged to address literacy demands across the curriculum.

Darrin Stockdill, University of Michigan

Working from a sociocultural perspective on this project, I am interested in exploring the connection between everyday literacies and learning and academic learning. In this context though, I am also concerned with the linguistic and cognitive scaffolding necessary to bridge out-of-school literacies and knowledge to more disciplinary and academic inquiry-based learning, especially for students identified as struggling readers in school. The TERRA project will explore this area through an after-school project involving two groups of fifteen to twenty adolescents, one group in a middle school and the other in a high school, in an urban, primarily Latino community. Student research will address a social problem of interest to the students. The participants will be positioned as knowledgeable co-researchers bringing valuable prior knowledge to the research process. The investigation will involve the use of diverse resources and texts, and participants will receive explicit, targeted literacy instruction, including the use of social science heuristics and literacy practices, in the process. I will explore the question of whether or not participation in such a program has an impact on attitudes and practices with respect to literacy in general, social science disciplinary literacy, and school engagement. Desired proximal outcomes include increased understanding and application of reading comprehension strategies and social science heuristics and reading practices. Desired distal outcomes include increased engagement in social studies classes and school as well as improved self-concept as a reader and writer. Although not included as an outcome measure, it is also hoped that this process will help students develop identities as positive civic actors in the future. To measure the efficacy of the intervention on these outcomes, I will collect survey, interview, reading assessment, and observational data before and after the intervention. Detailed observational field notes informed by video of each session will be collected during the program together with artifacts of student production. These data will be analyzed using complementary methods, including but not limited to descriptive statistical analyses and comparisons of mean differences of survey and assessment data as well as constant comparative analysis of interview and other qualitative data.

Jennifer Teitle, the University of Iowa

Subcultural Becomings: Adolescent Literacy in Affective Spaces

Subcultural memberships have long been understood as influential to the social lives of adolescents (Hall, & Jefferson, 1976/1993; Hebdige, 1979; Skelton, 1997), yet little research explores the connections between subcultural and adolescent literacy. Recently, concurrent with developments in sociocultural theory, a reexamination of subcultures is serving to help unlock some of the “myths, motivations, and mysteries” (Moje et. al., 2008) behind adolescent literacy. Of particular interest to this research are the multimodal practices of adolescents (combining image, sound, gesture, writing, etc.), which have long been part of subcultural practices, but have only very recently been brought under the umbrella of “literacy.” Subcultures connect adolescents through multiple online and offline networks; such adolescents may spend hours critically reviewing images and sound files online, but refuse to read their evening homework. From an outsider’s perspective, subcultural participation can be read a variety of ways. Authority figures (teachers, administrators, youth counselors) may see the signs of subcultural participation—style, dress, and literacy choices of members—as rejections of legitimate values, activities, and institutions; this “moral panic” (Cohen, 1972) is often an intention of the subcultural practice itself. For insiders, subcultures provide the tools for self-invention—often in the form of multimodal consumption and composition—that help members distinguish themselves in opposition to each other, and to the mainstream. In this work, I will explore multiple moments of “subcultural becoming” where the literacy performances of youth offer insight into the possibilities of change rather than one or more fixed identities (Leander & Rowe, 2006). The literacy performances selected for analysis in this study show how emergences in unexpected directions, what Deleuze and Guittari (1987) call “lines of flight,” are an integral part of time spent by adolescent subculturalists. Rather than restricting literacy performances to linear temporality, this work moves horizontally in order to show how movement creates new spaces of emerging potential. From a broader sociocultural perspective, Deleuzoguittarian theory and methods offer the potential to unpack some of the broad implications of new literacies for youth. To this end, I argue for attention to the temporary “affective spaces” where youth gather through affective potential. Theorizing affective space revises several traditional assumptions about the relationship between bodies and texts, thus providing

insight into the ways that social spaces and social identities are bounded and constrained. This mixed-methods qualitative inquiry will employ ethnographic and case study methods (Yin, 1994; Stake, 1995) to investigate adolescent literacy performances at United Action for Youth (UAY), a local non-profit youth center. UAY attracts adolescents whose practices, memberships, and motivations help reveal possibilities and restrictions on the further incorporation of multimodality into formal and informal literacy instruction. Further, as these literacies are interwoven with local and global social networks, this research sheds light on the increasingly important social role that literacy plays in shaping and reshaping the lived lives of adolescents.

Kallen Tsikalas, City University of New York

Effects of Computer-Based, Virtual Peer Modeling of Question Generation on

Early Adolescents’ Reading Comprehension and Engagement

My dissertation research will investigate how computer-based, virtual peer modeling of question generation affects adolescents’ comprehension of expository texts and reading engagement. Additionally, it will explore the mechanisms through which virtual peer modeling may exert its influence on comprehension processes. Finally, it will examine the characteristics of virtual peer models and modeling sequences that are associated with the greatest gains in comprehension. This research addresses a persistent problem (adolescent literacy deficits) with a novel and highly age-appropriate solution (computer-based social modeling of comprehension strategies). It will fill theoretical gaps about how social processes may enable students to self-regulate their reading comprehension more effectively through choice of reading strategies, degree of engagement in text processing, and comprehension monitoring. Finally, it will inform the design of future reading interventions that can be used in both classroom and out-of-school contexts. The study will employ an experimental design in which adolescents (age 11-13 years) participate in a computer-based reading intervention over three sessions. Participants will be students who read at- or one-level-below their current grade level. Using a stratified random procedure, they will be assigned to one of three experimental conditions: Virtual Peer Modeling (treatment); Strategy Instruction Control; and Basic Control. During each of the experimental sessions, all participants will read aloud expository text passages within the computer-based environment and will be audio-taped. As they read, participants in the Virtual Peer Modeling condition will be exposed to “virtual peer models” – video-clips of adolescent models asking a variety of “thinking” questions of the text and explaining why they had this question. Participants in the Strategy Control condition will receive a verbal explanation of thinking questions, examples of such questions, and instructions to try to ask similar questions as they are reading. All participants will complete a short survey and a comprehension assessment after reading each text.

Three types of data will be collected in the study: 1) self-report survey data of participants’ interest in the texts, affective reactions and judgments of comprehension; 2) behavioral data, captured through computer-based activity logs, that indicate use of vocabulary support (definitional links) by all students as well as use of modeling segments by students in the treatment condition; and 3) performance data from tests of reading comprehension and from audio-recordings of the miscues and questions that participants articulate while reading aloud. Quantitative data will be analyzed with descriptive statistics, ANCOVAs, correlations, chi-squared tests, and repeated-measures t-tests. Qualitative data on question types will coded thematically and then analyzed statistically.

Amy Alexandra Wilson, University of Georgia

Teaching as Text Designing in the Content Areas: An Examination of Secondary Teachers’ Texts and Principles for Design

The goal of this nine-month multicase study is to examine how four middle school teachers use and combine texts in discipline-specific ways as they teach mathematics, language arts, science, and social studies. Informed by theories of social semiotics, this study is based on the assumption that discipline-specific content, norms, and practices are instantiated in texts, defined broadly to encompass multiple sign systems such as written words, gestures, the natural world, maps, photographs, spoken words, and numeric and symbolic combinations. Teachers draw from these available designs as they create new texts in the form of enacted lessons. Students, in turn, must “read” these enacted lessons, whose representational forms and purposes vary from content area to content area. When seen through this theoretical framework, content area literacy instruction becomes a matter of supporting students in developing overarching frameworks for thinking metadiscursively about how forms and uses of representation vary across content areas, rather than simply providing students with strategy instruction on how to comprehend individual texts in an individual discipline.

Ultimately, by first documenting teachers’ discipline-specific conceptions and uses of texts, this study hopes to support teachers and adolescents in developing metadiscursive frameworks for thinking about texts across the content areas. In accordance with this goal, the study seeks to answer the following three research questions: (a) What available designs do the four teachers draw from as they design texts, in the form of enacted lessons, in their respective content areas?; (b) According to the teachers, what are the principles, considerations, perceptions, and values behind their text designs?; and (c) What discipline-specific patterns are indicated by the available designs that teachers use and the principles by which they use them?

To answer these questions, four types of data will be collected from the four middle school teachers, each of whom will be selected based upon her or his reputation for excellence in teaching two disciplines. Field notes from observations of teachers’ classroom instruction and artifacts from their lessons will serve as a record of the available designs that teachers use in their instruction. An analysis of transcripts of monthly interviews will provide insights into the teachers’ principles for text designing, while three video-recorded lessons from each teacher in each content area will enable a fine-grained analysis of how specific forms of representation are integrated in the four disciplines. Written data will be coded and analyzed using constant comparative methods, while the video data will be analyzed using a multimodal concordance table.