Literacy Research: Theory,Method,and Practice

The coupling of literacy and race emphasizes their historic and contemporaneous intersection in literacy research. In this article, I draw on my scholarship and use three counternarratives to articulate how literacy and race significantly influence access, equity, and freedom. First, I examine access within the sociohistoric context of African Americans attending Calhoun Colored School. Second, I explore equity in a review of the sociohistoric context of Brown v Board and the Civil Rights Act as well as two federal studies of reading research, National Assessment of Educational Progress reading data, and the No Child Left Behind Act. Finally, I investigate freedom by demystifying linkages among the privatization and corporatization of education and reading achievement under Race to the Top's expansion of charter schools, Common Core State Standards, National Council on Teacher Quality, and their funding sources. I conclude with a call to action to courageously pursue a more educationally and socially just literacy research agenda.

In order to reconceptualize literacy education for the Internet Age, we first need to understand the extent to which our thinking has already been shaped by literacy practices. I begin this article with an exploration of the relationship between ways of communicating, ways of thinking, and the way in which we understand education. Face-to-face dialogue, for example, means that thought is experienced as somebody’s voice. It is not surprising then that oral cultures tend to understand education as initiation into a living relationship with voices. Literacy, by contrast, especially print literacy, has tended to afford the rather different idea that thought can be dissociated from voices and represented by signs and symbols. Under the regime of print literacy, education has often been understood as first providing access to the collective store of knowledge represented in books and then transmitting this knowledge across generations. Although the Internet preserves some of the affordances of print literacy, it also returns us to some of the affordances of oracy, since it supports two-way participation. In the second half of the article, I outline a possible response to the challenge of the Internet Age. This response is not another “new literacy” but the proposal that we locate literacy education within a larger context, the context of dialogue, not only dialogue with specific others but also with generalized others and ultimately with the Infinite Other.

The essays below were prepared following the LRA session organized by Janice Almasi entitled, “Examining the relative contributions of content knowledge and strategic processing to comprehension.” What unites these essays are the personal and historical stances that each writer has taken; in addition, the essays are rich with constructive critique of tensions in the conduct of comprehension instruction (e.g., acknowledging and building on readers’ sensemaking efforts, while encouraging the development of reading expertise and flexibility). There are redeployments of classic theories (e.g., schema theory) and heuristics (e.g., the interactive model of reading) and the call for new lenses with which to inform scholarship on comprehension. Finally, there are invitations to consider new horizons for comprehension research that take into account contemporary contexts and uses for interpreting and learning from text.

When a reader produces a response to a written text (the observed response) that is not expected by the listener, the result is called a miscue. Using psychosociolingustic analyses of miscues in the context of an authentic text, miscue analysis provides evidence to discover how readers read. I present miscue analysis history and development and the foundational principles that led to understanding the reading process. The miscue analysis data used represents actual readers with a range of backgrounds, languages, ages and proficiencies. Teachers involved in miscue research develop their own knowledge about reading in order to develop curriculum and instruction to support readers' meaning making. When teachers engage readers in conversations about reading (retrospective miscue analysis), readers examine their own miscues and build concepts that allow them to discover their own reading strengths which leads them to revalue their abilities to make sense of print.

Drawing from the theories of feminist new materialism, this article looks closely at the ways children and things, particularly fabric remnants, work together to coconstruct stories. The data presented are part of a yearlong ethnographic study in the multimodal literacy play work of three early childhood aged children from working poor families. The data were collected during summer enrichment and an after-school program at a community center in the Southeastern United States located in the children’s neighborhood. Findings argue that children are more deeply and intellectually engaged when given access to a broader range of materials and opportunities to perform and participate in literacy practices.

This microanalysis of an extended discussion in an urban classroom explores the context in which rich discourses interacted to develop and extend deeper forms of meaning making by elementary students. The analysis first situates the study in the literature on classroom cultures where dialogic interactions are encouraged; such cultures develop when students’ intellectual work and agency as learners are valued. Next, a critical discourse analysis focuses on one classroom event as a microculture where a variety of discursive patterns are highlighted. This exemplar demonstrates that the teacher and the students utilized multiple linguistic moves to respond to each other. The teacher modeled serious regard for the ideas of others, but also retained her authority to push students to question assumptions or think more deeply. Her fourth grade students’ interactions mirrored these moves, indicating confidence and agency. The analysis connects these languages and literacy practices to the high levels of student engagement, stamina, and critical participation identified over time in this teachers’ classroom. The goal of the analysis is to argue that high academic expectations lie not in the standardization of practices that are most often touted in reform agendas, but in meaningful classroom teaching that honors the social, cultural, and linguistic resources of students. It also seeks to emphasize the rich and additive opportunities that this type of exchange of perspectives offers for complex intellectual work in urban classrooms; classrooms that are often subject to subtractive rhetoric from the reform movement.

Readers’ emotions often become engaged while reading and can sometimes enhance and sometimes skew text comprehension, with most research focused on reading texts in one’s native language. This project extended the work of Gaskins to explore how adolescents’ culturally constructed emotions affected their reading comprehension, and how this effect varied when reading in their first (Korean) or second (English) language. Students (N = 477) in a Korean high school read short paragraphs on four expository topics counterbalanced to represent both languages and both an emotional and neutral version of each topic. Results were that participants were more emotionally engaged and performed better on comprehension assessments when reading emotional than neutral texts. Thus, unlike Gaskin’s study, these results indicated that emotions were generally helpful for comprehension, whether the text was in the reader’s first language or a learned language, possibly by way of increasing attention and engagement with the text.

This mixed-methods study explored joining use of increasing-complex text with sound instructional practices on English Learners’ (ELs) academic language and conceptual knowledge. Findings showed one-week postintervention, ELs achieved significant academic vocabulary gains such that there were no differences between ELs and general education (GE) students. Moreover, six weeks postintervention, ELs’ academic language and conceptual knowledge closely approximated that of their GE peers. Findings suggest that carefully scaffolded use of increasingly-complex text holds promise in advancing ELs’ conceptual knowledge and academic language. Given the widespread use of simplified text as ELs’ primary reading curriculum—a practice that unintentionally delimits language and knowledge learning opportunities, and in turn, contributes to persistent achievement gaps—efforts aimed at identifying practices that build academic language and conceptual knowledge and in turn, enable access to complex text are of particular importance. If replicated in larger studies, teachers will have a clear alternative to such practices.

Few studies have explored how the literacies of immigrant parents are influenced by participation in their children’s emerging biliteracy. This study addressed this lacuna using a qualitative case study design to investigate the biliteracy development of Arab immigrant mothers in the U.S. Southwest. We used the framework of digital biliteracy to study participants’ literacy practices in Arabic and English and how these changed in the process of raising bilingual/biliterate children. As participants experienced life changes as immigrants, mothers, and language learners, they navigated this work through forms of digital technologies previously unfamiliar to them. They learned new words in both languages and developed digital literacy skills needed to use computers, tablets, and cell phones; access the Internet; create e-mail accounts; and translate terms across English and Arabic. The study contributes to knowledge of the literacy practices of Arab immigrant families and offers implications for research and practice.

The chapter explores the relationships of the material and discursive in an afterschool arts space devoted to creating an “ideal city” out of recyclables. Intrigued by the making of a homeless shelter by a Grade 5 student and a teacher candidate, the author turns to intra-activity as a theory—and ethic-onto-epistemological framework—through which to read and analyze the intra-actions between the human and nonhuman, the material and discursive and the natural and cultural factors in the practices of designing and making the home. For this literacy researcher, this required a methodological and ontoepistemological re-orienting, a poststructuralist move to enter into the theoretical threshold and to produce knowledge differently. Drawing on three thresholds—mindful walking, traditional oral storytelling, and the making of the birch bark canoe—the author suggests new possibilities for thinking with intra-activity as a theory in the study, illustrating how Indigenous ways of knowing and being have always included an ethics of living in relationship with the natural, spiritual and physical forces of the material world. This process opens up new insights and questions about the ways of knowing that inspired and informed the creation of the “home for the homeless”, as well as new considerations about the ontoepistemological frameworks used in literacy research.

This article reports a post hoc analysis conducted as part of a larger study in which 61 typically developing, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds were assessed in phonological awareness (PA), vocabulary (i.e., receptive, expressive, and definitional), and grammatical skill at baseline and 3, 6, and 9 months later. The larger study’s purpose was to shed light on the theory of lexical reorganization claim that increases in receptive vocabulary provide the basis for PA development. Its results showed that expressive vocabulary accounted for additional PA growth in 4- and 5-year-olds but not in 3-year-olds. The post hoc study involved a closer analysis of PA growth in relation to expressive vocabulary. Its results suggest that increases in receptive vocabulary might be necessary as a foundation for initial PA development but that expressive-level vocabulary might be needed to hold words in memory to perform complex manipulations required in higher level PA tasks.

Policies increasing the amount of time allocated to reading instruction are popular initiatives to meet the demands of accountability testing. Research suggests that time on instruction and children’s approaches to learning (ATL), which generally includes measures of attention, persistence, motivation, and flexibility, are positively associated with measures of reading achievement. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Kindergarten cohort, this study simultaneously examines the degree to which time on reading instruction and children’s ATL are related to reading growth during kindergarten and first grade, while also examining whether time on instruction contributes to reading achievement differentially for children with varying ATL. Results indicate that time on reading instruction and children’s ATL were positively associated with children’s reading achievement. Overall, time on instruction was equally beneficial for children regardless of their ATL. Findings highlight the importance of using teaching practices to support children’s ATL.

Reading rate, a component of reading not closely attended to by educators and researchers prior to the 20^th century, quickly became the subject of considerable research shortly after the turn of the century. This article uses historical content analysis to examine primary source documents from that period (1910–1925) to explore why reading rate emerged as a key component of reading during that time. Situating this rise with the concurrent rise in the efficiency movement within education, a critical analysis of these documents reveals that reading rate became relevant in part due to its alignment with three ideological tenets of the efficiency movement: efficiency, measurement, and sorting. In considering the similarities between the focus on rate during the turn of the 20^th century and the related focus on automaticity today, these findings suggest the need for critical examination of current approaches to fluency.

Using videos from 63 teachers in grades 4–8 who were part of the Measures of Effective Teaching study, we identified five tendencies in the teaching of reading comprehension that can inform future work on the design and implementation of reading instruction. The five tendencies are: (1) Instruction is generally text-centric, but dominated by instructional vignettes; (2) Text talk is common, but is dominated by teacher-facilitated questioning; (3) Instruction is intentional and explicit, but at a cost; (4) Instruction is strategy-centric, but not necessarily strategic; and (5) Knowledge-building is underemphasized during classroom textual interactions. This study addresses the need for more current understanding of the state of instructional practices in reading comprehension.

Theories guide many aspects of literacy research. In this article we describe four theoretical approaches that we have used in qualitative research with students who are perceived to struggle with reading in school, including: New Literacy Studies, Disability Studies in Education, Bioecological Systems Theory, and Cultural Historical Activity Theory. We provide a brief overview of each of the theories and then explain how we have used them to gain insights about students with whom we have worked in the context of our research. Although grounded in distinct perspectives, we argue that each of the theories are lenses through which we were better able to understand the complexities of students’ struggles with reading. We further argue that the theories are united in their ability to broaden the perspectives of researchers and teachers to better account for the social, cultural, and institutional factors that shape literacy teaching and learning in schools. We conclude by questioning the use of the term “struggling reader” and highlighting the implications of our individual theoretical frames and analyses for both research and practice.

Research on literacy tutoring such as working in an after-school reading or writing club, situated as a service-learning project, suggests that such work can foster culturally responsive teaching for prospective teachers by increasing additive perspectives toward students from diverse backgrounds and transforming views of diversity. The purpose of this qualitative study was to document the value of participating in a semester long, field-based university course combined with a service-learning program to enhance prospective teachers’ generative learning of culturally responsive pedagogy. Building on generative learning theories, we identified the ways prospective teachers became more metacognitive of their past experiences and beliefs, developed caring relationships, and gained confidence about the positive impact they were having on students’ literacy learning.

This study is part of a longitudinal, multiphase study on development of literacy mentoring practices particularly with regard to the cooperating teacher. This paper reports on the findings from the first year of the study during which cooperating teachers (CT) participated in a master's program focused on coaching and mentoring while mentoring preservice teachers completing their elementary education degree inside a literacy specialization cohort. Drawing on observational and interview data and employing an activity theory framework, we examine the ways the CTs' involvement in a community of peers and faculty who met regularly in courses was instrumental their appropriation of a model of mentoring known as coaching with CARE. Analysis indicated that coursework, particularly two courses taken during the first year, offered multiple spaces that functioned as ways for participants to work through tensions that arose as the CTs moved across activity systems (from their coaching community at the university to their individual schools situated within area school districts). Specifically, these spaces afforded opportunities to work through understandings of the underlying theories and concepts related to reflective coaching, to share their experiences and beginning enactments of the coaching model, and to coach one another as they interacted around videotaped coaching conferences.

This study is part of a larger longitudinal, multiphase study on the development of literacy mentoring practices that seeks to bring attention to the learning of cooperating teachers. In this paper we concentrate on how cooperating teachers (CTs) engage in responsive Critical Discourse Analysis while viewing and discussing videos of their coaching conversations with their preservice teachers (PTs). Our research was guided by the following question: In what ways do teachers engage in responsive CDA while watching videos of post-conferences between CTs and PTs with their colleagues? For our analysis, we examined the discourse turn by turn; focusing on interactional coaching moves and discourses of coaching using Fairclough's (1993, 2013) framework of genre, discourse, and style. Across the examples of responsive CDA the teachers used in Retrospective Coaching Analysis (RCA) for coaching, a process we developed based on Goodman's RMA, we found examples we identified as either deconstructive or reconstructive/positive discourse analysis. Thus, engaging in the work of both deconstructive and reconstructive CDA, teachers are developing tools to generate and rehearse new possibilities for their practice, both as teachers and as coaches. As a result, this collaborative work supports CTs as they become more integrated members of the university teacher preparation program.

This study examines the online writing practices of adolescent emergent bilinguals through the mediating lenses of dialogic interaction and intertextuality. Using a multimodal discourse analysis approach, the study traces how three students develop online academic texts through intertextual moves that traverse modal boundaries. The analysis reveals how cross-modal, dialogic interactions allow emergent bilingual students to pool linguistic resources, background knowledge, and writing expertise. Such collaborative interactions ultimately serve to support their academic writing. Findings suggest the importance of developing research methodologies and literacy pedagogies that bridge boundaries across social actors, spaces, modes, and languages.

The #WalkMyWorld project was an open, social media experiment developed to provide preservice and in-service teachers and K–12 students with an opportunity to focus on developing media literacies and civic engagement in online spaces. The study employed a basic interpretative qualitative study approach (Merriam, 2002) to examine how online social environments can be used as a vehicle to engage educators in the creation and sharing of online content, as it relates to multimodal meaning making, social scholarship, and identity construction. For this study, identity construction was identified as visually representing an aspect of an individual's life using any preferred medium, and sharing it through Twitter using the #WalkMyWorld hashtag. Results suggest three different categories in which participants viewed the activity of identity construction: (a) embraced similar identities, (b) established separate identities, or (c) resisted creating an online identity. As educators engage students with reading and writing digital content within social and connected learning environments, it is important to consider the creation and curation of an individual’s digital identity in social scholarship practices.

Multimedia expands the opportunity for graduate teachers to develop a community of learners in an online reading clinic as they reflect and collaborate on a variety of reading and writing experiences during an online lesson study of a comprehensive corrective reading lesson. This qualitative method study explores (a) the pedagogical shifts of teachers in an online reading clinic lesson study of their own self-selected literacy teaching. The findings reveal that the pedagogical shifts made by graduate teachers in an online lesson study resulted in changes in 1) knowledge of assessment and diagnosis as evident in metacognitive reflection and progressive of understandings; 2) teachers instructional differentiation and intervention skills refined by examination of practice as evident in their analytical reasoning; and 3) increased commitment to providing corrective reading instruction based on formal and informal data—driven decisions.

Rigor in qualitative research has been based upon criteria of credibility, dependability, confirmability, and transferability. Drawing upon articles published during our editorship of the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, we illustrate how the use of digital data in research study reporting may enhance these areas of rigor, and can provide more detailed and nuanced representations that move beyond print-based transcriptions. Data shared demonstrate how including digitally rich artifacts in research articles deepens readers' access to the content, forces authors to show and not just tell of the connections to practice, and ultimately improves the rigor of the study. We also address challenges and solutions to potential problems of using digital data in research reports.

According to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), to be college and career ready students must be able to construct logical arguments using facts and reason. A feminist perspective provides an alternative point of view on the value of argumentation. The purpose of this study was to question the theories that frame the current CCSS 9–12 English language arts (ELA) standards and to propose alternative theories to be considered by literacy pedagogues in teaching of the standards. I conducted a thematic content analysis of the 9–12^th grade writing standards and related content in the CCSS for ELA. Data revealed two shared areas between feminist pedagogy and ELA CCSS: (a) value of critical thinking; and (b) teachers’ and students’ power to make decisions about class content. However, three points of differences also became clear: (a) view of literacy as classified; (b) lack of women’s voices; and (c) hierarchy of academic writing styles. Implications for practice require teachers to use a dialogic rather than a monologic framework for writing instruction.

Situated within the historical and current state of writing and adolescent literacy research, we conducted a systematic literature review in which we screened 2,871 articles to determine the prevalent themes in current research on writing tasks in content-area classrooms. Each of the 37 final studies was evaluated and coded using seven methodological quality indicators. In this article, we further explore the quality analysis step of the review. Specifically, we critique the relative strengths and weaknesses of the current research in the area of content-area writing. Additionally, we identify exemplars for each of our primary recommendations for rigorous literacy research.

Despite the importance of prior knowledge to learning, few studies have systematically addressed the extent to which or ways in which instructional resources support teachers in the activation of students' prior knowledge, or the extent to which teachers prompt students' prior knowledge activation in practice. In study one, a content analysis was applied to the language in four instructional resources to come to an understanding of the ways in which resources guide teachers to activate students' prior knowledge. In study two, we went beyond teacher resources to examine prior knowledge activation in four (two male, two female) public elementary teachers' reading classrooms. A two-step procedure was followed to analyze teachers' utterances, first discriminating language intended to activate students' prior knowledge (n = 27) from other utterances (n = 1,770), and then examining the 27 knowledge activation utterances and scoring them according to the frame of reference. The results suggest that instances of prior knowledge activation were rare during reading lessons, both with recommended statements and demonstrated actions. Additionally, the analysis found that instructional resources focused predominantly on world knowledge and personal experience, whereas the practitioners focused on knowledge from previously taught lessons.