Literacy Now

Meghan Liebfreund is this year’s winner of the ILA Outstanding Dissertation Award. The Literacy Research Panel asked her to provide a post about her scintillating study.

The widespread adoption of the Common Core State Standards shines a spotlight on informational text comprehension. Research consistently reveals that students rely on different component skills when reading informational compared with narrative texts (Best, Floyd, & McNamara, 2008; Eason, Goldberg, Young, Geist, & Cutting, 2012; McNamara, Ozuru, & Floyd, 2011); however, these studies of informational text investigated only a few component skills and focused primarily on decoding ability and prior knowledge. As a result, in my dissertation I aimed to better understand informational text comprehension by examining additional component skills. 

This study included students in grades 3–5 and examined how decoding ability, vocabulary knowledge, prior knowledge, and intrinsic motivation are related to informational text comprehension. Each of these reading components was important for informational text comprehension, and vocabulary knowledge was the strongest predictor. I also examined these components for higher and lower comprehenders. For lower comprehenders, decoding ability and motivation had the strongest relationships with informational text comprehension. Of note, decoding ability predicted only informational text comprehension beyond the control variables of age and grade. When the other components were entered into the model, decoding ability was no longer a significant predictor. Also, because of the sample size, motivation was only marginally significant. For higher comprehenders, vocabulary knowledge was the strongest predictor of informational text comprehension.

Although this study was not designed to determine how instruction in each of these areas contributes to informational text comprehension, what might these findings mean for practitioners?

• Provide high-quality reading instruction. High-quality reading instruction that focuses on decoding, vocabulary, prior knowledge, and motivation is essential for student success with informational text. Educators should continue to support the development of these component skills that positively influence reading comprehension when working with informational text.
• Build students’ vocabulary knowledge. Vocabulary knowledge is essential for informational text comprehension and is an area that assists higher comprehenders with performing well with these texts. General instruction with informational text comprehension should focus on increasing students’ vocabulary knowledge.
• Differentiate. Readers with different skills may have different experiences when engaged with informational texts. As a result, we need to differentiate instructional materials and offer different types of supports.
• Motivate readers. Lower comprehenders in this study comprehended better when they were motivated more. Thus, we may need to be more concerned with motivating our lower comprehenders to engage successfully with informational texts, especially ones that are challenging. As teachers, we need to select texts and plan instructional activities that support active engagement and appeal to students’ interests.

Meghan Liebfreund,PhD, is an assistant professor of educational technology and literacy at Towson University in Maryland and is the winner of the 2015 International Literacy Association (ILA) Outstanding Dissertation Award.

The ILA Literacy Research Panel uses this blog to connect educators around the world with research relevant to policy and practice. Reader response is welcomed via e-mail.

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I recently gave a class of preservice teachers a copy of the article “Fostering Academic and Social Growth in A Primary Literacy Workshop Classroom: ‘Restorying’ Students With Negative Reputations” from Elementary School Journal after one of them shared—as an aside in a larger story about an elementary classroom—that one student experiencing difficulty with literacy learning was routinely sent out of class for bad behavior.  Scanning the room, I noticed no one seemed bothered by this information and, in fact, it appeared most considered this to be normal practice.

Behavioral issues—from nonparticipation to total class disruption—are commonly and historically viewed as individual problems solved by fixing the child (or the child’s family). Emotional and interpersonal difficulties are viewed as barriers to academic growth, both for the child in question and for classmates who, hypothetically, can learn in peace once the “problem child” is dealt with.

In this study, Worthy and colleagues (2012) offer a different perspective. In short, they argue that negative identities are socially constructed and should be approached as social problems (see related approaches in Cassetta & Sawyer, 2013). They spent a year in the second-grade classroom of Mae, who, like most teachers, had students who started the school year with negative reputations. In Mae’s classroom, though, these students’ identities made positive shifts. The researchers point out that in many contexts, the negative identities haunting students would be more deeply solidified, or even worsened.

How did Mae make such a difference?  The researchers explained that she socialized marginalized children into the community through literate practices. Two particular children and the growth they and their classmates experienced are included in the study. I will briefly describe one of those cases.

When Lydia began second grade, she had a reputation for being resistant to writing and for being antisocial but with an active fantasy life. Specifically, she had an affinity for fairies. Some adults in school wondered if Lydia had Asperger syndrome. When she resisted interaction for the first several months, Mae did not insist that she participate, but she was not ignoring her either. Mindful that Lydia needed to become socialized and to be a writer, she first worked to gain Lydia’s trust. Eventually, she was able to seize opportunities to capitalize on Lydia’s interests and expertise in class conversations, thus helping her change her status with peers. For instance, when a classmate mentioned that his book included fairies, Lydia piped up with a comment that made it clear she believed in fairies. This might have put her at risk for judgment and further isolation, but Mae interjected that her story was exactly the kind of thing she could write, and then she asked the class if they thought that other authors use the strategy of telling their story to a friend before writing it down. 

Mae repositioned Lydia as a valuable class member—and an author—with important things to say and, consequently, changed the way Lydia and her peers viewed and interacted with each other (and perhaps others in the future), A steady stream of episodes like this one contributed to what Worthy and her colleagues called the “restorying” of Lydia. As a side note, by the end of the year, Lydia was observed reading to the class a piece she wrote and answering questions about it. Also, the possibility of Asperger syndrome was no longer discussed.

When the researchers asked Mae for implications for teaching that make this kind of growth possible, she named two practices. First, literacy workshops allow for student choice and teacher–student interaction. Second, shared book experiences through teacher read-alouds offer a space for students to voice ideas, build meaning together, and appreciate each others’ perspectives.

Gay Ivey, PhD, is the Tashia F. Morgridge Chair in Reading at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a member of the International Literacy Association Literacy Research Panel and vice president-elect of the Literacy Research Association.

The ILA Literacy Research Panel uses this blog to connect educators around the world with research relevant to policy and practice. Reader response is welcomed via e-mail.

by Jennifer Rowsell
Brock University
Dec. 18, 2014

Why are movies like Frozen, videogames like Minecraft, and book series like The Hunger Games fixtures in so many classrooms? What compels students to take up popular culture stories and become so preoccupied with their songs, characters, storylines, and associated objects? Researchers including Anne Haas Dyson , Jackie Marsh (2005), Deborah Rowe (2008), and Karen Wohlwend (2008; 2009a; 2009b) have written extensively about how young children play with media and popular culture texts and how these texts and associated practices have the potential to open up spaces for learning in early years and primary learning contexts.

Wohlwend provides a particularly incisive, critical framing of the often hidden practices and competencies children display when they play and think through media and popular culture. As she repeatedly demonstrates in her research (Wohlwend, 2008; 2009a; 2009b), children perform their identities through media and, in turn, media and popular culture powerfully shape children’s thinking and learning. In her various research studies, Wohlwend shows how adults have become more constrained by conventions, where children easily move across a variety of text genres (e.g. information, narrative, visual/image-based, haptically driven, and explanatory) and through a variety of modalities (e.g. sounds, visuals, gestures, animation). They do this seamlessly and often with abandon.

In one example of Wohlwend’s work, Wohlwend (2009a) examined closely how a group of children engage with toys and artifacts as identity texts. Wohlwend spotlighted Abbie Howard, a kindergarten teacher with 15 years of experience in early years classrooms, who had an inquiry-based style of teaching in which she would plan out and negotiate activities for each day with the children in her classroom. Once they had a plan, children set to work on a project or compositional task. Children worked independently as Abbie circulated. Children naturally consulted with peers and engaged in collaborative work as needed. In her seminal article about the research project during 24 once-a-week visits over one school year, Wohlwend offered a detailed discourse analysis interpreting a group of girls named “Disney Princess Players.” The group loved such Disney animated films as The Little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty, Mulan, Aladdin, Cinderella, and Snow White and they spent much of their class time talking about the films, enacting parts of the films, extending their own stories based on characters. Wohlwend particularly looked at gendered tensions that arose during their playing and writing particularly around their sophistication with animating characters—that is, moving them, speaking for them, building on stories about them.

Wohlwend provides an in-depth, bird’s eye view of material features of Disney princess characters (costumes, physical features, colour schemes, skin colours, etc.), connecting these material features to ways in which the girls in the group perform their own identities in the classroom and within their peer groups. Wohlwend shows how the girls not only negotiate their relationships with peers, but also how Howard had them critically reflect on the content and respond with their own plays. Howard fosters an environment in her classroom encouraging “approximated writing” and she builds on the children’s funds of knowledge (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005) about popular culture. In her article, Wohlwend notes the Princess Players engaged in 42% more authoring than other children in the class, primarily because of authoring considered texts they dearly love, and they invested a lot of time in viewing, thinking about, and remixing into other texts and compositions.

Stepping back and thinking about research informing practice, Wohlwend’s work tells us some important things that we might know on a tacit level, but that are not as prominent in theory and pedagogy, such as the power of incorporating media and popular culture in classrooms and how young children negotiate and even contest gender stereotypes naturally and in productive ways.

Three pieces of advice emerging from Wohlwend’s work are: 1) talk about popular culture and media texts, discussing material qualities, critically engaging with stereotypes, assumptions, and underlying ideas; 2) provide students with opportunities to focus on particular scenes or characters in popular culture texts, such as Katniss in The Hunger Games, and devise alternative storylines or scenarios; 3) have students work in pairs or small groups to compose a response to a popular culture texts, such as a short film, a rant, or visual montage that depicts a part or theme of the text.

by Catherine Compton-Lilly
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Oct. 23, 2014

I am constantly impressed when an 8-year-old-child easily shifts between languages, translating her mother’s words into English to compensate for my lack of Spanish. In recent years, a growing body of research has highlighted the significance of bilingualism and the long term effects being bilingual, or being multilingual, has not only on people’s understandings of language, but also on their general cognitive abilities. Perhaps this is why I am intrigued by a recent publication by esteemed scholar, Luis Moll. I highlight Moll’s work partly because I found it in a book on Vygotsky and feared it might not be discovered by many of us who focus on literacy.

In this chapter, Moll and his colleagues observed two groups of children as they moved between reading instruction in Spanish and English. The children spent half of their days in each classroom. The teacher who taught them to read in English did not speak Spanish. Moll and his research team were intrigued when they noticed that some children who were capable readers in Spanish, were identified as struggling in their English reading classroom. When their Spanish-speaking teacher viewed her students participating in the English reading classroom, she noted, “Those can’t be my kids. Why are they doing such low-level work?”

Moll and his colleagues initiated a series of teaching-learning experiments in which they asked children to read texts in English and then discuss what they had read in Spanish. The results were compelling. Children who appeared to have minimal comprehension of English texts when they were required to discuss these texts in English, revealed rich comprehension when they were allowed to talk about the texts using their native Spanish. Moll and his colleagues worked toward creating a “bilingual zone” in which children were invited to draw on their Spanish language resources to comprehend and discuss texts they had read in English. Specifically, Moll and his colleagues were careful to provide scaffolds when children discussed texts using English. They built on students’ comments and provided missing elements of stories enabling groups of students to collectively express what they understood and to share their ideas with each other. When students gave short one-word responses, the research team situated these comments within the story and invited other members of the group to build on these comments.

Finally, the research team invited children to use Spanish to access key terms and convey ideas the children could not yet express in English. Throughout this process, the research team actively resisted allowing the children to resort to literal and basic comprehension of texts. Instead, they asked high-level inferential questions and expected the children to respond to complex ideas while employing language scaffolding and allowing the children’s selective use of Spanish. As Moll reports, “we knew that the students could perform at more advanced levels,” and that “it was well within their zone of proximal development.”

Significantly, the idea we can invite bilingual speakers to draw on their full language repertoire— in two languages— is a concept quickly gaining traction with our colleagues who focus on ESL and bilingual education, as noted in several of the studies listed at the end of this post. Teachers can ask children to use their native languages to talk or write about books read in English or explore different ways of conveying ideas using multiple languages or language variations. In addition, it is important for teachers to recognize the bi-literate abilities many children bring to classrooms, including being able to write words and sentences in more than one language. Even teachers who do not speak the native languages of all her students can invite students to draw on their bi-literate abilities, consulting with bilingual colleagues as needed. Recent work on “translanguaging” opens the door for reading scholars to think deeply about intersections between reading and language. Moll’s work invites all of us to consider the competencies our bilingual students bring to text and possibilities for our teaching.

Catherine Compton-Lilly is an associate professor in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Compton-Lilly teaches courses in literacy studies and works with professional development schools in Madison.

The ILA Literacy Research Panel uses this blog to connect educators around the world with research relevant to policy and practice. Reader response is welcomed via e-mail.

by Nell K. Duke
University of Michigan
April 16, 2014

Periodically, I still hear students told that, “When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking.” In other words, so the generalization goes, when there are two vowels side-by-side in a word, they represent the long sound of the first of the two vowels, as in the word rain, for example. The problem is, this generalization actually holds true less than half the time—considerably less, depending on whose analysis you read.

I recently had the opportunity revisit a classic analysis by Francine P. Johnston reported in the 2001 article The Utility of Phonic Generalizations: Let's Take Another Look at Clymer's Conclusions. Johnston reviewed a landmark study on how often phonics generalizations apply that was first published by Theodore Clymer in 1963, as well as several replication studies that followed. She also reported on her own analysis, which employed the American Heritage Word Frequency Book (Carroll, Davies, & Richman, 1971), which was created from a wide variety of reading materials used in grades 3 through 9. Johnston too found that the “when two vowels. . .” generalization often did not apply, nor did any related broad generalization. However, when she looked at generalizations for specific vowel pairs, she found   that regularity was much higher. For example, in her database

• aw made the sound in saw 100% of the time
• oy made the sound in boy 100% of the time
• oi made the sound in join 100% of the time

Ay, oa, ee, ai, ey, and au also represented one particular sound more than three-quarters of the time. Another set of vowel pairs represented either one of two sounds three-quarters or more of the time: ow (snow or how), ew (blew or view), oo (book or boot), and ei (eight or either).

The well-worn “final e” or “silent e” generalization (variously stated to mean something along the lines that in a word ending with a vowel, one or two consonants, and an e, the first vowel represents its long sound and the second e is silent) behaves similarly. In her database, it was true 77.7% of the time for a-e, as in cake, but only 16.6% of the time for e-e, as in these (i-e met the generalization 74.2% of the time, o-e 58.4% of the time, and u-e 76.9% of the time).

What do we make of all this? Johnston concludes, “Broad phonic generalizations are not especially useful in very many cases. However, that should not be interpreted to mean that phonics instruction is not useful or that English orthography is too irregular to be the subject of study. Research in the years since Clymer's study offers ideas about alternatives to the teaching of generalizations” (p. 140). Johnston goes on to suggest strategies that are still recommended (and research-supported) today, such as teaching specific sound-letter relationships (e.g., the sound commonly represented by oi), teaching phonograms or rimes (e.g., -ake), developing orthographic knowledge through word sorting, and teaching students to be flexible in decoding, trying one likely vowel sound and then, if that doesn’t work, trying another. We can’t boil down English orthography into a few simple generalizations, but we have lots of tools to help students deal effectively with its complexity.

Nell Duke is a member of the International Reading Association’s Literacy Research Panel. Reader response is welcomed. E-mail your comments to LRP@/.