Literacy Research: Theory,Method,and Practice

In this 2019 presidential address, I reflect on the significance of community across four areas: with youth and in school communities, within literacy teacher education, in community-engaged theories and methodologies, and within the professional organization. How do we define and understand community? Who and what is included and excluded? As a literacy research community, who are we becoming and who do we want to be? Drawing from historical and contemporary examples within and beyond literacy research, I take a look back and at the present to examine discourses of community and imagine possibilities for the future.

This interview highlights and extends Dr. Barbara Rogoff’s keynote address at the 2019 annual convention. Specifically, in the interview, Dr. Rogoff discusses her framework for learning, Learning by Observing and Pitching In, as well as other aspects of learning, including notions of childhood, age-based social ordering, and conflict as an aspect of learning and community engagement.

The collection of papers represented in the Integrative Research Review responds to the question: How can we study children’s/youth’s out of school experiences to inform classroom practices? Using a variety of lenses to address the question, the authors consider how to understand, respond to, and serve children and youth in a variety of contexts. Duke explores a quasi-experimental design showing the potential impact on student achievement and motivation in schools that incorporate literacy practices from children’s lives outside of school compared to the traditional curriculum. Bloome and Faust take a philosophical approach to explore the languaging of the relationship between students’ out-of-school lives and classroom practices and its implications for the construction of personhood by examining one classroom event from a microethnographic discourse analysis perspective. García-Sánchez highlights the methodological features that allow linguistic anthropologists to make visible the agentive and innovative character of immigrant children’s communicative practices in a variety of learning situations. Drawing on the transliteracies approach, Stornaiuolo considers work with a group of young people to study multimodal composing and the development of school makerspaces in a 6-year partnership project with a local innovation high school. Alvermann discusses the papers, pointing out the affordances and challenges of each perspective.

This address focuses on research and practice in the preparation of preservice teachers in literacy. I begin with an examination of the constructs of practice, activism, and imagination from an historical perspective. Next, I report on two initiatives in field-based literacy teacher preparation. The first initiative engages preservice teachers with inquiry as a curriculum stance. The second initiative engages preservice teachers as researchers with attention to research as too both for professional knowledge and for resistance to contentious policy environments that constrain teacher decision making. Finally, I argue for the need to become more inclusive within our community and to shift our stance from teachers as receivers of knowledge to teachers as participants in the sense-making process around practice.

Employing a multisited ethnographic stance, this study examined second-generation Korean immigrant children who sustain linkages with their parental homelands to better understand how transnationalism shapes their language and literacy practices by documenting their experiences in and across multiple spaces in North Carolina, the United States, and Seoul, South Korea. Findings suggest that the circulation of care, or the multidirectional and reciprocal exchange of support and care, functioned at the center of the children’s multilingual and transnational lives. The children actively engaged in language and literacy interactions through which they forged and extended meaningful ties with their parental homelands and strengthened intergenerational relationships. This study challenges the binary and fixed notions of home/host countries and highlights the need for longitudinal, multisited research on immigrant children’s transnational journeys with careful attention to the mobility of their language and literacy across generations and countries.

In this multiple case study, I examine relationships among the essay genre, contextual influences, sociocultural resources, and choices made by four adult English learners enrolled in an English composition course at a community college. My primary objective is to provide an expanded view of the writing processes used by adult English learners. The research draws heavily on participants’ sociocultural realities before and after their arrival in the United States. The patterns in the data showed that the essay genre along with context significantly contributed to participants’ agentive capacity. The essay genre, in particular, determined the types of competencies they needed to demonstrate, while contextual influences shaped the available resources and their access to those resources.

In this personal reflection, Sonia Nieto recounts the lessons she learned about language and literacy from learning to speak Spanish and then English; to reading and writing; and the impact of these lessons on her identity, teaching, research, and life; and, more broadly, on the fields of education and literacy.

English language learners’ nonparticipation and reticence in adult literacy classes are often presented problematically from a deficit lens of student resistance and disengagement. This article draws from an ethnographic case study of Generation 1 learners, who are defined as adult-arrival immigrant learners, transitioning from an adult English as a Second Language class to a developmental literacy class. By examining learners’ resistance through a framework of agency enactment, the study bridges the fields of adult literacy and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, both of which support adult-arrival immigrants entering the U.S. education system. The resulting analysis illustrates how Generation 1 learners’ acts of resistance can be complex presentations of their literacy identities and their engagement in classroom literacy practices.

Relatively little is known about the long-term academic literacy development of refugee-background students, particularly at the postsecondary level. The purpose of this study was to understand how refugee students leveraged their cultural and linguistic resources to navigate a competency-based online college program. Using a multiple case study, this research examined the literacy practices of two focal students from Iraq. This article discusses two main themes: becoming students and acquiring academic Discourses. Both participants were actively renegotiating their identities as students, writers, and readers within a new linguistic and academic context. Findings suggest that mushfake Discourse might be a valuable perspective in helping refugee-background students by positioning them with greater agency in their literacy practices as they intuit, question, and manipulate norms to reach their academic goals.

Black immigrant youth in the United States tend to be considered a new model minority because of the perception that they perform academically better than their African American peers. Yet, Black immigrant youth face challenges with literacy performance that often go unnoticed by teachers, which amplifies the invisibility of their literacies. I assert that nuances presented in the literacies of Black immigrant youth as they become Black, become immigrants, and become speakers of racialized Englishes, necessitate the use of a theoretical lens that allows researchers to foreground race and mediate the linguistic and cultural expectations of these youth. To demonstrate, I propose the lens of translanguaging premised on an integrated model of multilingualism. This perspective provides a basis for foregrounding racialized language to facilitate an ideological understanding surrounding how Black immigrant youth leverage Englishes in their individual linguistic repertoires (i.e., I-languages) to enact literacies. At the same time, it provides an opportunity to understand how these youth engage the often-imposed structural rules of shared grammars within and across these Englishes (i.e., E-languages) in ways that influence these literacies. By presenting Black Caribbean immigrant youth’s literacies as a unique example to foreground racialized language via translanguaging for examining the Englishes of bidialectal youth, I encourage researchers to empower youth to navigate theoretical tensions that remain central to translanguaging research. More broadly, I invite researchers to think beyond dichotomies while clarifying what it means for youth of color from varied backgrounds to leverage their literacies and thrive.

Although existing research examines how pre-K–12 teachers understand everyday translanguaging and enact translanguaging pedagogies in their literacy classrooms, considerably less research explores translanguaging pedagogies in literacy teacher education. Drawing on García, Johnson, and Seltzer’s theorization of translanguaging stance, design, and shifts, we redesigned a university-based literacy methods course to encourage both English-medium and dual-language teacher candidates (TCs) to engage their full linguistic repertoires in writing. In this study, we used qualitative methods to explore how TCs in our course experienced translanguaging pedagogies in coursework and enacted them with students in fieldwork settings. Findings illustrate that TCs experimented with language within our university classroom, drawing on their full linguistic repertoires in course assignments and countering the dominance of English in course activities. They also showcase how TCs began enacting translanguaging pedagogies in their fieldwork placements, planning intentionally for translanguaging in lesson plans, and tapping into the translanguaging corriente in everyday teaching and learning. Ultimately, this study offers insights into the potential of enacting translanguaging pedagogies in preservice literacy teacher education for English-medium and dual-language educators alike.

This descriptive case study explored literacy preservice teachers’ (PTs) learning for the use of practice-based research and the impact of research experiences on their literacy teaching. This project spanned two courses and two contexts: a learning and development course focused on PTs’ stance as inquirers, activists, and practice-based researchers, with work in a field placement classroom, and a reading methods course, focused on literacy teaching through inquiry and activism, with a mediated literacy mentoring experience. The researcher employed framings of communities of practice and transformative activism in analyzing PTs’ identity development as researchers, identifying resources and design features that supported PTs’ learning, and understanding connections between PTs’ stances as inquirers and use of inquiry as literacy curriculum. Findings indicate the ongoing identity development PTs experienced as they used practice-based research to envision and enact transformative possibilities in literacy teaching.

From 2014 to the present, we have engaged in a series of studies examining the features of coaching that support teachers in reflecting on practice and moving toward transformation in literacy teaching. In this report, we engage in an inductive analysis of the findings across this body of work to identify the evidence-based design features associated with these coaching practices. Our inspection of the body of work reported here traces the development and use of the Coaching with CARE—Critical, Appreciative, Reflective, and Experiential-model. These research studies draw on activity theory as a theoretical framework, design-development research as a method, and reflective coaching as a pedagogical stance. Literacy coaching, like teaching, is complex and nuanced. The design principles we have identified do not yield a formula for effective coaching but rather specify a set of principles that can guide decision making around coaching in complex spaces. In the conclusion, we identify areas for future research that can further inform the work of literacy teacher educators in support of preservice teachers.

This article explores how critical pedagogy unfolds in the everyday interactions between teachers and students. Specifically, Freirean constructs of critique and dialogue were explored in two key literacy events drawn from an ethnographically informed case study of one fourth-grade classroom. The events were first examined from an ethnographic perspective to understand how sociopolitical issue(s) were being critiqued (or avoided). These events were then analyzed again through microanalytic discourse analysis to explore how teachers and students jointly accomplished dialogue and critique through proposing and taking up of particular stances toward text(s). By juxtaposing these two analytic lenses, the researchers argue for an understanding of critical pedagogy, particularly the tenets of critique and dialogue, as interactionally co-constructed in the continually evolving, everyday talk between teachers and students. This article closes by considering the implications of this work for classroom-based literacy research that examines critical pedagogy.

In this article, we share findings from three qualitative studies, illustrating how children of color and their families make meaning of the racial, linguistic, cultural, and gendered worlds in which they develop. The first study examines how White adoptive Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer (LGBTQ) parents engage in race conscious child-rearing of their young African American son and the dialogism of racial identity formation and racial literacies; the second study examines the family literacy learning and teaching practices of one adult English to Speakers of Other Languages student; the third study examines how Latinx parents engage intergenerational sharing of stories as tools of resistance. Utilizing critical race theory, LatCrit theory, and sociocultural perspectives on literacy and intergenerational learning as analytical lenses, this article illuminates the consequential nature of intergenerational learning that occurs through the lived and embodied literacy practices of children and families of color and the implications for literacy researchers and practitioners.

Drawing from theories of visual culture, social semiotics, and multimodality, the researchers conducted a qualitative multimodal content analysis of the covers of 21 young adult (YA) books that had been adapted as graphic novels (GNs). This study showed that the GN covers emphasized character and that the ages of the represented characters seemed to shift during the process of adaptation. However, publishers linked the two covers through branding, color schemes, and visual elements. These findings suggest that publishers view the readership of GNs differently than the readership of YA novels. This article encourages literacy education researchers and classroom practitioners to support students in analyzing visual artifacts designed for particular consumers. Critical readers could examine the sites of production and dissemination in addition to the text itself.

The purpose of this article is to isolate and detail various literacies deployed by youth when they composed multimodal texts that culminated in the production of student films. In particular, we focus on manifestations of young people’s thinking in the forms of fast and slow literacies. Using data from a series of research studies in which we observed Grades 3–12 students create short films in course-embedded field experiences and summer movie camps, we examined how the composition of student-made films allowed us to interrogate and elaborate literacies, both fast and slow, and the fast and slow thinking that supported the creation of those literate manifestations. We suggest fast and slow literacies, broadly construed, alter theories of literacy learning.

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) have described discipline-specific literacy skills needed to successfully engage with science concepts, and science assessments ask students to use language in many and varied forms to mediate their science thought and actions and prove mastery of content. Yet many science teachers have not been prepared with skills that help them recognize the ways literacy is integral to the discipline of science, much less integrate it. This research explored the experiences of three classroom science teachers as they worked to enact overlapping English Language Arts and science standards inherent in CCSS and NGSS through inquiry-based instruction. The 4Es’ heuristic framed analysis of classroom observations of instruction, teacher interviews, and surveys. Ways the teachers utilized inquiry-based instruction to Engage their students, Elicit/Engineer their literacies, and Examine and Evaluate discipline-specific language practices are analyzed, with recommendations for specific, interdisciplinary, and ongoing support teachers will need in order to realize the disciplinary literacy goals of the CCSS and NGSS.

Oral reading fluency is recognized as an important variable associated with the assessment of reading proficiency. Frequently, fluency assessments distill a child’s overall reading fluency to a single numerical score. Even when multiple dimensions are considered, the processes informing the nuance of the reading fluency variations are ignored. In order to shed light on the issue, we use an instrumental case study approach to illuminate how a reader’s fluency varies within a passage. We describe the insight this variability provides to teachers and researchers interested in understanding how readers transact with print. Specifically, we apply a multiple lens approach to analyze one child’s oral reading fluency and address the question: What variables contribute to a reader’s fluency? We combine eye movement miscue analysis and Flurkey’s oral reading flow and compare these assessments to Rasinski’s well-established fluency instrument. This methodology led to the identification of six variables influencing oral reading fluency. Five of the influential factors could not be observed using the traditional fluency measure. These five variables illuminate the complexity of oral reading fluency and support greater understanding of a reader’s abilities. This strengths-based conceptualization of fluency offers supportive rather than subtractive insight into a reader’s fluctuations in oral reading fluency. Our findings highlight a need for professionals to more adequately consider the conceptualizations of oral reading fluency.