Literacy Instruction in the Content Areas

Patricia L. Anders, Barbara J. Guzzetti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000149395
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Like its predecessor, Literacy Instruction in the Content Areas, Second Edition is written for undergraduate, graduate, and in-service teachers who want to integrate literacy processes into their content area instruction. In addition to extensive updating of earlier material, this new edition extends its coverage to include new chapters on adolescents' out-of-school literacy experiences and their in-school preferences, digital resources for content learning, and considerations for the reading specialist. In doing so, however, the authors have tried to maintain the brevity, stylistic clarity, and classroom focus of the earlier volume. Key features of this important new book include:
* Teaching Flexibility. Although written with the needs of pre-service teachers in mind, theory and research are treated in sufficient depth to make the book suitable for graduate courses and for teacher study groups. It is also appropriate for secondary reading specialists or literacy coaches responsible for establishing or maintaining a school-wide literacy program.
* Changes in New Edition. All chapters have been reorganized and most of the text rewritten. In addition, new chapters not usually included in content area reading texts were added. These cover: 1) adolescents' out-of-school literacy experiences and in-school preferences; 2) digital resources for content learning; and 3) considerations for the reading specialist.
* Socio-Cultural Perspective. Like other volumes in the Literacy Teaching Series, the perspective of this one is socio-cultural and constructivist. It recognizes that classroom teaching and learning are closely intertwined with surrounding school and community cultures as well as the culture and language of the subject being studied. Likewise, literacy is not simply a matter of reading and writing but involves using multiple literacies to negotiate and construct meaning.
* Practical Orientation. Although supporting theory and research are included in all chapters, instructional strategies with illustrative examples from practicing teachers are included in most chapters. Each chapter concludes with "Application Activities" and "From Our Professional Library" references.

1
Knowing Today’s Millennial Youth: Discovering Students’ Literacies

Kids are kids. How often do you hear that expression? We hear it a lot. Our experiences with today’s young people or those born since 1981, known as millennial youth, show us how false this assumption is, particularly in a diverse society.

Kids, after all, are people–and people are different from each other as individuals. Each of us is influenced by his or her multiple subjectivities or layers, such as gender, race, ethnicity, generation, geographical location, and social class, all of which contribute to our individuality. These and other aspects of students’ identities also influence their participation in particular types and activities of youth culture.

It is important for teachers to know the students with whom they work as people with literate lives outside of school. We think that it is necessary for teachers to recognize, acknowledge, and understand the range of youth culture and literacy practices in which their students engage in by choice. We maintain that it is imperative to be aware of what is important to students because teachers are not just teaching content–they are teaching students.

THE IMPORTANCE OF KNOWING STUDENTS’ INTERESTS

Why is it important to become familiar with students as individuals and their outside-of-school interests and practices? Two examples illustrate why we emphasize being able to understand the language and practices of young people to truly communicate with them. The first instance is an experience that Barbara had while attending a teacher’s presentation of her research for her master’s thesis. A high school social studies teacher investigated her students’ involvement in cooperative learning. During the presentation of her study at the university, the teacher mentioned that the cooperative groups were allowed to choose their own names. She enthusiastically praised the students for coming up with creative names for their small groups, one of which was Skunk Cabbage. Although other graduate students attending that presentation knew it, the teacher was oblivious to the fact that skunk cabbage is a folk term or jargon for marijuana. Unwittingly, the teacher was praising her students for celebrating and publicizing the drug culture. Had this teacher taken the opportunity to talk with and question her students to find out what skunk cabbage meant, she could have avoided two awkward situations-one in her classroom and one at the university.

This scenario also illustrates that students often have their own language or jargon that is reflective of their subcultures or outside interests, as do skateboarders, video gamers, and music fans. James Gee (2003) refers to students who engage in these kinds of practices or semiotic domains with each other and have a shared language related to those practices as affinity groups or communities of practice. Gee makes this statement:

People in an affinity group can recognize others as more or less “insiders” to the group. They may not see many people in the group face to face, but when they interact with someone on the Internet or read something about the domain, they can recognize certain ways of thinking, acting, interacting, valuing and believing as more or less typical of people who are “into” the semiotic domain. (p. 27)

Affinity groups are illustrated in a study that Barbara and Margaret (Guzzetti & Gamboa, in press a) conducted of three European American girls from an upper-middle-class-upper-class area who created their own zine (pronounced “zeen”), a self-publication created as an alternative to commercial magazines. They explored the girls’ involvement in the worldwide community of zinesters (those who create zines). Barbara and Margaret learned more than 40 terms from these girls, including zining (the act of creating a zine), DIY (do-it-yourself or the ethic of zining and punk rock) and distros (online distribution centers for zines). In a similar kind of study, our colleague, Eliane Rubinstein-Avilla, investigated Hispanic and Native American students from a low socioeconomic area who created a magazine in an after-school program. She discovered a shared slang with over 20 terms such as Yo! for “Hey there!,” homie for “friend,” and dubs for “20-inch tire rims” that these students used to communicate with each other (Rubinstein-Avilla, 2003).

Although affinity groups are more common with preadolescents and adolescents, even students at the elementary grades may share a common language or common practices that set them apart from others. One example of this, the second instance that illustrates the importance of knowing students’ language and interests, is illustrated by one of Barbara’s graduate student’s classes. In Stephanie Carpenter’s fourth-grade classroom, the girls were talking and writing in ghibberish, a language that is structured by reversing the order of the syllables of words to disguise real words by creating variations. The girls learned and spoke ghibberish so that the boys would not know what they were saying. This shared language enabled the girls to talk without fear of being interrupted or ridiculed by the boys in their class.

In this case, the teacher was aware of and understood the girls’ talk, was able to communicate with them, and, as a result, take action to help them. Stephanie was savvy to the girls’ rationale for engaging in this language practice in their informal conversations and writings in the classroom. Being in touch with her students allowed Stephanie to not only recognize them and their needs as individuals, but also to make changes in her classroom structure and practices to enable the girls to speak more freely without having to resort to an invented language.

In addition to being able to understand and communicate with students, there are other reasons for teachers to take an interest in their students’ language, interests, and out-of-school activities. One of these reasons is motivation. Students often see no connection between their informal literacy practices and their in-school instruction and assignments (Guzzetti, 2002; Hartman, 1997). As a result, many students feel alienated in school, and they fail to see the relevance of their assignments.

Students may very well be engaged in activities outside of school, however, that actually relate to their content area instruction, but they may not receive any acknowledgment or reward from their teachers for pursing a subject beyond the classroom walls. This situation is discouraging for students. Even high-achieving students are disenfranchised by this lack of acknowledgment. Many such students have teachers who think they like school because they are good at playing the game of school (telling the teacher what the teacher wants to hear no matter what the student really thinks) and get good grades, but these students never really feel challenged by the instruction or the curriculum. Many students, including low-achieving and Advanced Placement and Honors students, look for additional information and enrichment about a subject through their own explorations on the Internet, through television programs, movies, and videos, and through the trade books and literature they self-select (Guzzetti, 2002). By contrast, in a survey of nearly 1,000 high school students in an inner-city school and in an area school with a high socioeconomic status (SES), Barbara (Guzzetti, 2002) found that students complained about the lack of resources and stimulation in their science classrooms, leading one girl to exclaim, “This place has no atmosphere!”

Teachers who wish to motivate their students by bridging the gap between students’ out-of school literacy practices and their in-school literacy instruction and assignments can benefit from becoming familiar with students’ engagement with subject matter outside of school. Therefore, later in this chapter, we share the kinds of content area involvement students report or show us in their literate lives outside of school. Becoming aware of these kinds of resources that students find interesting helps teachers in acknowledging their students’ own explorations of subject matter, and it assists in bringing outside resources into the classroom.

Teachers can also create more motivating and relevant instruction and assignments by becoming familiar with students’ new literacies, such as video gaming, Web surfing, instant messaging, music fandom, and online journaling. By observing and interviewing young people in their engagement with popular culture, technoliteracies or electronic literacies (see the following paragraph), and other informal literacy practices, researchers are able to discover the elements of those practices that are motivating and interesting to students. Hence, later in this chapter, we present the findings of those studies that have implications for designing instruction that will be interesting and engaging for students.

Knowing students as individuals with their own interests and activities also assists teachers in recognizing the existence of students’ multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996). These multiple literacies range from such abilities as speaking the language of a trade like roofing or plumbing to writing ghibberish. Definitions of functional literacy, or the skills and abilities needed to keep pace with and function in today’s society, have changed with the times, particularly in the digital age (Bean, Bean, & Bean, 1999). These new literacy abilities include technoliteracies such as text messaging, online journaling, and writing html code to build a Web site. Given the new literacy demands of today’s new times, traditional notions that restrict what counts as literate have constrained instruction and negated students’ accomplishments (Knobel, 2001). By acknowledging that students have multiliteracies, including those not commonly recognized in school, teachers gain rapport with and the respect of their students. Knowing students as people with outside interests and abilities also assists teachers to understand the stance-the ways that students behave and respond-that students take in school (Alvermann & Heron, 2001).

NEW VIEWS OF LITERACY

The remainder of this chapter discusses the kinds of out-of-school literacies that students engage in by choice. Some of these practices are directly relevant to the content that teachers are teaching, whereas others relate to the kinds of thinking, talking, and reading abilities that enable and enhance students’ learning. We also provide some examples of ways to bridge the gap between students’ in-school and out-of-school literacy activities. In doing so, we review the findings of studies that surveyed or observed and interviewed students from various grade levels in their explorations of and engagement in literate activity.

By their very basis, these new investigations are different from past studies of students’ engagement with text. Whereas past studies of students’ comprehension of content texts were conducted from a psycholinguistic view (Smith, 1973) of reading as an interactive process between author and reader, these more recent studies of varying textual practices were conducted from the perspective of literacy as a social practice (Street, 1995). In this view, literacy is seen as a process in which students make meaning not only with their prior experiences and the author’s text, but also by talking with others, writing, and by relating the current text being read to other texts. Gee (2003) explains that reading and thinking are social achievements connected to social groups. He gives the scenario of “reading and thinking in different ways when we read and think as members of or as if we are members of different groups” (p. 3). Gee gives the example of reading the Bible differently as theology, as literature, and as deserving of religious skepticism. Each of these represents different ways of reading and thinking and ways of being in the world, which depend on the group with whom we are dialoguing.

We also recognize that students have intertextual lives. The notion of intertextuality recognizes that “a text is a sign that communicates meaning and shows traces of past texts; that texts are imbued with the voices of others’ social, cultural, and ideological practices; and that texts are constructed in a complex interplay of discursive practices and systems between the self and the social” (Kristeva, 1986 as cited in Hartman, 1997, p. 2). Hence, one text relates to or builds on another. One example might be an oral or written text that results from a game such as Pokeman, an art form such as Japanese anime, or a comparison of the Spiderman or Catwoman movies and comic books.

Douglas Hartman’s (1997) observations of the intertextual lives of African American teenagers reveal the range of textual practices demonstrated within the everyday literacies of the students’ lives. These included such musical texts as rap, rhythm and blues, and reggae, which often serve as backdrops for encounters with others, and the print, video, musical, audio, and dramatic texts the students experienced in church that were usually not found in the classroom. In fact, the dominant text type used in school—the printed page—was not prominent elsewhere in these students’ literate lives.

We anticipate that, by highlighting studies like Hartman’s investigation of students’ real-world literacies, teachers’ view of literacy will change. We hope to expand notions of what counts as text and demonstrate how the field has moved from traditional notions of literacy (reading, writing, listening, and speaking) to literacies (also encompassing new literacies and multiliteracies). In doing so, we offer new possibilities for literacy instruction in content areas.

Students’ Engagement With New Literacies in New Times

Bertram Bruce (1997, as cited in Bean et al., 1999) identifies new l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Knowing Today’s Millennial Youth: Discovering Students’ Literacies
• 2 Responses to Adolescent Learners: Literacy and Content Area Literacy—Past and Present
• 3 Literacy and the Teaching and Learning of Ideas
• 4 Analyzing, Selecting, and Planning to Use Print Resources
• 5 Digital Resources and Content Area Literacy
• 6 Possibilities for Literacy Instruction in the Content Areas
• 7 Content Area Literacy Assessment and Classroom Climate
• 8 Promising Principles and Practices for Adolescent Literacy Programs
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index