Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy最新文献

Language and culture hold power and significant connections to students' identities. However, these connections are often minimized, especially for students from diverse racial-ethnic, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds who are neither white nor monolingual speakers of English. In literacy instruction, we often see complete disregard and devaluation for culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students' home languages, dialects, and cultures as a resource for their development of English. Many home languages that students bring with them to the classroom do not match the language of texts traditionally considered academic. These texts often contain complex language structures in English that do not match students' oral language and language structures students must learn to navigate. Students who are still learning foundational skills must be given access to these complex language structures to access rigorous academic content, which can otherwise serve as a gatekeeper to college and career opportunities. In this paper, we argue for the essential role of joyful, culturally, and linguistically sustaining, and grade-level foundational skills instruction in literacy education. We demonstrate why and how teachers of adolescent students, particularly those who have not yet secured foundational skills in English, can leverage students' cultural and linguistic assets to build the knowledge needed to access the complex language of academic texts. Additionally, we provide a vignette to illustrate instructional routines that classroom teachers can use to support students in building their foundational skills in a joyful, culturally, and linguistically sustaining, and grade level. Through these efforts, we aim to deepen teachers' understanding of how language and culture can be leveraged to enhance learning and honor the linguistic and cultural diversity students bring to the classroom. We conclude with implications for practice and research.

The editors of the special issue share themes from the research about how to develop foundational literacy skills for adolescents with a culturally and linguistically sustaining lens. The authors define foundational literacy skills and share a framework for supporting learners' development of these skills with culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogy at the center of planning and instruction.

This commentary explores the nuanced approaches to literacy instruction in middle and high school classrooms, emphasizing the integration of skilled and strategic reading. The commentary underscores the distinction between skilled readers' effortless navigation through familiar texts and the conscious employment of reading strategies when faced with complex texts. It draws attention to components of instruction within English Language Arts, Science, and Social Studies by drawing illustrative examples from three teachers' classrooms. These examples illustrate how meaning-, vocabulary-, and code-based approaches overlap and can be integrated in a multifaceted approach to literacy instruction, which is sensitive to disciplinary demands and student diversity. An integrated approach is essential for equipping adolescents with the sociocognitive tools necessary for academic and lifelong literacy. Instructional recommendations are provided.

Supporting foundational skills in adolescents such as word-level knowledge, syntactic knowledge, and morphemic knowledge are indeed vital. However, these skills alone and in isolation are not enough and do not develop without supporting students' sense of agency during literacy instruction. In this commentary, the authors explore student agency and the teaching of foundational skills to create engaged and skilled adolescent readers and writers.

I discuss the complementary strengths of foundational literacy skills and foundational texts to support the academic and life journeys of Black adolescent males in this commentary. Foundational texts are defined as texts central to life-outcome, personal, intellectual, and professional trajectories accompanied by self-assurance while being psychologically and culturally intact. Five implications, grounded in historical and contemporary examples, are provided for identifying and selecting foundational texts to hold the literacy development and lives of Black adolescent males in high regard in U.S. schools.

While adolescent foundational skills interventions can be critical levers for reading improvement, district leaders, teachers, and researchers must make complex decisions about how to evaluate their effectiveness in context. In this discussion article, we explore three issues and tensions we experienced during a 2-year research–practice partnership overhauling Tier II high school reading intervention practices in a district serving largely African American students. First, we discuss assessment and the challenges of using data and reading theory to simultaneously address system-level and student-level needs. Second, we share our process for choosing a curriculum and evaluating its effectiveness. Finally, we weigh how students' African American English may have been related to program implementation and foundational skills development. We share our takeaways to help practitioners and researchers seeking systematic foundational skills improvement across a district, especially districts like ours.

The middle and high school years represent a unique challenge for students who have not yet attained proficiency with word reading. By this time, it is generally expected that students will be able to independently read a variety of texts to gain content knowledge and to read for understanding. Students with or at-risk for learning disabilities (LD) often struggle with acquisition of word-level reading skills and these difficulties are amplified as words become increasing complex. By fifth grade, most of the new words introduced in text are multisyllabic, yet students often lack a systematic approach for decoding these words. Despite these challenges, teachers can effectively support secondary-aged students with LD in developing the foundational word reading skills necessary for reading proficiency. In this article, we describe the critical role of word reading efficiency, unique challenges of multisyllabic word reading, and the importance of ongoing instructional support for students with LD. We then introduce four instructional routines that can be implemented to facilitate secondary students' acquisition of word-level reading skills that also affirm and strength students' diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

An issue devoted to foundational skills and adolescents might center the cognitive skills and practices most needed to accelerate learning. While an understanding of these—whether multisyllabic decoding, fostering comprehension through discussion, or argumentative writing—is important, in this article, we advocate for the importance of attending to principles of motivation. After defining motivation within the context of adolescent literacy instruction, we summarize representative research on the topic. We then present four guiding principles for teachers, each accompanied by practical examples for classroom application.

Foundational skills are often viewed as necessary components for automaticity in reading and writing. In this study, we draw on teacher interviews to explore what secondary English/language arts teachers identify as necessary language for successful school writing. Findings suggest that teachers believe White mainstream English is a necessary component for academic success, although interviewees could not recall ever being explicitly taught this idea. Furthermore, teachers experience a tension between wanting to engage in culturally and linguistically responsive pedagogy and their (often unexamined) underlying beliefs about White mainstream English being part of foundational language. We discuss how teachers' understanding of language skills includes their beliefs about what is deemed “correct” and “appropriate” for school and discuss the hidden ways foundational skills reinforce White mainstream English-centric ways of knowing. We offer recommendations for teachers to examine their own biases in foundational language for writing.

Automaticity in recognizing the words in a text is fundamental to comprehension. If the number of words readers need to stop and decode exceeds their ability to retain their understanding of a narrative's plot or an expository text's description, their comprehension suffers. The conventional intervention for students who lack the automaticity to adequately comprehend text has been to repeatedly read texts orally. The current review first addresses evidence for this conventional treatment, concluding that students have not shown substantial increases in silent reading comprehension. Next, this review presents evidence underlying an alternative perspective for automaticity support where texts are selected to support students in increasing their automaticity with the words they will encounter consistently—the 2500 morphological families that have been shown to account for at least 90% of most school texts. Finally, guidelines for teachers are provided that address the talk, tasks, and time of instruction, as well as texts, for automaticity.