Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy最新文献

Engaging students in the reading process is challenging when they are unable to connect to texts. It is important to provide inclusive and diverse texts (IDTs) in the language arts curriculum. To promote a positive reading experience, all students need to read IDTs with non-stereotypical depictions of girls, women, people of Color, and more. This is challenging when obstacles such as limited resources, a lack of teacher preparation to meet challenges, and stakeholder opposition to “non-traditional” literature may hinder educators' efforts to include IDTs. Using effective instructional strategies, increasing home and school literacy connections, and providing focused teacher training can help overcome these obstacles. Literary texts that reflect multiple identities will promote a more equitable representation of all students within the classroom community. This paper discusses possible strategies and approaches for including and engaging with IDTs and resources educators can use to address instructional challenges and find high-quality texts.

Book banning and censorship in the U.S. prompts necessary conversations on how critical literacy, dialogue, and inquiry are used in various school and library settings. We share guiding questions alongside three examples of textual analyses centering on gender fluidity with three young adult novels. We believe that English language arts teachers will benefit from seeing examples of how we responded to these texts with critical analysis questions that require students to analyze gender representation and identity within the stories. By developing an empathic analysis, students can engage in this critical work within classrooms and libraries, where reading diverse texts is encouraged.

In order to better understand whether and how college students use certain textbook reading strategies, this project employed several important methods in concert, including a textbook reading strategy inventory that focused on frequency of strategy use, eye-movement recordings of participants reading college textbook excerpts, and think-aloud sessions in which participants viewed their own eye-movement recordings and used them as a stimulus to engage in a structured retrospective think-aloud about their own reading approach and strategies. Salient findings include participants' emerging articulations about the observable reading strategies they identified themselves implementing, discrepancies in their assumptions about their reading strategies and what they actually employed, and the sometimes surprising (to the participant) strategies they used to navigate these textbook excerpts.

This discussion article presents practices for designing more supportive and individualized writing tasks for adolescent and young adult students. The practices emerged from a synthesis of findings from a prior study in which we asked 79 undergraduates to talk about moments from their writing histories that made them feel proud of their writing.

This study involves translating, cross-culturally adapting, and validating the Literary Response Questionnaire (LRQ) for 413 Spanish adolescents. It explores the evolution of literary education in Spain and its alignment with the Reading Responses paradigm. The LRQ, adapted across various locations, is validated in Spanish through Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. The research analyzes reading responses in dimensions like Leisure Escape, Insight, Empathy, Story-driven Reading, Concern with Author, Imagery Vividness, and Rejecting Literary Values. Findings reveal widespread indifference and rejection toward literary reading among the adolescents, along with a clear disapproval of the historicist-authorial approach to literary education. Significant variations were identified based on students' gender, enrollment in a bilingual program, and notably, the number of books read per year. This underscores the significance of introducing literary reading practices in secondary education that align with the leisure preferences of adolescents, encouraging personal and experiential engagement with texts. This could materialize in the classroom the shift from a historicist to a reader-centered approach suggested by the current Spanish curriculum.

Students in England sit an important gateway examination in English at age 16. Major changes were made to this exam in 2017 resulting in more emphasis on the comprehension of unseen literary texts. This paper uses corpus linguistic methods to identify the kind of vocabulary encountered in these exam texts and compares it to the kind of vocabulary encountered in other sources of written language (classic literary fiction, biographies, poetry, etc.). Results showed vocabulary in the exam texts was typically low in frequency and that older literary fiction texts contained similar types of vocabulary. This suggests that students and teachers should rely more on older literary fiction to best prepare for the exam. However, this raises ethical questions about whether an exam should dictate students' reading experience, especially when older literary fiction is likely to be less diverse and dominated by dead White men.

Preparing literacy teachers for culturally relevant teaching is increasingly critical amidst growing student diversity and pandemic-associated learning needs. However, despite the prevalence of existing reporting on culturally relevant literacy teaching, there remains a disconnect between the theoretical conception and realized implementation of this work in literacy classrooms. Operationalizing the praxis of culturally relevant literacy teaching has remained elusive due to the contextualized and adaptive nature of the practice. This literature review aims to demystify this praxis by particularizing and grounding the theories and ideas that support culturally relevant teacher practices in literacy and offer examples for preservice and in-service practice. We conducted a rapid review of 72 articles to explore how culturally relevant literacy teaching has been included in teacher preparation and teaching. Findings include six categories of culturally relevant literacy practices in preservice teacher education and three in in-service teaching. Results point toward a needed shift away from a curricular focus of this work to one that is pedagogical and student-centered.

This study examined the effect of a supplemental, multicomponent reading intervention with 75 seventh graders who scored below grade level according to a battery of assessments. Students received a yearlong reading intervention during the 2021–2022 or 2022–2023 school year. Students' pretest and posttest data were compared to determine the impact of the reading intervention. Findings indicate that the reading intervention resulted in greater than typical improvement in reading ability, as students reading below grade level made more than a full year's growth in reading level. Implications for practice include the need for supplemental support for adolescent readers, which can mitigate the need for reading intervention that persists in secondary education.

Two concepts characterize the zeitgeist of the 21st century. The first is the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which provides a positivistic vision of societal transformation caused by the explosion and fusion of technologies. The second is post-truth, in which objective facts have become less influential than appeals to emotion or personal belief. The concurrent visibility of both concepts suggests their interconnection. Indeed, digital porosity, exacerbated by technological advancements, is a catalyst for post-truth. Given this climate, cosmopolitan literacies are fundamental to promoting ethical ways of living and relating to diverse others. In this paper, I argue that what is foundational to cosmopolitan literacies is hermeneutical justice. Without hermeneutical justice, all communicative practices are liable to post-truths and misinformed acts of justice. I begin by explaining the concept of hermeneutical justice and proceed to discuss its implications for cosmopolitan literacy practices.

In this discussion, we argue for those who are literacy educators to reframe gossip as a dialogic, feminist act in their teaching and interpretation of gossip as framed in the literature they teach in secondary English language arts (ELA) classrooms. Reframing gossip as a feminist act invites meaning-makers to view those conversations and generative dialogues discursively gendered in deficit ways (or gossip) as proactive, productive, and powerful tools of connection between and within societies and communities. We share how we centered and created through a critical feminist lens, an ELA curriculum that supports gossip as a literary tool that drives narratives in plot formation, as well as a means to enhance characters' positions, personalities, allies, and enemies within a story. Most importantly, we use gossip as an analytical tool to reframe and promote gender equity, guiding preservice teachers and adolescents in critical analysis of the innumerable ways systems and institutions of power and privilege—such as race, ethnicity, religion, and sexuality—intersect in the fight for gender equality. First, we will discuss our guiding theoretical framework of critical feminist pedagogy to examine the ELA curriculum. Next, we share how the development of a curricular unit on reframing gossip in literature unfolded organically through a monthly Saturday workshop called “Writing Us In: Developing Critical Literacy Curriculum for ELA Classrooms.” Then, we showcase how one preservice ELA teacher applied the critical feminist lenses examined within the workshop space to develop a linked text set and subsequent ELA curricular unit with the aims of her future students to critically analyze, from a feminist lens, how gossip is portrayed in society and how it is framed in literature. We end with a discussion of how our spotlight student reflects on this project and her key takeaways.