Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy最新文献

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.

Personally and professionally, the author shares experiences with school safety and how the English Language Arts (ELA) classroom may utilize middle grade novels to address gun violence with adolescents. Highlighting five middle grade novels that address school shootings—Katherine Erskine's (2011) Mockingbird, Emily Barth Isler's (2021) Aftermath, J. S. Puller's (2022) The Lost Things Club, Jasmine Warga's (2022) The Shape of Thunder, and Erin Bow's (2023) Simon Sort of Says, this discussion provides ELA teachers and stakeholders with before, during, and after reading prompts to facilitate students' engagement with the topic through ELA tasks that support critical thinking and open dialog.

Adolescent youth participating in a summer writing workshop drew from funds of community wealth to answer youth-generated inquiry questions about history, political participation, and equity. By turning to community members as expert sources of knowledge, students deepened their inquiry, their connections to the local community, and their identities as writers. Learning from these youth writers, there are recommendations for how classroom teachers can engage youth in inquiry projects that draw from sources of community cultural wealth.

Textual consumption in digital spaces has come under scrutiny by educators who worry about youth's surface-level comprehension of such texts as well as the polarizing nature of online discourse. This paper synthesizes affective concepts of critical witness and glimmers of care to explore two cases in which adolescent writers in digital OST programs engage with digital communities surrounding texts like comics, movies, and video games. We trace how focal youth across the programs engage in critical witness around issues of marginalization in digital spaces outside of class in order to produce advocacy-focused compositions addressing issues they encountered and discussed across informal digital learning spaces. We identified a common trajectory across both cases for these youth advocates: (1) experiencing and witnessing marginalization in digital spaces outside of class; (2) bringing critical witness to (digital) class; leading to (3) constellations of advocacy produced through compositions. Teachers can support such adolescents through affectively attuned instructional practices like framing spaces to center youth voices, providing multiple channels for peer conversation, inviting youth to co-design expansive and creative assessments, and cultivating reciprocal understanding of power and vulnerability through practices of critical witness.

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.

This study aims to understand how bilingual college students constructed literacy spaces across their lives rather than an in-school/out-of-school dichotomy. Drawing on Lefebvre's (1991) spatial triad as a lens to examine the participants' spatial literacy practices, the findings show that some participants repurposed planned spaces into literacy ones while others relied on the planned aspect of space. Furthermore, adapting spatial literacy practices to meet life and semester demands significantly impacted the participants' ability to compose college essays. This study has implications for college writing instructors because it shows that students' literacy spaces are contingent on the social production of space beyond the physical classroom and calls for a greater emphasis on the role of space in college.

This article presents findings from a six-month Language and Social Justice course collaboratively designed with multilingual educators in the Dominican Republic. Teaching and learning processes with Dominican and Haitian youth (ages 18–24) illustrate how opportunities to learn about English and Kreyòl from a transnational perspective can disrupt dominant discourses about youth's relationships with themselves and each other. By intentionally focusing on counternarratives to notions that Dominican youth reject their Blackness and that Dominican and Haitian youth interact in tension rather than solidarity, this study highlights how youth “translate blackness” (García Peña, 2022) through language learning. Drawing from transnational literacy frameworks that engage the cultural and linguistic repertoires of Black youth in relationship with one another (Skerrett & Omogun, 2020; Smith, 2023) and from Black-centered language pedagogies (Anya, 2017; Clemons, 2021b), I describe how youth negotiate meanings and orientations to Blackness through language and literacy practices.

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.