This research presents a theoretical and descriptive case study in which I investigate the nature of literacy competence in the life of Stuart Carter, an English speaking man who at the early age of thirty-six, suffered from a left cerebral hemorrhage resulting in expressive aphasia and right side hemiplegia. By using a qualitative data set, including videotaped interactions, documents, interviews and fieldnotes, and qualitative data analysis strategies, I trace the evolution of Stuart's literacy practices and literacy process after the stroke that took place in April of 1994, identifying issues that shaped his literacy experiences over a lapse of seven years. The present study grew out of my concerns regarding the capricious ways in which portraits of competence get created, based on reduced and clinical images of performance. Three landscapes of competence emerged from the analysis: (a) Sociocultural landscapes; (b) Transactional socio-psycholinguistic (TSP) landscapes, and (c) Affective and personal landscapes. I use the metaphor of 'landscapes' as an interpretative construct that makes it possible to describe literacy competence as multidimensional, as dynamic, and as closely tied to the overall structure of everyday literacy contexts. The first landscape presents Stuart's perceptions of his literacy practices after the stroke, and offers a description of Stuart's uses of literacy as a window into his literacy practices. The second landscape describes his reading and writing processes. I explore the contextual features that hinder/support his participation in literacy events, and elaborate on the mediational purposes of his writing process. The third landscape relates to the significant personal and affective tensions that frame Stuart's literacy experiences as a reader and writer with aphasia. I describe the underlying strategies, inventions and coping mechanism he developed to deal with the transformations in his life after aphasia. What I illustrate throughout this study is that an alternative theoretical framework, one based on understanding literacy as both social practice and sociopsycholinguistic process, and an alternative research methodology within the field of aphasiology, based on qualitative and ethnographic principles, provide a wealth of unexplored territory into the nature of literacy, language and learning in aphasia.

Miscue analysis and eye movement analysis are used to explore the reading process of first-grade beginning readers as they use pictures and print in a picture book designed for instructional purposes. Eye Movement Miscue Analysis (EMMA) is also used as a tool to gain insights into the reading strategies of the beginning readers in this study. Miscue analysis provides a psycholinguistic analysis of' unexpected oral responses in the oral texts that readers produce. Eye movement analysis provides an analysis of the visual fixations of readers in pictures and the print. Both forms of analysis are used to examine the relationship between the oral and visual aspects of the reading process. This dissertation focuses on first-grade beginning readers' use of pictures and print as they read. Patterns of eye movements relative to picture use, print use and the relationship between the two media are described, analyzed and compared. Results of the analyses are discussed in relation to existing literature within the theoretical framework that informed the study. Major findings include that beginning readers are aware that reading is a complex process of making meaning from print and pictures; they exhibit many of the same reading strategies as older more experienced readers; and they sample pictures in ways that are purposeful and know where to look for useful information. Implications for authors, illustrators, publishers, educators and reading theorists are discussed and areas for further research are delineated.

The purpose of this study is to examine the beliefs of teachers in the process of developing a whole language philosophy. It is a descriptive interpretive study of seven teachers interacting with their instructor as they come to know whole language theory and apply it in their classrooms during a graduate education course, "Whole Language: Learning and Teaching." The study focuses on the use of dialogue journal/learning logs as an interactive tool to help the teachers examine their own beliefs about children, learning, and teaching; consider relevant theory and research; and change their teaching practice. Answers were sought to two questions: What demonstrations of perceiving, ideating, and presenting are evident in the dialogue journal/learning logs as these teachers come to know whole language, and how does the instructor utilize these journals to facilitate the ways in which she collaborates with the teachers in their efforts to become whole language teachers? The topics introduced and recycled by the teachers and instructor became the primary units of discourse analysis that revealed how the individual teachers and the instructor interpreted the events and experiences of the course. The analysis revealed that the instructor's use of mutuality building discourse and use of statements that build bridges between the perceptions expressed by the teachers and her own understanding of whole language contributed to the unique learning experience of each of the informants. Those teachers who responded to the instructor's request for reflection in their journals were the teachers who changed the most. They expressed personal concerns about their teaching or their students, posed pertinent questions and initiated personal inquiry to find solutions to those concerns. When they wrote reflectively they expressed their own thinking or ideating most freely. As they expressed their "wonderful ideas," they gained confidence to try them out with their students in their classrooms. The study concludes with strategies for engaging all teachers in reflection on their classroom practice and for intentionally building mutuality and seeking to build more conceptual bridges with each of them. These strategies would enhance the use of dialogue journal/learning logs for supporting change in teaching practice.

This study was designed to provide an in-depth examination of biliteracy development among students in a bilingual, second and third grade classroom over the course of one academic year. Biliteracy refers to children's literate competencies in two languages. This qualitative study focused on understanding biliteracy among children who were already bilingual in English and Spanish, and those who were monolingual in English. The three basic questions guiding this study are the following: (1) Can children become biliterate in this setting? (2) What kinds of classroom cultural practices foster biliteracy development? and (3) What are the theoretical and practical implications of these dual literacy practices for the development of a biliterate pedagogy? Three case studies of students provide insights into the processes of dual literacy learning. These case studies highlight significant aspects of each student's developing biliteracy, and are intended to demonstrate that there are multiple paths to and contexts for biliteracy development in English and Spanish. The results of this inquiry suggest that biliteracy development in classrooms is feasible, but that teachers and students must create "additive" conditions for learning that make both languages "unmarked" for classroom work. The study provides insights into the relationships between student characteristics and classroom dynamics, the specific contexts, processes, and content of English-Spanish biliteracy within the classroom. This study also raises issues for further research and pedagogy in this important but neglected area of study.

This study examined whether an intervention program based on a neuropsychological approach to specific reading disability subtypes would improve overall reading ability, Subjects were middle school righthanded boys and girls who were low achieving readers. The readers were initially subtyped according to Bakker's clinical-inferential approach used with clinic children and classified as L-type dyslexic (substantive errors and excessively fast reading), P-type dyslexic (slow and laborious reading), or M-type dyslexic (a combination of both L-type and P-type dyslexia). The method of assessment was used as a pre-posttest group design. The dependent variables included a reading decoding measure, oral reading errors, and comprehension scores from the Multilevel Academic Skills Inventory (MASI), which is a reading and language battery. All three groups were receiving additional reading instruction from their school reading program. Experimental treatment occurred in two parts: Hemispheric Specific Stimulation (HSS) and Hemispheric Alluding Stimuli (HAS). When the study was concluded, a fused dichotic listening task was administered once to discern a potential relationship between the subtypes of the groups and their particular hemispheric processing capacity for language. The results revealed that the neuropsychological treatment was effective at improving reading comprehension and accuracy. Although there were perceived benefits in comprehension, no direct comprehension exercises were used in this study so the gains could have been attributed to the school reading program. There were no changes in word recognition between the pretest and the posttest. The results from the fused dichotic words task were not significant.

This study describes how literacy is mentally represented as cultural knowledge, referred to by educational and cognitive anthropologists as "cultural models." These models, widely shared among specific social and cultural groups, depict prototypical events in a simplified world. Despite enormous research attention identifying 'multiple literacies,' particularly emphasizing the literacies of those who live at the 'margins,' the one most closely associated with a literary literacy remains prototypical or 'normal' while terms such as "functional" reading are viewed pejoratively. This common sense reasoning is produced by the White, middle class who largely control the society, whose ideological stances of the way literacy 'ought to be' escape serious scrutiny. My research integrates sociocognitive, sociocultural, and sociolinguistic analyses by reconstructing the cultural models of literacy held by 15, White, urban, middle-class parents of kindergarten children. This reconstruction required the use of numerous interviews and interpretation of those interviews. My goal in the analysis was to search for patterns across interviewees and interview passages that would be indicative of shared understandings. I focused on two features of parents' discourse: their use of metaphors and their reasoning. The metaphor analysis identifies three schemas that parents have about literacy. The reasoning analysis provides the underlying story of the cultural model that links the three schemas. This study concludes that when middle-class parents of young children talk about reading, they conceptualize a literary literacy. Through indirect indexicality, expressing this literacy as a prototype sends a covert message which emphasizes moral worth. Such a moral attachment to reading books marks and morally elevates one's social-class membership, which is itself implicitly linked to racial and cultural status. This moral identity distances these middle-class parents from the lower and working classes as well as from the upper class. Furthermore, institutions designed to facilitate the literacy of children and families construct a similar discourse, where the goal of learning to read is secondary to the primary goal of reshaping the moral character of the families, particularly non-mainstream and minority families. This discourse hegemonically constructs as 'immoral' the kinds of literacies which do not match a 'moral literacy.'

This microethnographic study describes what happened when a small group of 12- and 13-year olds were given the opportunity to compose with hypermedia in their language arts class. Drawing from semiotic, sociocultural, constructivist, transactional and holistic theories, the researcher interpreted the meanings the students and their language arts teacher ascribed to the creation of a student-run online magazine. The researcher investigated the kinds of things that the seventh graders in this study value, what the webzine project meant to the student editors, what processes are involved in the creation of a webzine, how hypermedia literacy functions as a language form, how the hypermedia design project impacted the language arts curriculum, and the roles that computers can play in the classroom. Hypermedia is a multi-symbolic semiotic language form that is still in the process of evolving. Hypermedia literacy requires transmediation, among print literacies, oral literacies, visual literacies, computer literacies and hypertext literacies. Becoming fluent in hypermedia involves orchestrating the various elements (cueing systems) of hypermedia and flexibly applying this knowledge within a variety of hypermedia genres. The webzine project was a positive experience for the seventh graders in this study because it met their affective needs to be active, to learn new things, to have new experiences, to feel motivated and interested, to be social, to have freedom, to feel proud and to have a sense of audience. It also stimulated the cognitive processes of generating ideas, collaborating, problem solving, representing concepts and monitoring their own learning. It is suggested that hypermedia design projects cannot be fully integrated into the language arts curriculum unless the district and/or the classroom teacher has made a paradigmatic shift from a transmission model to a constructivist philosophy of education. Successful integration of hypermedia composition in the curriculum is also related to the students' and the teachers' perception of the potential roles of computers. Based on the results of this study and others, the author concludes that junior high language arts students should be given invitations to compose with hypermedia whenever feasible, but that educators should not dismiss the challenges associated with such an undertaking.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of an intervention program, Reading Recovery, on the literacy achievement of black and white students. Through a battery of assessment, interviews, and analysis procedures, the researcher addressed the following questions: (1) Do black and white students, who were students in the intervention program, Reading Recovery, have similar levels of literacy achievement and share similar literacy characteristics? (2) Do black and white students who successfully complete the intervention program, Reading Recovery, maintain average scores for at least two years post intervention? (3) Do teachers of black and white students accurately evaluate their literacy ability two years post intervention? Twenty-seven third grade students were selected to participate in the study, based upon their successfully completing the Reading Recovery Program. Procedures included the students reading Three Narrative Passages written at different difficulty levels. One passage was written at a first grade level, the second passage was written at a third grade level, and the third passage was written at a fifth grade level. In addition to the Three Narrative Passages The San Diego Oral Reading Paragraph for grade three was administered. An interview with the students' teachers included the teachers completing a questionnaire, The Teacher Evaluation of Students' Literacy Ability. The students were given The Elementary Reading Attitude Survey to measure their attitude about reading. Finally a written sample of the students' writing was obtained. Results showed no significant differences between the black and the white students on any of the assessments. There was no significance difference found in the teachers' evaluation of the black and white students' literacy ability. Both black and white students maintained average literacy scores two years post intervention.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the reliability and validity of the Turrentine/Bradley Literacy Testing Battery (TBLTB), a literacy test designed to parallel the type of texts and tasks commonly employed with undergraduates in a university class. The TBLTB has two forms, each consisting of multi-page reading passages selected from a widely used college-level psychology textbook. Form 1 of the TBLTB was a 2839-word passage about dreams. Form 2 consisted of a 2750-word passage about cognition. Each passage was accompanied by thirteen multiple choice and ten short answer test items. The TBLTB was administered to 138 undergraduate students attending nine classes at a southwestern university. The tests were given to the sample during two sessions typically separated by a one to three week hiatus. The standard directions and procedures were followed. Correlations across the two response types and between the two forms (Dreams and Cognition) were examined. Results of the study indicated that low to moderately low but positive correlations existed between the TBLTB and GPAs (college and high schools English) and the scores on the commonly used admissions tests (ACT, SAT, and SAT Recentered). The extent of agreement across the two response types and between the two forms (Dreams and Cognition) of the TBLTB produced very positive results although correlations between raw scores was marginal. The wide range of scores across the two response types and between the two forms of The TBLTB indicates the tests is a valid measure of reading and writing skills. The quantitative data provided in examining short answer responses provided valuable information in several areas: (1) the students ability to express information in written responses, (2) grammatical and spelling strengths and weaknesses, and (3) the possibility of the discovery of the presence of a learning disability. The conclusion of the study is that the Turrentine/Bradley Literacy Testing Battery (TBLTB) is a valid and reliable measure for screening students in terms of mastery/non-mastery of college-level literacy skills and for aiding in determining the nature and extent of literacy weaknesses.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the assessment instruments that a southwestern community college (SWCC) used to evaluate its incoming students' academic literacy skills and to determine how well the results of those tests placed students in either college-level or developmental reading courses. The three college-level academic literacy instruments that were investigated were: the Nelson-Denny Reading Test (NDRT), the Degrees of Reading Power (DRP), and the Turrentine/Bradley Literacy Testing Battery (TBLTB), consisting of two response types: the TBLTB Multiple-Choice (TBLTB-MC) and the TBLTB Short-Answer (TBLTB-SA). Interrelationships were computed for reliability, concurrent validity and extent of agreement for placement into the three developmental reading courses. The three tests were administered to 88 students placed into the three developmental reading courses, Reading 071, Reading 081 and Reading 091, taught by the researcher during the Fall 1997 semester. The NDRT was used by the college for placement purposes. The DRP and the TBLTB were given during the first and second weeks of the semester for comparison purposes. Pearson Product-Moment correlations indicated that there were low to moderately low positive correlations among all the tests at the .01 level of confidence. The Kappas obtained between pairings of the three tests demonstrated that two of the tests showed concurrent placement validity: (1) the NDRT with the TBLTB-MC and (2) the TBLTB-MC with the TBLTB-SA. The extent of agreement exceeded the .01 level of confidence. The other tests did not show sufficient extent of agreement for placement purposes. The ANOVAS demonstrated significant mean differences among students placed into the three SWCC developmental reading classes by: (1) the NDRT and the DRP, (2) the NDRT and the TBLTB-MC and (3) the NDRT and the TBLTB-SA at the .01 level of confidence. Two other combinations of tests showed significance at the .05 level of confidence: (1) the DRP and the TBLTB-MC and (2) the DRP and the TBLTB-SA. Although the three tests did not have extent of agreement sufficient for placement into the three developmental reading classes, all three tests did agree that this sample of students did not possess college-level reading abilities.