The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between culturally matched and unmatched materials on the reading comprehension of African-American students in grades 3 through 5. The study also sought to explore potential relationships amongst variables such as background knowledge, academic self-concept, and comprehension. The results obtained suggest that after adjusting for background knowledge, oral reading fluency and reading comprehension scores did not vary as a function of reading culturally matched and unmatched materials. In other words, reading passage content did not facilitate fluency and reading comprehension for African-American students enrolled in grades 3 through 5. In addition, academic self-concept scores did not vary as a function of reading culturally matched and unmatched materials. Therefore, the results obtained fail to support the cultural model's hypothesis of reading achievement in the African-American community.

This study explored the consummations of "The Transitional Approach to Reading" with Puerto Rican native language emergent and second language early emergent readers enrolled in a Transitional Bilingual Education Program of a public school system in Central Massachusetts. The objective of this study was to put forth a paradigm for a new reading approach, "The Transitional Approach", in a Bilingual first-grade class. The intent was to enhance their initiation into English reading. The principal goal was to transfer native language vocabulary whose definitions are the same in both languages (from one language to another) allowing reading comprehension to be achieved. The students were taught to manipulate "transference" in order to reach word comprehension in the second language. The vocabulary learned in native language reading, Spanish, will be transferred from Spanish to English. The study inquired as to whether these students, at the culmination of five months, showed growth in vocabulary attainment in Spanish, in English, and in Spanish and English on the post-approach assessments. No hypothesis was tested. The study was exploratory and descriptive in nature. The following tasks were accomplished: (1) Accumulation of Transfer Word Vocabulary from the entirety of the first-grade curricula: Spanish, Science, Social Studies, Culture, Mathematics, Language Arts, Reading, and English as a Second Language (a total of 235). (2) Assessment in Spanish, first, then in English of 78 Transfer Vocabulary Words: "Yes/No" Match, Pre-Test; and "Yes/No" Read and Match, Post-Test. (3) Observations made prior to, during, and after the implementation of the approach. Fourteen children were chosen to participate in "The Transitional Approach to Reading". The research revealed that the students increased their native and second language transfer word vocabularies and initiated second language beginning reading. "The Transitional Approach" played an important role in the formulation of the child's vocabulary development, reading comprehension, and overall reading development. Knowledge of vocabulary, word meaning, plays an essential part in the first-grade reading curriculum and accounts for about half of reading comprehension.

The representation of Mexican American migrant farmworkers in children's literature has increased over the past 15 years, making visible a group that previously was rendered invisible in the U.S. landscape. Classifying stories about migrant agricultural laborers under the literary category of multicultural children's literature further marginalizes this population by portraying their social circumstances as private, personal, and cultural. While these stories bring the reader up close to the poverty that families endure as migrant farmworkers, they leave the socioeconomic circumstances with the families, in many ways, unlinked to power relations. In this study, I theorize a critical multicultural analysis of children's literature, which creates a space for adult and young readers alike to rethink power (i.e., inserting class into the critical dialogue on race and gender) and recognize their own social construction. Reading class, race, and gender together in children's literature about migrant farmworkers leads to reading how power is exercised in U.S. society as well as how we are implicated in its circulation: It's a waking up from the American Dream. My text collection functions as evidence of U.S. power relations of class, race, and gender—children's literature as social transcripts because a large part of U.S. ethnography is in literature (Ortner, 1991). I read these books against the history and scholarship of multicultural children's literature and the historical and sociopolitical context of migrant work in the United States. I historicize these current representations of Mexican American migrant workers within the developments of the Mexican American experience as it is rendered in children's literature. Since many of these titles fall under the genres of nonfiction and realistic fiction, I consider how these genres textually reconstruct reality by examining the discursive construction of characters and the ideological implications of how the stories close. The theoretical constructs of discourse, ideology, subjectivity, and power function as analytical tools for examining how power is exercised among the characters to locate how class, race, and gender are enacted in text, while revealing how story characters dominate, collude, resist, and take action collectively. A critical multicultural analysis of children's literature about Mexican American migrant farmworkers is a microanalysis of U.S. power relations, an examination of how power is exercised, circulated, negotiated, and transformed.

Agencies providing literacy education have sought to introduce program innovations that more closely reflect learners' everyday lives. A growing number of studies have documented the situated nature of literacy practices and their implications for program design. The concept of learning is at the periphery. Despite innovations and new insights into literacy practices, practitioners are more attuned to diverse content than learning or literacies. Researchers are more attuned to the concept of multiple literacies and their socially situated nature than learning. The Women's Economic Empowerment and Literacy (WEEL) program integrates literacy and numeracy education, savings and credit group concepts, and livelihood training for Nepali women. This dissertation is a case study of the WEEL program, focusing on staff members', participants', and facilitators' perspectives on learning. The research questions were designed to elicit research participants' narratives of their learning experiences. Four themes emerged as the most salient: the powerful role of aspirations; the meaning of education; learning as change; and the life-long, long-term, and life-wide nature of learning. The aspirations are closely associated with Scribner's (1984) conception of the metaphors of literacy: as adaptation, as power, and as a state of grace. Education is interlinked with issues of the women's social identity; gender and caste; concepts of modernization; and the women's hopes for the future. Descriptions of learning are associated with access to knowledge, "doing" or activity, and seeing from a different perspective. An understanding of learning beyond the program's boundaries is found in the themes of life-long, long-term, and life-wide learning raised in the interviews. This research confirms and supports the movement towards more localized programs that is occurring in the field of adult literacy education. Program staff provided evidence to this effect, as the findings show how they consider a perspective of literacy and learning oriented to life-long, long-term, and life-wide learning as they engage in program design. The final chapter develops strategies to bring insights from a conception of literacy as metaphor and from adult learning theories to help strengthen program design and ensure programmatic responsiveness to learners' lives.

Homeschooling is a dynamic learning and living community producing a growing percentage of our nation*s college-ready students. Serious academic studies of homeschooling remain scarce, and those that exist tend to come out of sociology and anthropology. Through an analysis of the literacy practices that constitute the work of homeschooling, this study offers findings and conclusions relevant to current discourses in the fields of literacy studies and rhetoric and composition. These include discussions on the ways technology is reshaping and individualizing traditional models of literacy learning and composing, as well as the growing research on the specific actions taken by literacy brokers when mediating mainstream literacy practices to novices. This study borrows theoretical and methodological concepts provided by the New Literacy Studies in order to understand the ways in which two homeschool families with high school students learn and practice various literacies. Data collection methods included interviews, observations, and participant-produced literacy logs. I took an ecological approach to data analysis that required identifying the specific literacy practices and events of the participants and attempting to situate them within the context of the homeschooling movement and culture at large. A primary finding of the study is that homeschool mothers* role in their students* literacy practices often resembles the work of what scholars term literacy brokers. These mothers actively mediate a wide variety of mainstream or institutional practices and values to their children. While current discussions of literacy brokers detail their actions of advocacy,guidance, and assistance, this study contributes to our understanding of literacy brokers by highlighting homeschool mothers* actions of delegation and customization within the mediation process.

Motivated primarily by a cognitive approach, with consideration of interactional processes from a sociocultural perspective, the present study examined the use of linguistic assistance and peer interaction to facilitate second language (L2) writing of young ESL learners. A total of 257 Year 5 children (age 10) from twelve intact classes (from six different schools) took part in this eight-week intervention-based study. Using a quasi-experimental design, the classes were randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups or the control group. Pretests, interim tests, immediate posttests and delayed posttests were administered. As the study concerned both the processes and products of L2 development, peer interaction and children's written production were taken as the two primary sources of data for this study. For the written production, four criteria were used to rate learners’ writings: Quality of ideas, Story shape and structure, Vocabulary and spelling and Implicit grammar. Partial correlation was employed to examine if there were any statistical relationships between treatment and learners’ written performance while controlling for prior attainment. Results show that the provision of enhanced and basic linguistic assistance may have a positive influence on only certain aspects of L2 writing, while opportunities for peer interaction does not appear to have an impact on learners’ L2 performance. For peer interaction, a subset of 60 learners were selected from the two treatment groups which received basic and enhanced linguistic assistance, to compare their dialogic performance. Based on quantitative analyses of their recorded interactions, the findings suggest that the provision of varying degrees of linguistic assistance may affect, not the content of peer discussions, but how peer assistance is given during task. The results also show that through the provision of linguistic assistance, peer interaction mediates the participants’ performance on Quality of ideas, Story shape and structure and Implicit grammar in their subsequent individual writing.

Title from second page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 54-62).

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Western Sydney, [2002]. / A thesis submitted to the University of Western Sydney in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Bibliography: leaves 139-170.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2008. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 240-251).

Thesis (Ed.D)--Teachers College, Columbia University, 1990. / Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Includes appendices. Sponsor: Ray McDermott. Dissertation Committee: William Sayres. Bibliography: leaves 159-165.