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Restorying Literacy: The Role of Anomaly in Shifting Perceptions of College Readers

College reading programs are traditionally remedial or developmental in nature and often take a decontextualized skills based approach to reading and to supporting college readers (Holschuh & Paulson, 2013). Skills oriented deficit-based approaches to reading provide deficit-based frameworks for readers to construct self-perceptions. TLS 239 Literacy Tutoring is an undergraduate service-learning course where students learn about reading process and theory and develop strategies to tutor in community schools for twenty-four required hours. Coursework frames literacy as a socially constructed process and students engage in a miscue workshop, strategy presentations and in exploring the reading process. In this study, I examine the coursework of 38 students enrolled in TLS 239 and students' reports of shifting their perceptions and self-perceptions of literacy through coursework that challenged their literacy conceptualizations. In this study, I conceptualize Ken Goodman's (2003) theory of revaluing as restorying through a construct of story (Bruner, 2004; Short, 2012) and a semiotic theory of inquiry (Peirce, 1877), a process of fixating new belief. This struggle, or inquiry into reading provides a framework for students to renegotiate and restory their perceptions of literacy and their self-perceptions as literate. Findings indicate that conceptualizing reading as a socially constructed process including the construct of a reading transaction (Rosenblatt, 1994) and the construct of miscue (Goodman, 1969) was anomalous to college students' perceptions of literacy and caused students to doubt previously held misconceptions about reading. Students reported shifts towards conceptualizing reading as the construction of meaning, shifts towards positive self-perceptions as readers, and shifts in their literacy engagements. Students reported an increase in confidence, reading differently, reading more effectively, becoming metacognitive, reading more assigned readings in college, reading more for leisure and feeling more actively engaged in their other courses. Implications include conceptualizing literacy learning as social and emotional learning and the pedagogical implications of literacy instruction framed within a construct of inquiry.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:arizona.edu/oai:arizona.openrepository.com:10150/613346
Date January 2016
CreatorsAllen, Kelly Lee
ContributorsAnders, Patricia L., Short, Kathy G., Yaden, David B., Jr., Jaeger, Elizabeth
PublisherThe University of Arizona.
Source SetsUniversity of Arizona
Languageen_US
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext, Electronic Dissertation
RightsCopyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author.

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