Handbook of Research on Teaching the English Language Arts

Douglas Fisher, Diane Lapp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138122277
• eBook ISBN: 9781317307358
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Education General
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Now in its fourth edition, the Handbook of Research on Teaching the English Language Arts – sponsored by the International Literacy Association and the National Council of Teachers of English – remains at the forefront in bringing together prominent scholars, researchers, and professional leaders to offer an integrated perspective on teaching the English language arts and a comprehensive overview of research in the field. Reflecting important developments since the publication of the third edition in 2010, this new edition is streamlined and completely restructured around "big ideas" in the field related to theoretical and research foundations, learners in context, and new literacies. A Companion Website extends and enhances the Handbook with a wealth of additional resources.

The Handbook of Research on Teaching the English Language Arts, Fourth Edition:

• 
  
  

• Addresses all of the language arts within a holistic perspective (speaking/listening, language, writing, reading).

• 
  
  

• Is well grounded and balanced in theory and research while promoting validated practice.

• 
  
  

• Features authors who are known for their expertise and who represent diversity in culture, years in the profession, and geographic location.

• 
  
  

• Gives attention to special populations and instructional contexts.

• 
  
  

• Includes new media literacies.
• Has the authority of a research handbook while remaining practical for students in masters and doctoral classes.

1

Significant Literacy Research Informing English Language Arts Instruction

Richard Beach, David O’Brien

In this chapter, we provide a historical review of significant literacy research conducted in roughly the last 100 years, beginning in the 1920s, related to teaching English language arts (ELA). We selected particular research studies as significant based on the degree to which this research led to redefining status-quo perspectives on literacy learning that resulted in changes in English language arts instruction.

Research in ELA has both reflected and influenced different perspectives on literacy learning since the 1920s. From the 1920s to the 1950s and 1960s, a prevailing focus was on formalist and behaviorist perspectives on literacy learning, as evident in New Criticism approaches to literary criticism in the 1940s to 1960s that emphasized formalist analysis of language use in texts. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed an increased focused on studying cognitive processes involved in reading and writing reflected in research on cognitive processes in composing texts. In the 1970s and 1980s, drawing on earlier work of Dewey’s (1938) progressivist learning theories, researchers began to adopt more social-cultural perspectives focusing on how literacy practices are shaped by participation in different social and cultural contexts. In the 1990s the increased use of digital media tools in school resulted in another shift towards more New Literary and “connected learning” perspectives on learning mediated by uses of digital media tools (Ito et al., 2009).

During this time period, researchers employed a range of different research methods to examine the impact of instruction on literacy learning. They employed:

• experimental designs to compare the effectiveness of certain methods or other methods, for example, the fact that instruction in grammar rules – a reflection of formalist perspectives – does not necessarily result in improvement in writing quality (Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, & Schoer, 1963; Hillocks, 1984).

• think-aloud protocols to examine students’ composing strategies related to goal-driven decision-making (Hayes & Flower, 1980; Newell, 1984; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1986), which led to an understanding of complex decision-making related to purpose, audience, and context in composing texts that challenged behaviorist perspectives on writing instruction.

• qualitative, case study, interview, ethnographic, and discourse analysis methods to document students’ situated uses of certain literacy practices within social and cultural contexts (Brass & Burns, 2011), for example, use of qualitative methods to examine classroom discussions to study how particular classroom and community social and cultural contexts and discourse communities reflected the diversification of schools during the last half of the twentieth century (Gee, 1996; Street, 1995), given that the majority of students in American public schools are students of color (Maxwell, 2014).

Broadening the use of different research methods reflected researchers drawing on wider interdisciplinary perspectives from linguistics, sociolinguistics, rhetoric, sociology, anthropology, literary theory, and cultural studies perspectives illuminating social and cultural aspects of literacy learning communities and contexts outside of school (Beach et al., 2005; Dyson, 1988; 2008; Hull & Schultz, 2002). One significant research study of the 1980s was Shirley Brice Heath’s (1983) study that drew on linguistics and anthropology to analyze literacy practices operating in two different North Carolina working-class communities, the largely African-American town of Trackton and the largely white town of Roadville, compared with a third more middle-class mainstream community. Parents in the two working-class towns employed different practices for interacting with their children, with parents in Trackton employing more creative uses of language and narratives in interactive conversations, while parents in Roadville focused more on reading to children and use of written texts. Children and parents in the working-class communities employed practices focusing on experience of the local, while children and parents in the middle-class communities adopted more decontextualized literacy practices associated with learning in school, resulting in students in the former group being less successful in the use of decontextualized activities in school.

Capturing the unique aspects of social and cultural contexts represented a shift away from engaging in a “search for universals” related to literacy learning to determining how variations in these particular, unique contexts shape different aspects of literacy learning (Smagorinsky, 2006, p. 12). This led to critiques of autonomous theories of literacy learning resulting in the adoption of sociocultural and situated cognition perspectives shaping learning (Gee, 2015, Lave & Wenger, 1991; Street, 1995; Vygotsky, 1986).

This increased focus on the influence of social and cultural contexts on literacy learning also led to research identifying the importance of teachers adopting formal and informal research methods for studying their own classroom teaching as well as “funds of knowledge” students bring to school from their experiences in local communities and homes that may or may not be consistent with those literacy practices valued in their classrooms and schools (Moll et al., 1992). From reading research on how students’ cultural backgrounds influence learning (Rogers & Soter, 1997), teachers are then more likely to attend to and build on differences in students’ backgrounds in designing instruction. This increased focus on students’ use of literacy practices outside of school also led to a recognition of students’ extensive use of multimodal media and popular culture material in peer groups and home contexts, leading to research on the value of use of media and popular culture in the classroom to expand on what is often a print-based curriculum (Dyson, 1988; 2008).

Given these considerations related to the impact of research on English language arts instruction, we organize our review of historical trends in the research based on five categories associated with English language arts instruction consistent with the English Language Arts Common Core Standards (2010): literary response, reading, writing, language/speaking/listening, and digital/media literacies.

Given the huge volume of research on teaching English language arts that is considered significant and even foundational over the past 100 years, in this limited space we discuss trends with citations of only the most foundational studies. We therefore leave the extensive discussion of the large body of individual studies to our colleagues in this volume and elsewhere who have done excellent work in summarizing and critiquing the history of this research. In this brief foray, we will focus on how research has led to changes in perspectives and ideologies regarding instruction in English language arts.

Research on Literary Response

Research on students’ literary response during the past 100 years revolved around three competing paradigms related to the nature of meaning-making related to (1) a focus on the text itself, (2) the reader-text transaction, and/or (3) the social or cultural context (Beach, 1993; Beach & Swiss, 2010; Galda & Beach, 2001; Roser, Martinez, & Wood, 2011).

Text-based focus. For much of the initial literary response research, researchers adopting a text-based focus were interested in determining readers’ abilities to interpret the meaning of specific aspects of texts, for example, inferring uses of specific figurative language associated with use of literary conventions, meaning perceived to be housed primarily “in” the text. This focus on extracting meaning from texts was evident in I. A. Richard’s (1929) classic study of students’ responses to 13 poems, leading to identifying ten factors associated with what Richards assumed to be “correct” interpretation of these poems, factors related to difficulties visualizing images, experiencing rhyme and rhythm, formulating stock responses, voicing sentimental responses, and imposing certain presuppositions onto the texts. The study also pointed the importance of students responding to the sense, feeling, tone, and intention of the poems, all these being essential to interpreting the poems. This focus on the text was codified by literary critics as “New Criticism” based on the need to focus on the text itself through bracketing out one’s subjective experiences, leading to close-reading instruction involving inferring meanings “in” the texts without reference to readers’ emotions – the “affective fallacy,” or authorial intention – the “intentional fallacy.”

Reader-text transaction. In her transactional theory of response, Louise Rosenblatt (1938), drawing on Dewey (1980), emphasized the importance of fostering the “lived-through” aesthetic experience with texts as distinct from an “efferent” focus on acquiring information from a text. In her own research on high school English teachers’ responses to a poem, she found that the teachers reflected on how the poem evoked certain responses across re-readings, representing an unfolding transaction between the text and the reader (Rosenblatt, 1964).

Researchers studying the effects of instruction in “New Criticism” structural analysis assuming that the meaning is “in” the text versus a reader-response focus in which students applied their own prior knowledge and experience found that the latter generated more divergent, personal responses than did the group receiving the structural “New Criticism” analysis instruction (Grindstaff, 1969). This led to research in the 1960s and 1970s analyzing the range of different types of responses students employ as they move within or across different texts (Purves & Beach, 1972). For example, analysis of 15-year-old students’ responses to four short stories at different points in the stories found that their responses varied across different points in the story with the interpretation and evaluation responses increasing as students progressed in a story: 60% of responses related to the story’s content, 20% to personal/psychological aspects; and 20% to other factors, with high involvement responses to the stories leading to making judgments about the stories (Squire, 1964).

In the 1970s, researchers also drew on psychoanalytic and psychological theories of response to conduct case-study analyses of individual reader’s unique response processes. Based on Freud and Lacan’s psychoanalytical theories, Norman Holland (1975) and David Bleich (1978) examined the influence of readers’ own “identity styles” reflecting subconscious needs and desires on their responses, finding, for example, how openness to ambiguity versus the need for closure shaped the degree to which students were willing to entertain alternative meanings in a text.

Rosenblatt’s (1978) later distinction between aesthetic versus efferent stances as well as Iser’s (1978) theories of the aesthetic response led to research on how instruction in use of aesthetic responses fostered students’ experience with texts. One study found that adopting an aesthetic stance varied according to differences in age or genre, with older students being more likely to adopt an aesthetic stance (Galda, 1990). Another study found that differences in teachers’ prompts based on aesthetic versus efferent stances resulted in students adopting these stances in their response to these prompts (Many, Wiseman, & Altieri, 1996).

Researchers also focused on how these stances are constituted by social contexts. In their research on readers’ adoption of “information-driven” (focus on retrieving information), “story-driven” (engagement in story), or “point-driven” (interpreting thematic meanings) stances, Hunt & Vipond (1991) found that interpreting the “point” of a text was the result of an unfolding shared social construction of the “point” emerging through social interaction in a discussion.

This focus on stances shaped by unfolding meaning over time is evident in Langer’s (1995) identification of four different “envisionments”: “being out and stepping into an envisionment” (applying questions and associations to build a text world), “being in and moving through an envisionment” (drawing on personal knowledge and experiences to build on and elaborate understandings), “stepping back and rethinking what one knows” (using responses to rethink previously held ideas, beliefs, or feelings), and “stepping out and objectifying the experience” (distancing oneself to examine, evaluate, or analyze the reading experience).

Researchers also examined how readers apply their knowledge of narrative conventions for example, how readers, through reading literature, learn to apply “rules of notice” to attend to certain text features – titles, first and last sentences, and opening scenes, as well as “rules of coherence” to infer overall meanings for a text (Rabinowitz, 1987). This focus on readers’ knowledge of narrative conventions led to analysis of developmental differences influencing students’ responses. When students ages 6 to 14 were read the same short story, younger readers focused more on characters’ external aspects such as gender, age, or skin color, while older readers focused more on traits, feelings, and character development, a reflection of the older students’ applications of narrative conventions (Martinez et al., 2002).

Responding in social or cultural contexts. Given the emerging focus based on sociocultural learning theories (Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1998), researchers considered how certain social or cultural factors shaped literary responses, with a particular focus on the classroom context (Galda & Beach, 2001; Rogers & Soter, 1997). In responding to literature, having students share related narratives from their own cultural backgrounds served to support transfer of cultural “funds of knowledge” (Moll et al., 1992) to interpret cultural practices in texts (Martinez-Roldan, 2003).

Researchers also examined how differences in rhetorical, social contexts in the kinds of students writing resulted in differences in the quality of literary response and interpretation. In looking at comparisons of students’ use of personal analytic, formal analytic writing, and writing as short-answer questions, the researchers found that the two analytic approaches were associated with significantly higher posttest scores on literature than with use of restricted short-answer questions (Marshall, 1987). In a comparison of reader-based personal writing with more formal writing in response to short stories, researchers found that the more personal writing fostered more fluent, insightful responses reflecting a wider range of different types of responses than did the more formal writing (Newell, 1989).

Researchers also focused on how to improve classroom discussions, given that discussions are often teacher dominated through IRE (initiate, react, evaluate) interactions with little elaboration of response or student-to-student interaction or use of authentic questions with no predetermined answers (Nystrand & Gamoran, 1997). This research led to teachers recognizing the importance of facilitating discussions using more open-ended, “authentic” discussion questions and prompts (Marshall, Smagorinsky, & Smith, 1995). Doing so served to foster students’ use of intertextual links and narratives between students’ experiences and/or texts to build social relationships in discussions (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1993; Juzwik et al., 2008), as well as use of language games or signifying involving figurative/symbolic uses of language as “cultural modeling” to interpret similar uses in literary texts (Lee, 1993; 2007).

Drawing on phenomenology, hermeneutic, and rhizomatic theories, researchers have more recently focused on the need to go beyond a focus on the individual to examining sense-making processes associated with a focus on the meanings constituted through “in-between” interactions of students, texts, emotions, and contexts (Heydon & Rowsell, 2015; Leander & Hollett, 2013). For example, analysis of emotions defined as mediated actions involved in high school students critique or and creation of documentary films found that the emotions played a major role sh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Introduction
• 1. Significant Literacy Research Informing English Language Arts Instruction
• 2. Re-positioning Race in English Language Arts Research
• 3. Literacy Engagement and Motivation: Rationale, Research, Teaching, and Assessment
• 4. Reading Comprehension, Critical Understanding: Research-based Practice
• 5. Toward a New Appreciation of Speaking and Listening
• 6. Vocabulary Instruction: Research and Practice
• 7. Academic Vocabulary Instruction: Building Knowledge about the World and How Words Work
• 8. Cultivating Students’ Inner Language of Comprehending Through Classroom Conversation
• 9. Word Study, Research to Practice: Spelling, Phonics, Meaning
• 10. Writing Research and Practice
• 11. The Promise and Challenge of Language Arts Assessments in Twenty-first Century Classrooms
• 12. Disciplinary Literacy
• 13. Diverse Learners in Linguistically Complex Classrooms: Research, Policy, and Practice
• 14. Repositioning Online Reading to a Central Location in the Language Arts
• 15. Language Arts Learning in Multimodal and Multilingual Contexts
• 16. It Is About Time for Comprehensive Language Arts Instruction (We’ve Tried Everything Else!)
• 17. Language Arts Instruction in Middle and High School Classrooms
• Epilogue: Traversing the Landscape: A Retrospective Reading of the Fourth Edition of the Handbook on Teaching the English Language Arts
• Author Bios
• Chapter Reviewers
• Index