Theoretical Models and Processes of Literacy

Donna E. Alvermann, Norman J. Unrau, Misty Sailors, Robert B. Ruddell, Donna E. Alvermann, Norman J. Unrau, Misty Sailors, Robert B. Ruddell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351616522
• Edition: 7
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Seventh Edition of this foundational text represents the most comprehensive source available for connecting multiple and diverse theories to literacy research, broadly defined, and features both cutting-edge and classic contributions from top scholars. Two decades into the 21st century, the Seventh Edition finds itself at a crossroads and differs from its predecessors in three major ways: the more encompassing term literacy replaces reading in the title to reflect sweeping changes in how readers and writers communicate in a digital era; the focus is on conceptual essays rather than a mix of essays and research reports in earlier volumes; and most notably, contemporary literacy models and processes enhance and extend earlier theories of reading and writing. Providing a tapestry of models and theories that have informed literacy research and instruction over the years, this volume's strong historical grounding serves as a springboard from which new perspectives are presented. The chapters in this volume have been selected to inspire the interrogation of literacy theory and to foster its further evolution. This edition is a landmark volume in which dynamic, dialogic, and generative relations of power speak directly to the present generation of literacy theorists and researchers without losing the historical contexts that preceded them. Some additional archival essays from previous editions are available on the book's eResource.

New to the Seventh Edition:

• 
  
  

• Features chapters on emerging and contemporary theories that connect directly to issues of power and contrasts new models against more established counterparts.

• 
  
  

• New chapters reflect sweeping changes in how readers and writers communicate in a digital era.

• 
  
  

• Slimmer volume is complemented by some chapters from previous editions available online.

Section Two
Cognitive and Sociocognitive

The second section of this volume provides eight chapters, all of which reflect cognitive or socio-cognitive theories or models of literacy processes. James Paul Gee’s “Reading as Situated Language: A Sociocognitive Perspective” (Chapter 5) reflects the view that reading is far more than processing skills; it is a process embedded in a context of social interaction and culture. As children learn social languages—such as the language of rap, street gangs, classrooms, or law—they also are socialized into Discourses, which Gee also calls “communities of practice” or “identity kits.” While socialized into Discourses, children build cultural models that inform Discourse members of what are linguistically, socially, and culturally acceptable practices for that community. A Discourse establishes a reader’s/writer’s world and suggests that the reader’s/writer’s work in that world is to gain a critical consciousness of how he or she is defined by texts.

As rolled out in Chapter 6, Nell Duke and Kelly Cartwright deliver a “DRIVE” model of reading, an acronym that stands for Deploying Reading In Varied Environments. Their model provides a tour of the reading experience internally and externally with reference to elements in the ecological context. All of the elements of their model are supported with empirical research. Portions of the car itself represent reading processes. For example, the dashboard represents comprehension monitoring; the seats and chassis, language knowledge; axles, reading fluency; tires, decoding and word recognition; and the tire’s treads, phonological awareness. The ecological surroundings through which the car travels on its journey to comprehension represents the reader’s context.

Richard Anderson’s “Role of the Reader’s Schema in Comprehension, Learning, and Memory” (Chapter 7) explains schema theory and its part in comprehension of texts. Anderson describes schema-based processes during learning and remembering that include schema operating as an ideational and conceptual scaffold for assimilating text, schema facilitating the allocation of attention, schema facilitating inference making, and schema enabling orderly searches of memory while processing texts. He then provides examples of evidence supporting the theory and makes recommendations for the theory’s application to classroom instruction.

In “To Err Is Human: Learning About Language Processes by Analyzing Miscues” (Chapter 8), Yetta and Kenneth Goodman develop the role of schema in meaning construction through their exploration of miscue analysis. Arguing that there is nothing random about miscues, the Goodmans explain the role of schema-forming miscues as a kind of struggle toward accommodation of new information and schema-driven miscues as those reflecting assimilation of either old or new information into a preexisting schema. A reader’s linguistic and conceptual schematic background manifests itself in both miscues and in the reader’s conceptual understanding of texts.

In “Dual Coding Theory: An Embodied Theory of Literacy” (Chapter 9), Mark Sadoski and Karen Krasny present a unified theory of literacy under the aegis of a general theory of mind, Dual Coding Theory (DCT). Since its introduction in the late 1960s, DCT has evolved and expanded through programs of research to many areas of cognition, especially into literacy. With its emphasis on multisensory mental representations and connections between verbal and non-verbal mental systems, DCT proposes a multicode, multimodal approach to reading and writing that accounts for meaning making in multimodal and multimedia texts as well as printed texts. After summarizing DCT in relation to contemporary theoretical perspectives in literacy, the authors characterize DCT as: a scientific theory; an embodied cognitive theory; a theory of decoding, comprehension, vocabulary, and response in reading; a theory of written composition and spelling; and a theory of multimedia/multimodal literacy. In addition, they show that the mental representations and processes in DCT are fundamental to achieving the intersubjectivity central to the social epistemic movement in literacy.

In Chapter 10, “Revisiting the Construction-Integration Model of Text Comprehension and Its Implications for Instruction,” Walter Kintsch explains the relationship between cognition and representation while reading. He describes three levels of mental representation during reading: the surface structure, a textbase, and a situation model. The surface structure for a text refers to sentences or fragments of them that are held in a reader’s memory. The textbase, or the semantic underpinnings of a text, is composed of microstructures and macrostructures. The situation model represents information provided by a text, but integrated with information from a reader’s goals, beliefs, and prior knowledge. Although we know quite a lot about how readers process words and sentences into text structures, we know far less about the processes that occur during the formation of a situation model.

In Chapter 11, “A Sociocognitive Model of Meaning Construction: The Reader, the Teacher, the Text, and the Classroom Context,” Robert Ruddell, Norman Unrau, and Sandra McCormick present a sociocognitive model of reading in which meanings are constructed during a socially contextualized bottom-up/top-down reading process. Specifically, the model proposes the elements that are engaged when “meaning is constructed” interactively within social environments comprised of readers, teachers, texts, and classroom contexts, and it explains how these four components are in a state of dynamic activity and interaction while individuals process text and make meaning. The model demonstrates that understanding text is never a static endeavor in which the text alone carries and conveys meaning, but, rather, a meaning-construction process, with meanings assembled through a variety of interactions with a text within a context.

In Chapter 12, “The Role of Motivation Theory in Literacy Instruction,” Ana Taboada Barber, Karen Levush, and Susan Klauda focus on motivation applied to both reading and writing. They point out, in the light of their perspective, that reading motivation as a construct has been approached empirically in much more depth than that of writing motivation. However, because of the relevance that motivation has for both literacy processes, the authors review theories of motivation and their implications to both reading and writing. They draw primarily from four major theories of motivation: Self-determination theory, social cognitive theory; expectancy-value theory, and achievement goal theory. Within each motivation theory, the authors have focused on implications for reading and writing development as well as instruction—emphasizing the empirical work that has been done relevant to each construct. The authors also conceptualize reading engagement as a multidimensional construct and draw from a model of reading engagement to elaborate on its implications for reading instruction. They end their chapter with other key motivation constructs relevant to reading and writing in order to identify potential issues and areas for future work in literacy motivation.

In “Educational Neuroscience for Reading Researchers” (Chapter 13), George Hruby and Usha Goswami review promising advances in neuroscientific research on cognitive processes involved in reading, noting that, over the last 35 years of brain research, only the surface has been scratched to date regarding areas of neural activation that function when a reader is making sense of text. The authors offer an overview of the neural correlates of reading while pointing out that neural images do not provide evidence that areas of the brain have been dedicated since birth to specific reading processes. More likely, much of the neural imaging portrays the anatomical result of development in response to interactions with texts and instruction. Neuroscience is an exciting field, as understanding how brains operate when learning occurs offers enormous potential for educators, and could very well upend established literacy theories.

5
Reading as Situated Language

A Sociocognitive Perspective

James Paul Gee

This chapter is reprinted from Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 44(8), 714–725. Copyright © 2001 by the International Reading Association.

My main goal here is to situate reading within a broad perspective that integrates work on cognition, language, social interaction, society, and culture. In light of recent reports on reading (National Reading Panel, 2000; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998) that have tended to treat reading quite narrowly in terms of psycholinguistic processing skills, I argue that such a broad perspective on reading is essential if we are to speak to issues of access and equity in schools and workplaces. I also argue that reading and writing cannot be separated from speaking, listening, and interacting, on the one hand, or using language to think about and act on the world, on the other. Thus, it is necessary to start with a viewpoint on language (oral and written) itself, a viewpoint that ties language to embodied action in the material and social world.

I have organized this article into four parts. First, I develop a viewpoint on language that stresses the connections among language, embodied experience, and situated action and interaction in the world. In the second part, I argue that what is relevant to learning literacy is not English in general, but specific varieties of English that I call “social languages.” I then go on to discuss notions related to the idea of social languages, specifically Discourses (with a capital D) and their connections to socially situated identities and cultural models. In the third part, I show the relevance of the earlier sections to the development of literacy in early childhood through a specific example. Finally, I close the article with a discussion of the importance of language abilities (construed in a specific way) to learning to read.

A Viewpoint on Language

It is often claimed that the primary function of human language is to convey information, but I believe this is not true. Human languages are used for a wide array of functions, including but by no means limited to conveying information (Halliday, 1994). I will argue here that human language has two primary functions through which it is best studied and analyzed. I would state these functions as follows: to scaffold the performance of action in the world, including social activities and interactions; to scaffold human affiliation in cultures and social groups and institutions through creating and enticing others to take certain perspectives on experience. Action is the most important word in the first statement; perspectives is the most important word in the second. I will discuss each of these two functions in turn.

Situated Action

Traditional approaches to language have tended to look at it as a closed system (for discussion, see Clancey, 1997). Any piece of language is treated as representation (re-presenting) of some information. On the traditional view, what it means to comprehend a piece of language is to be able to translate it into some equivalent representational system, either other language (one’s own words) or some mental language or language of thought that mimics the structure of natural languages (e.g., is couched in terms of logical propositions).

However, there are a variety of perspectives today on language that tie its comprehension much more closely to experience of and action in the world. For example, consider these two remarks from work in cognitive psychology: “comprehension is grounded in perceptual simulations that prepare agents for situated action” (Barsalou, 1999a, p. 77); “to a particular person, the meaning of an object, event, or sentence is what that person can do with the object, event, or sentence” (Glenberg, 1997, p. 3).

These two quotes are from work that is part of a family of related viewpoints. For want of a better name, we might call the family “situated cognition studies” (e.g., Barsalou, 1999a, 1999b; Brown, Collins, & Dugid, 1989; Clancey, 1997; Clark, 1997; Engestrom, Miettinen, raij Punamaki, 1999; Gee, 1992; Glenberg, 1997; Glenberg & Robertson, 1999; Hutchins, 1995; Latour, 1999; Lave, 1996; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). While there are differences among the members of the family (alternative theories about situated cognition), they share the viewpoint that meaning in language is not some abstract propositional representation that resembles a verbal language. Rather, meanin...