What Does it Mean to Read Literary Works? The Literacy Practices, Epistemologies, and Instructional Approaches of Literary Scholars and High School English Language Arts Teachers.

Abstract

Despite many calls for K-12 disciplinary literacy instruction—instruction that teaches students the specialized ways of reading, writing, and reasoning of the academic disciplines—few researchers have focused on what disciplinary literacy instruction means for the prominent school domain of English language arts (ELA).

This study investigates and compares the disciplinary literacy practices and teaching approaches of a group of ten university-based literary scholars who taught undergraduate literary studies courses and a group of twelve high school ELA teachers who taught with literary works. I conducted semi-structured interviews and think alouds using multiple short stories. Data sources included 71 audio-recorded interviews, along with multiple classroom observations. I used constant comparative analysis (Glaser, 1965) to identify patterns among and across the two groups of participants.

I found that the literary scholars and some of the high school ELA teachers in this study seemed to share some problem-based ways of making meaning with literary works and approaches to teaching students to make meaning with literary works. The remaining high school ELA teachers focused on students’ comprehension and strategy use absent disciplinary purposes, and they did not demonstrate disciplinary purposes or practices in their own reading.

I also found major differences among the institutional contexts of this study. Whereas the contexts of the university seemed to support the literary scholars’ disciplinary literacy instruction, the contexts of the suburban school district seemed to constrain high school teachers’ disciplinary literacy instruction. This pattern of constraint was most notable for the group of high school teachers who shared literary literacy practices and instructional approaches with the university-based scholars; the more discipline-aligned high school teachers regularly expressed dissatisfaction in their abilities to provide sufficient instruction to their students.

Together, the findings of this study suggest that holding disciplinary understandings and disciplinary literacy practices is necessary but not sufficient for instructors’ abilities to provide disciplinary literacy instruction to students. This has implications for literacy education research, teacher education and professional development efforts, and education policy.