Moving Words and Worlds: Beyond Reading as Acultural “Comprehension”

• In Event: Reading as Possibility: Constructing a New Theoretical and Empirical Foundation for Equity and Imagination in Reading Education

Abstract

Reading in public schools relies on an autonomous model of literacy (Street, 1984), which assumes meaning is inherent in the words on a page, and the reader’s task is simply to unlock their meaning. Critics have long decried the resultant emphasis on the “lowest” levels of such decoding processes (the phonemic level), but even when attention is given to “higher” levels of the reading process (i.e. “comprehension”), the ideology that reins about reading dictates that comprehension is about extracting the author’s intentions from the text, and treating the meanings as fixed rather than negotiable and mutable.
In this paper, I show what is possible when curriculum is designed using what Street (1984) calls an “ideological” notion of literacy and what Canagarajah (2013) refers to as “negotiated literacy,” especially in the context of translingual practices (Garcia, 2009; Canagarajah, 2013). I draw from data gathered through ethnographic research in an after-school program serving the children of immigrants from Mexico, Central America, and the Philippines. The after-school program is designed based on sociocultural learning theory in the Fifth Dimension tradition established by Mike Cole (2006). Undergraduates interact with K-6 kids and offer many opportunities to “play” with and reflect on language, and to use literacy as a tool for connecting with others and making meaning about the world. I look at how children leverage the various tools in their linguistic toolkits to make meaning, construct identities, express themselves, and connect with others. This includes translingual meaning-making at the phonemic level as well as at the level of extended text. I look at where, when and how engagement with the printed word moves children, the mutability and mobility of the meanings they extract from text, and how these moving words connect them to the larger world. I draw implications for challenging narrow notions of “reading comprehension” in school, and for presumptions about “higher” and “lower” levels of reading processes.

Author

• Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, University of California - Los Angeles