Troubling Expertise in Literary Reading

• In Event: 61.017 - Post-Truth? The Power of Repertoires of Everyday Practice of Youth From Nondominant Communities

Abstract

Framework

In studies of literary reading and interpretation, a growing body of socio-cultural research examines the interpretive power of students labeled as weak or novice readers by school-based metrics (Alvermann et al., 2012; Kinloch, 2012; Lee, 2007; Levine, 2018; Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2005). In these studies, interpretive power was defined by attention to imagery, figurative language, and other “rules of notice” (Rabinowitz, 1987), as well as instances of transactional reading (Rosenblatt, 1982), where students articulated their reading experience through description of emotion or connections to other experiences or texts.

Such studies raise questions about conventional definitions of expertise. This study investigated those questions through analysis of interpretive practices of high school students with low standardized reading scores and graduate students who would be labelled expert readers by most conventional measures. The high school students considered themselves experienced and enthusiastic hip hop listeners, and the doctoral students similarly identified as experienced and enthusiastic poetry readers.
The social justice themes in hip hop offer opportunities for youth to wrestle with political, social and economic challenges. Thus the interpretive skills of literary reasoning and social theorizing available and socialized in youths’ literate practices out of school represent important opportunities to re-conceptualize relations between out-of-school and in-school learning and to debunk extant meta-narratives around deficits.

Data and Methods

Students in both groups read and engaged in think-alouds of a canonical English poem and a canonical hip hop song (lyrics only). Their eye movements during their first and second silent readings of the texts were recorded to shed further light on their reading practices.

Eye-tracking data was analyzed for time spent on reading, as well as focus on title, first, and last stanzas. Think-alouds were analyzed through both top-down and emergent coding, and were ultimately coded for instances in which students noted and explored rules of notice; drew on outside knowledge, and critiqued authorial style, among other things.

Results

Eye tracking data revealed that high school students spent more time reading the lyrics and less time reading the poem than did doctoral students. Additionally, high schoolers made significantly more “expert like” moves, such as noting textual patterns and interpreting symbols, when reading the hip hop lyrics than when reading the poem. Conversely, the doctoral students made significantly more expert moves when reading the poem than when reading the lyrics. For example, high school students were much more likely to draw on outside knowledge (literary and other) when reading the lyrics than when reading the poem, where the opposite was true for the graduate students (Figure 1).

Significance

These results contribute to research suggesting that literary reading and expertise are situated in text, context, and stance. They bear out sociocultural and constructivist theories of learning that suggest that students who are not considered strong readers by conventional academic measures may in fact engage in rich interpretive reading. As researchers, it is our job to make public these very real achievements to combat current deficit narratives about our students and to trouble the notion of expertise.

Author

• Sarah Levine, Stanford University