An Exploration Into How Select African American Children's Academic Discourse Influences Their Literate Behaviors

• In Event: AERA Poster Session 3
  In Poster Session: Concepts and Considerations in Literacy Education

Abstract

This paper presents the research of a qualitative multiple embedded dissertation study. It explored the written and literate language structures or the academic discourse as well as the literate identities of eight African American third graders in order to understand how their knowledge of select academic language features and their literate identities influenced their ability to decode, anticipate text structures, answer comprehension questions and retell stories. Five literacy-based research tasks were used. Supporting James Gee’s discourse analysis theory, the first two tasks were intended to reveal students’ levels of academic language knowledge (d/discourse) and their identity (D/discourse) as readers. The students’ performances on the other tasks were studied through the lenses of the first two tasks.

Authors

• Melanie Renee Loewenstein, Texas A&M University - Commerce

• David L Brown, Texas A&M University - Commerce