Reading and Learning from Culturally Relevant Text

• In Event: Culturally Sustaining, Social-Emotional, and Critical Literacies

Abstract

This study examines how reading culturally relevant text may support students’ use of comprehension processes, as well as their understanding, identification with, and enjoyment of texts. Fourth- and fifth-graders read one culturally-relevant and one non-culturally relevant text. They completed think alouds while reading and retellings and interviews about their perspectives of the texts after reading. Findings suggest (for example) that readers more often made perspectival inferences and personal identifications when reading the culturally relevant text.

Authors

• Miranda Fitzgerald, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

• Gina Cervetti, University of Michigan