English‐Language Learners' Reading Achievement: Dialectical Relationships Between Policy and Practices in Meaning‐Making Opportunities

Abstract

This case study of reading activity in third‐grade bilingual classrooms at a state‐sanctioned “successful” school examines the influences of the California accountability framework—Proposition 227, No Child Left Behind, and the federal Reading First program—on shifting beliefs and practices around what “counts” as reading. The researcher utilized cultural‐historical theoretical perspectives on the socioculturally mediated nature of teaching and learning to examine the joint construction of reading activity as well as account for the institutional constraints within which teachers and their students accomplished this work. Specifically, she employed participant observations and video recordings of Spanish and English language arts instructional periods, in‐depth teacher and administrator interviews, a collection of student work samples, and a collection of relevant school and district documents to examine the mediation of reading activity across school, district, state, and federal policy contexts. To examine the dialectical relationship between policy and practice, she analyzes two bilingual classrooms in depth through heuristic tools that illuminate how particular discourse patterns and participation structures align broadly with policy‐sanctioned notions of what counts as reading. Analyses of narrative texts and transcripts illustrate that this alignment had implications for English‐language learners' meaning‐making opportunities. This analysis contributes a theoretical conceptualization of reading activity as implicated in the dialectical relationships between policies, practices, resources, and beliefs around what counts as reading across institutional contexts and how these processes affect English‐language learners' reading potential. [Note: The author discusses the research presented in this article in a podcast from the “Voice of Literacy”: http://www.voiceofliteracy.org/posts/41204.] تفحص هذه الحالة الدراسية لأنشطة القراءة في غرف الصف الثالث ذات الثنائية اللغوية في مدرسة ناجحة متعمدة من الولاية تأثيرات إطار كاليفونيا المحاسبي— عرض مشروع 227 وقانون عدم ترك أي طفل دون تعليم وبرنامج القراءة الأولى الفدرالي—على الاعتقادات والممارسات المتبدلة بشأن ماذا تُعتَبر القراءة. واستخدمت الباحثة مناظر نظرية ثقافية‐تاريخية حيال طبيعة التعليم والتعلم وسيطها الثقافة الاجتماعية لفحص البناء المشترك لنشاط القراءة كما بحثت عن التقيدات المؤسسية التي أنجز فيها المعلمون وطلابهم هذا العمل. وعلى وجه الخصوص استخدمت ملاحظات المشاركين وتسجيلات فيديو للدروس التعليمية في لغتي الفنون الإنكليزية والإسبانية ومقابلات المدير والمعلم المعمقة ومجموعة من عينات أعمال الطلاب ومجموعة من وثائق المقاطع والمدارس المعنية لفحص وساطة أنشطة القراءة عبر سياقات سياسة المدرسة والمقاطع والولاية والدولة. ومن أجل فحص العلاقة التناقضية بين السياسة والممارسة فهي حللت صفين ثنائي اللغة بشكل عميق من خلال الأدوات المساعدة على الكشف التي تسلط الضوء على كيفية أنماط معينة من الخطاب وأنظمة المشاركة تناسق بشكل عام مفاهيم السياسة المعتمدة لما تُعتبَر القراءة. تبين تحاليل النصوص المحكية ونسخها أن هذا التناسق لديها معاني متضمنة لدارسي اللغة الإنكليزية فيما يتعلق ب...

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