Kathryn H. Au

Social Organizational Factors in Learning to Read: The Balance of Rights Hypothesis.

of disadvantaged 7 year-old Hawaiian students, were analyzed. One teacher (LC) had had little contact with Hawaiian children, while the other (HC) had worked successfully with Hawaiian students for five years. Consistent with their backgrounds, it was found that the two teachers managed interaction in their lessons very differently. Teacher LC used participation structures which are commonly used with children from the mainstream culture; the major structure requires them to wait to be called on and to speak one at a time. On the other hand, Teacher HC conducted much of her lessons in a different participation structure, one which allowed the children to share turns in joint performance. This structure follows interactional rules much like those in talk story, a common nonclassroom speech event for Hawaiian children. The results supported a social organizational hypothesis. The lessons of Teacher HC displayed much higher levels of achievement-related student behavior than those of Teacher LC. Furthermore, student productivity appeared to vary as a function of specific characteristics of participation structures, within and across the lessons of the two teachers. A new construct, the balance of rights in speaking and turntaking between teacher and students, was formulated to explain the relationship between classroom social structure and student productivity.

QAR: Enhancing Comprehension and Test Taking Across Grades and Content Areas

Teachers today face increasing demands to ensure their students achieve high levels of literacy. They may feel overwhelmed by the challenges of teaching reading comprehension strategies that foster the integration, interpretation, critique, and evaluation of text ideas. The challenges are compounded because students of diverse backgrounds often enter classrooms reading far below grade level. In this article, the authors describe how Question-Answer Relationships (QARs) can provide a framework for comprehension instruction with the potential of closing the literacy achievement gap. QAR can serve as a starting point for addressing four problems of practice that stand in the way of moving all students to high levels of literacy: The need for a shared language to make visible the invisible processes underlying reading and listening comprehension The need for a framework for organizing questioning activities and comprehension instruction within and across grades and school subjects The need for accessible and straightforward whole-school reform for literacy instruction for higher level thinking The need to prepare students for high-stakes testing without undermining a focus on higher level thinking with text.

Multicultural Perspectives on Literacy Research

My goal in this essay is to convey a sense of the broad territory covered by researchers whose work reflects various multicultural perspectives on literacy. Proponents of multicultural education generally consider the key cultures (also called subcultures or microcultures) to be ethnicity or national origin, class, primary language, gender/sex, religion, age, geographic region, urban-suburban-rural, and exceptionality (Gollnick & Chinn, 1990). In a sense, any study addressing any of the variables listed above, in any combination, could be labeled a multicultural study. However, in my view such a broadly inclusive use of the term would not adequately convey the concerns of most researchers who consider their work to be multicultural. Specifically, most of these researchers are concerned with issues of social justice and with improving conditions in schools for students of diverse backgrounds. From this point of view, most researchers with a multicultural perspective tend to focus on issues related to ethnicity, social class, primary language, and gender. The term students of diverse backgrounds is used here to refer to students within the United States whose ethnicity is African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic-American, or Native American; who come from poor and working-class families; and who speak a primary language other than standard American English (Au, 1993). Students of diverse backgrounds may be contrasted with students of mainstream backgrounds. The latter tend to lead more privileged lives, have greater access to what Delpit (1988) calls the culture of power, and generally achieve higher levels of literacy in school (Au, 1993). An adequate treatment of gender issues and of feminist perspectives on literacy is-beyond the scope of this essay. The use of the term ethnicity here is not based on the suspect biological factors typically associated with the term race (Lieberman, Stevenson, & Reynolds, 1989). Instead, ethnicity refers to groups with shared histories and cultural knowledge, for example, African Americans or Chinese Americans. Anthropologists and other social scientists who work with the concepts of ethnicity and culture acknowledge

Culturally Responsive Instruction: Application to Multiethnic Classrooms

Standards for literacy in developed nations have rapidly risen, fuelled by economic competition and globalisation. A danger in this rapid rise is the possibility of a further widening of the gap that exists between the literacy achievement of students of diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds and their mainstream peers. Culturally responsive instruction, or teaching that builds on the values and experiences students bring from the home, is a possible solution to eliminating the literacy achievement gap. A new formulation of culturally responsive instruction is proposed—one that is centered on hybridity and a diverse worldview rather than a duplication of home settings.

Developing Children's Comprehension in Listening, Reading, and Television Viewing

Because the modern-day citizen must be able to deal intelligently with a wide range of complex issues, educators are recognizing the importance of teaching students strategies for understanding and critically assessing new information. Those teachers working with secondary and upper elementary grade pupils have perhaps been quicker to recognize the need for providing systematic training in comprehension, but this need exists in the primary grade curriculum, as well. Children should be encouraged to exercise comprehension skills from the time they first enter school.