Reading and Language Arts

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Browsing Reading and Language Arts by Author "pavonett@oakland.edu"

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    The impact of a book flood on reading motivation and reading achievement of fourth grade students
    (2017-03-22) Andrews, Sherry; Pavonetti, Linda; pavonett@oakland.edu
    Reading proficiency makes profound differences in reasoning and the ability to learn new information. Past research has indicated that avid readers demonstrate superior literacy development and a wide-range of knowledge across subjects (Allington, 2011; Guthrie, 2008; Krashen, 2004). In a contrasting trajectory, a child who does not engage in reading has limited exposure to a wide vocabulary (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1997) and a gap in knowledge ensues that adversely impacts literacy into adulthood (Hodgkinson, 1995; Neuman & Celano, 2006). This quasi-experimental study examined the impact of readily accessible books on students’ motivation to read, attitudes towards reading and reading achievement when students are provided daily opportunities to read self-selected materials provided through a book flood. Book floods are designed to provide a large number of books to a classroom with limited books. Thirty-eight fourth grade students from two intact classrooms were assigned as the treatment (n=19) and the control group (n=19). Participants in both the control and treatment group were administered pre- and post-test to measure reading motivation and attitudes towards reading. Participants’ scores from the district mandated assessment were used to measure pre- and post-treatment reading achievement. The fourth-graders in the treatment group were provided 15-minutes daily to read self-selected books from the book flood. Participants in the treatment group recorded and rated the self-selected books in reading logs for a 12-week period. ANCOVA was conducted to compare post-tests results on the Elementary Reading Attitude Survey (M. McKenna & Kear, 1990), the Self-Regulation Questionnaire-Reading Motivation (De Naeghel, Van Keer, Vansteenkiste, & Rosseel, 2012), and the Northwest Evaluation Association Measures of Academic Progress (NWEA, 2003). Analyses of the data indicate significant differences between the control and treatment group on post-test results for recreational autonomous and academic autonomous reading motivation but not on post-test results for attitudes towards recreational and academic reading. Correlation relationships and other descriptive findings are discussed.
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    Literacy and Liberation: A Content Analysis of Four Antebellum Slave Narratives as Sites of Critical Literacy
    (2023-03-28) Blunt, Johnnie; Pavonetti, Linda; pavonett@oakland.edu
    This dissertation examines the roles of literacy and literacy education in early 19th-century autobiographies of four fugitive African American slaves: Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Henry Bibb, and Harriet Jacobs. Also known as antebellum slave narratives, these autobiographies regularly depicted the dehumanization many African Americans endured in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. As such, slave narratives provide critical information about the origins and development of racism in the United States. These stories illustrate how race in the early 19th century became a significant marker of one’s humanity and how people of African descent were perceived as slightly less than human and thus deemed suitable for subjugation. I argue that literacy and literacy education enabled these authors (and by extension, millions of other African Americans) to establish their humanity through their engagement with the debates and conversations about the institution of slavery. Antebellum slave narratives were part of global abolitionist efforts to end slavery immediately. These narratives countered proslavery arguments about the naturalness and logic of slavery and were often the end results of fugitive slaves having given oral accounts of their lives on lecture tours. In short, literacy and literacy instruction enabled Douglass, Brown, Bibb, and Jacobs, as critical literacy theorist Paulo Freire argued, to become more fully human. That is, literacy and literacy instruction enabled the authors to fight oppression and establish agency in a world that frequently denied them their humanity and human agency. Using content analysis as the method of data collection and analysis, I coded textual data according to 12 categories James Olney (1985) argued were common themes in the narratives. After reducing redundant data, I concluded that the contextual phenomena that best described the data were critical literacy, material conditions, and human rights. Douglass, Brown, Bibb, and Jacobs used literacy and literacy education to engage in the national debates and conversations for the immediate and unconditional end of slavery in the United States. The main implication of this conclusion is that literacy and literacy instruction are pivotal to developing crucial citizenship attitudes and skills that will maintain a healthy democracy.