Boys and Literacy (part 10)

 

The license teachers can utilize in motivating boys to read is cloaked in standards-based curriculum, assessments, and accountability. Many public schools systems have grasped the enormity of declining literacy, and the issue of boys in particular. Their approaches to raising literacy among teens are often guided by federal reports, which afford a desired measure of accountability. Squarely at the helm of the nationwide concern over the falling proficiency of adolescent literacy is The National Institute for Literacy and The Department of Education. They have joined with other federal agencies to bring resources and attention to the issue.

 The National Institute for Literacy helped sponsor a series of workshops to develop recommendations for research on adolescent literacy. The focus of the workshops was to address the lack of converging evidence on how literacy abilities are best acquired and subsequently taught during adolescence. The extensive findings of the workshops mirror concerns identified by many of the educators and authors acknowledged in this paper. Interestingly, however, nowhere in the Institute’s report is gender addressed as a factor. Socioeconomic, cultural, peer group identity, and even something called “neurobiological factors” are all discussed as playing a role in how well adolescents learn to read and write. Considering the amount of scholarship on the topic of gender and literacy, this omission is appalling.

 There were two valuable areas addressed by the workshop’s participants. First, the literacy difficulties of English language learners were acknowledged, but most of the work in this area did not address adolescent learners. Participants felt that translation of the existing work was unlikely to be an effective solution with non-English-speaking or English language learning students. Furthermore, that translation could not address dialect or other socio-cultural factors. Second, the participants recognized the need for assessments that measure reading proficiency across different text types (including electronic text) and writing. Participants also stated that testing methods should be sensitive to increasing and yet changing abilities and needs. Moreover, assessment should include a range of language literacy abilities, including narrative and expository knowledge, comprehension, decoding, and inference.

 Happily, a shift that incorporates a broader interpretation of literacy could include such venues as graphic novels, music, film, and web-based applications. Perhaps this could empower middle and high school teachers in the real world to reach out to the struggling boys in their classes and still maintain curriculum standards. Thus, standardized assessment, the missing piece of the puzzle, would fall into place somewhere between the recognition of boys falling behind in literacy, the integration of creative strategies designed to help them succeed, and the essential paradigm shift necessary for teachers to change instruction methodologies.