Overview
A review of this topic, drawing on the CITE-ITEL data-base has been published. See:
Hikida, M., Chamberlain, K., Tily, S., Daly-Lesch, A., Warner, J. R., & Schallert, D. L. (2019). Reviewing How Preservice Teachers Are Prepared to Teach Reading Processes: What the Literature Suggests and Overlooks. Journal of Literacy Research, 51(2), 177-195.
Summary and Moving Forward
Looking Forward
In the same ways that there is a tendency to research reading processes in isolation and then infer toward reading, there appears to be a pattern in this research area to isolate preparation on specific processes. There is a real danger, in following this pattern of research, that teacher preparation becomes fragmented into how to teach isolated skills and ignores the ways that teachers need to integrate practices. There is some hope to be found in the studies that focus on tutorial contexts. These studies offer opportunities to examine the appropriation of strategies by preservice teachers and their effects. Similarly, the studies in this area that focus on more complex understandings of developing teaching expertise offer promise for framing assessment and growth.
The notion of what counts as basic to an understanding of reading processes is largely a product of psychological research that has been affirmed, indeed one might say almost concretized, in the framing of the five pillars from the National Reading Panel report (Allington, 2005; Cassidy, Valdez & Garrett, 2010). Providing alternative perspectives, the theoretical literature might raise questions about what counts as basic. One perspective emphasizes the interaction of language processes in development that would suggest that the isolation of basic reading skills from writing, listening, and speaking misrepresents literacy by its very compartmentalization of language processes. Perhaps most “basic” to language and literacy development is the ways these processes interact and complement each other. A second perspective might suggest that texts and meaning are not always found in the forms of papers and books, and that the basics in development are found in the multi-modal ways in which meaning is represented through text (Jewitt, 2008).
In our analysis of studies that documented preservice teachers’ understandings of basic processes, we noted that researchers seemed to conceptualize preservice teachers’ knowledge or understandings in terms of deficits, focusing on what preservice teachers did not understand (Washburn, et al. 2011) or lacked in comparison to in-service teacher colleagues (Aro & Björn, 2016). However, as we look toward future research, documenting what preservice teachers do know in the area of basic processes may be generative.
Finally, some of the most recent and powerful theoretical literature on literacy is found in the literacy as a social practice perspective (Bloom & Greeen, 2015; Gee, 2015; Street, 2003). Studying what people do with literacy and how and why may be the most basic understanding needed for an exploration of literacy. If there could be a time when the focus on basic reading processes took us outside of the pathological, or inside the head perspective on literacy and into the socio-cultural realm, we might see a very different set of teaching and teacher educator practices come into our work.
References
Allington, R. L. (2005). Ideology Is Still Trumping Evidence. Phi Delta Kappan, 86(6), 462.
Bloome, D., & Green, J. (2015). The social and linguistic turns in studying language and literacy. The Routledge handbook of literacy studies, 19-34.
Cassidy, J., Valadez, C. M., & Garrett, S. D. (2010). Literacy trends and issues: A look at the five pillars and the cement that supports them. The Reading Teacher, 63(8), 644-655.
Gee, J. (2015). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses. Routledge.
Jewitt, C. (2008). Multimodality and literacy in school classrooms. Review of research in education, 32(1), 241-267.
Street, B. (2003). What’s “new” in New Literacy Studies? Critical approaches to literacy in theory and practice. Current issues in comparative education, 5(2), 77-91.