Further reading literacy practices and perspectives from the first year writing classroom

Ianetta, MelissaCommon instructional approaches to reading in composition classrooms emphasize reading’s cognitive aspect, delineating useful strategies to promote comprehension and to understand a text’s content. Yet such attention omits the embodied, social, and material performance of reading, ignoring the ways in which students’ experiences of texts impact their attention and, ultimately, the way they write with sources. “Further Reading” thus re-envisions reading theory and instruction for first-year writing curricula. It attends to the materiality of digital texts and their impact upon students’ reading experiences and also traces the manner in which students’ affective responses to source materials influence their composing processes. By arguing that the field must treat reading, like writing, as a situated, social activity mediated by tools and technologies, it expands reading scholarship to encompass the body’s role in meaning making and evidences the necessity of guiding students in understanding their own corporeal and situated responses to texts. ☐ This project applies a case study methodology, examining the reading-writing processes of six focal students and exploring the inter-relationship with digital literacies and the classroom environment. Using interviews, analysis of textual artifacts, and video-recordings enabled by screen-cast software of their individual, in-process work, I describe and analyze the reading-writing practices the students demonstrate. Following principles of ethnographic research, this analysis of students’ reading practices is grounded in the classroom, composition program, and institutional context. ☐ “Further Reading” revises disciplinary commonplaces about the ways that students read, responding to the growing need to consider digital and information literacy concerns. It argues that closer observation of students’ in-process reading practices reveals the influence of document and website design on students’ engagement, an impact currently unaccounted for in instructional literature. Further, attention to instances of students’ problematic source use reveals the impact of affective responses to texts. Thus, if students are to avoid patchwriting, our instructional approaches must encompass students’ emotional reading responses as well. Ultimately, this project contends that because reading, like writing, is a situated, social activity mediated by tools and technologies, attention to reading must engage with all aspects of its meaning making.University of Delaware, Department of EnglishPh.D