The role of culturally relevant texts and comprehension strategy instruction in the literacy engagement of African American adolescent males

Within the African American community, African American males, arguably, experience a great deal of difficulty in the current educational system (Biggs, 1992; Kleinfeld, 1998a, 1998b; Kunjufu, 2005; Tatum, 2003; Wynn, 1992; Wynn, 2005). This study seeks to examine the role of culturally relevant texts and comprehension strategy instruction in the literacy engagement of African American adolescent males. Following Garth-McCullough’s (2002) findings that highlight the positive correlation between African American students’ background knowledge and the comprehension of culturally relevant texts, this study modified Garth-McCullough’s (2002) design and explored nine, 9th grade private, boarding school African American male students’ reading comprehension and engagement with culturally relevant texts. The participants were divided into three groups. The control group received no comprehension strategy instruction. Group two received instruction on answering extended response questions and group three received instruction on how to complete a double-entry journal. All three groups read six texts, three texts were narrative and the other three were expository. Two of the texts were about European Americans, two about Mexican Americans, and the other two were about African Americans. For the purposes of this study, the texts that focused on African Americans were considered culturally relevant texts. Literacy engagement, with text, was defined, following Guthrie (1996) as the level of cognitive involvement invested to the reading process. Due to the complexity of literacy engagement, the data was collected five ways; The Silent Reading Behaviors Checklist (Kelley & Clausen-Grace, 2007; 2009), a modified version of the Performance Assessment of Engaged Reading (Guthrie, et al, 1996), a reading comprehension instrument, a post survey, and an interview. The findings suggest that the participants were the most engaged with a culturally relevant text. The findings also suggest that the participants that received comprehension strategy instruction were more engaged than those participants that did not. The participants that were the most engaged were those that received instruction on completing a double entry journal