“Sense -making—The heart of the matter”: Exploring reading comprehension in various participation structures

Current federal education policy supports an autonomous model of literacy (Street, 1984) by focusing on the acquisition of decontextualized literacy skills and strategies without considering a sociocultural perspective on how students interact with texts. Within this narrow conception of literacy, reading comprehension is often reduced to a list of strategies students should employ while reading and discussing a text. However, students engage in various comprehension practices as they draw on their sociocultural resources during classroom-based literature discussions. This dissertation is a year long study in a third grade classroom that documents and examines how students construct meaning in three participation structures—Shared Reading, Guided Reading, and dialogically organized literature discussions (Nystrand, 1997) which utilize Shared Evaluation Pedagogy (Aukerman, 2007)—and explores the relationships between the structures and students\u27 comprehension practices. Drawing on the work of Vygotsky and Bakhtin, this study investigates how children grow into the intellectual life of those around them (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 88) and how dialogue shapes both language and thought (Bakhtin, 1981). Using interpretive research methods and teacher research, the study focuses on the sociocultural interactions that occurred when students and teacher discussed written text in order to better understand how these interactions influenced students\u27 construction of meaning. This study reconceptualizes reading comprehension as an ongoing, fluid, social, cognitive and linguistic process. By providing characterizations of reading comprehension for each structure, the study aims to further our understanding of the affordances and limitations of these participation structures in terms of students\u27 development of reading comprehension. I found that students learn what counts as comprehension and that they become skilled at delivering it. Three main conclusions from this research are: (a) reading comprehension should be reconceptualized as practice-oriented; (b) various participation structures enabled particular kinds of comprehension practices; and (c) when students were afforded textual agency, they collaboratively constructed new understandings