Reading Engagement And Multiliteracies

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TPISA 2000 report (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD], 2004) that surveyed 15-year-olds in 43 countries found that students' levels of reading engagement were more important than their socioeconomic backgrounds in predicting their literacy performance. The implication of this is all too clear--"cultivating a student's interest in reading can help overcome home disadvantages" (OECD, 2004, p. 8). In classrooms that have students who come from marginalized communities and have little access to resources that enable Links Of London Charms mainstream middle class students to succeed academically, his cultivation of interest in reading can help level the (laying field. Furthermore, these students' engagement in reading enables them to apprentice into social groups and networks in both the classroom and community, routes that might have otherwise been closed Gee, 2008; Guthrie, 2004).

In contrast to the assumption that reading is solely .n isolated activity, Guthrie (2004) argued that engaged reading is "often socially interactive" (p. ...
... 4). These interactions are clearly evident in the reading club, chat room, blog, and posting activities that lave flourished in the wake of recent phenomenally popular books among adolescent and adult readers, and Engaged reading followed by participation in these activities and others is a key to proficiency. In what Guthrie termed a spiraled process, reading engagement and achievement are mutually reinforcing, and intertwined in this spiral are students' senses of their identities as they increasingly see themselves as "readers who are learners and thinkers" in which literacy is internalized "as a part of who they are" (p. 6).

One approach that fosters reading engagement involves a pedagogy of multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996) with its four-dimensional instructional framework: situated practice, which draws in part from students' own life experiences overt instruction that introduces met languages to deconstruct the myriad and multimodal ways in which meaning is constructed; critical framing of the cultural and social context in which meaning is disseminated and understood; and (4) transformed practice that aims to re-situate all of these meaning-making practices to other cultural sites or contexts. Multiliteracies is defined as "the multiplicity of communication channels and media" and "the increasing salience of cultural and linguistic diversity" (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000, p. 5). Inasmuch as many students are already engaged in multimodal practices of meaning making (online role-playing games, text messaging, etc.), pedagogy of multiliteracies seeks to incorporate these important resources to construct knowledge in linguistically diverse classrooms. By foregrounding in the classroom substantive topics that can be related to students' own experiences, multiliteracies pedagogy works to promote learning that recognizes students' own knowledge resources, which in turn affirms students' identities as learners and thinkers.

Because meaning making has Links Of London Bracelets become increasingly multimodal, our definition of literacy needs to encompass not only the textual, but also the visual, the spatial, and the aural. The PISA 2000 report (OECD, 2004) highlighted that a key indicator of reading engagement and achievement among the 15-year-olds surveyed is the diversity of their reading content. Given the increasingly complex delivery systems of information in our globalized societies, it follows that the more students are exposed to and grounded in multiple modes of representation, the more they would appear to have a chance to succeed in school and beyond. One such multimodal text that is engaging to students is the graphic novel.