How Literacy Practices Are Dialogic

By Author: Amelia.White
Total Articles: 41
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The second type of metaknowledge that literacy practices are dialogic rather than one-way transmissions of information—developed in the practice session in the following way. Karen's "pur-ah-tees" interpretation had been a dramatic demonstration of how reading involves interaction between the reader and the text. The way Karen had understood the text was not due to an inability to decode text. Because informational text in school science and mathematics is Merrell Boots considered to be objective and to have unambiguous meaning, this example showed how a reader's perspective and choices shaped her reading of text.

The realization of the importance of the interaction between reader and text was surprising to our preservice teachers. And because preservice teachers may fail to recognize the ways in which text in science and mathematics is dialogic, this experience provided them with a vivid example that reading is more than extracting meaning from text and that the reader's perspective shapes what is understood.

The preservice teachers ...
... found that, like Karen, how their students engaged with the tasks was related to how they made sense of the content. One student immediately suspected that the premise of the traditional task was false. Therefore, he "looked for ways to interpret the passage and graph as incorrect." For students who did not examine the premise, the approach could be quite different. For instance, Erin explained, "[one student] read exactly what was on the page and restated what she read or thought she read. The student did not try to interpret the graph." This student "did not once argue with [the claim] or question the data presented to her." The use of problematic content for the traditional task showed the preservice teachers that reading is a dialogic process that depends not only on the student's ability to decode text but also on how the student approaches the text.

Differences in approaches to text were even more striking in the Internet task. Each preservice teacher's report attempted to characterize either the success or failure of the student to conduct a fruitful search and to productively interpret information on websites. How this was done varied: Some students Merrell Shoes simply clicked the first website returned by the search engine, but others made selections from the search page. Some students selected the "cached" version of the search result because the search terms were highlighted on the linked page. Other students used the key combination "control + f" to immediately begin searching the linked page for their search terms.
Across the two tasks, the preservice teachers saw that how students engaged with the task shaped what meaning they made. Instead of a straightforward process of decoding text, a dynamic and idiosyncratic process was observed by the preservice teachers. As Jordan summarized in her report, "[It] was particularly interesting to see exactly how students gain information, decide whether the information is credible and whether the information is relevant to the task with which they are presented." It was clear to the preservice teachers that students engaged with the texts in multiple ways. The dialogic nature of literacy practices is metaknowledge similar to the third type we discuss—the contextual nature of literacy practices.