Apprenticing Adolescent Readers: Developing Social Agency through Effective Text Processing Strategies View Digital Media

Workshop Presentation
Sharon Russell  

Society is bombarded with text written for myriad purposes. Adolescents are a particularly vulnerable and underserved population. Participation in our ever-changing society requires the ability to think critically with the multiple genres and styles of text. This proficiency relies on cognitive processing often overlooked in school: the development of knowledge about text and the requisite text negotiation strategies. To understand the challenges and requisite thinking processes involved in informational text processing, participants will engage in activities with text to uncover the automatic thought processes used by proficient readers and align those with the text-based comprehension roadblocks faced by readers who lack requisite strategic processing. Because genres demand varied thought processes, participants will consider multiple in-school and social media examples. The Adolescent Critical Reading Intervention framework (Russell, 2005) aligns carefully crafted questions with anticipated comprehension roadblocks using three research-based strategies. Questioning the Author (Beck, McKeown, & Sandora, 2020) encourages students to analyze and synthesize author’s choices, purposes, and stance text-based inferencing and matching a question to an answer (Raphael, 1986), affords readers a way to make inferences within and across sentences, paragraphs, and sections of text. Finally, text structure questioning encourages students to identify and unpack the relationship between the author’s choice of structure and the information it carries (Chambliss & Calfee, 1998; Meyer & Poon, 2001).