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Current conversations about children’s literacy have focused on the need for more phonics and decoding instruction and have sidelined the importance of children’s language development, argues George Hruby. Language development involves more than the ability to decode written language. The ability to understand the meaning of those words is also important, and poor outcomes on reading assessments are not necessarily evidence of poor decoding skills. Hruby posits that comprehension follows a recursive trajectory that he calls ELIK in which students’ linguistic environment affects their language abilities which affects their intellectual growth, which affects their knowledge. Against this backdrop, a lack of attention to linguistic environment is an issue of equity, with children who grow up in less literacy-rich environments coming into school at a disadvantage.

This department explores critical perspectives on issues at the intersection of policy and practice in order to generate fresh questions about enduring dilemmas, new challenges, and debates.

In this review, we lay the groundwork for an interdisciplinary conversation between literacy education research and relevant neuroscience research. We review recent neuroscience research on correlates of proposed cognitive subprocesses in text decoding and reading comprehension and analyze some of the methodological and conceptual challenges of bridging neuroscience and literacy education research. We note that much more research on decoding processes in typically developing children is needed before profound implications for instruction can be expected. We also note that the diverse neural activity demonstrated in research on text comprehension contradicts our traditional categorical distinctions about the role of syntax, semantics, and discourse in meaning-making with language. We observe some of the debates within the neuroscience community regarding research design and statistical analysis and note two of the possibly competing theoretical frames for making sense of the brain and behavior. We conclude that contributions from neuroscience offer the possibility of interdisciplinary integration of brain, social, cognitive, and cultural perspectives in ways beneficial for reading education. (Contains 1 note and 2 figures.)

This department explores critical perspectives on issues at the intersection of policy and practice in order to generate fresh questions about enduring dilemmas, new challenges, and debates.

This department explores critical perspectives on issues at the intersection of policy and practice in order to generate fresh questions about enduring dilemmas, new challenges, and debates.

This department explores critical perspectives on issues at the intersection of policy and practice in order to generate fresh questions about enduring dilemmas, new challenges, and debates.

This department explores critical perspectives on issues at the intersection of policy and practice in order to generate fresh questions about enduring dilemmas, new challenges, and debates.

This department explores critical perspectives on issues at the intersection of policy and practice in order to generate fresh questions about enduring dilemmas, new challenges, and debates.

In this review, we lay the groundwork for an interdisciplinary conversation between literacy education research and relevant neuroscience research. We review recent neuroscience research on correlates of proposed cognitive subprocesses in text decoding and reading comprehension and analyze some of the methodological and conceptual challenges of bridging neuroscience and literacy education research. We note that much more research on decoding processes in typically developing children is needed before profound implications for instruction can be expected. We also note that the diverse neural activity demonstrated in research on text comprehension contradicts our traditional categorical distinctions about the role of syntax, semantics, and discourse in meaning-making with language. We observe some of the debates within the neuroscience community regarding research design and statistical analysis and note two of the possibly competing theoretical frames for making sense of the brain and behavior. We conclude that contributions from neuroscience offer the possibility of interdisciplinary integration of brain, social, cognitive, and cultural perspectives in ways beneficial for reading education.

In this review of literacy education research in North America over the past century, the authors examined the historical succession of theoretical frameworks on students' active participation in their own literacy learning, and in particular the metatheoretical assumptions that justify thos frameworks. The authors used motivation and engagement as focal topics by which to trace this history because of their conceptual proximity to active literacy participation. They mapped the uses of motivation and engagement in the major literacy journals and handbooks over th past century, constructed a grounded typology of theoretical assumptions about literate agency and its development to code those uses, and reviewed similar histories of theoretical frameworks in educational psychological, philosophical, and literary scholarship to draft a narrative history of the emergence of engaged literacies.