Melissa Anderson

TE 843

March 3, 2017

Literacy Inquiry Project

INTRODUCTION

Over the three years that I have been a teacher, I have really tried to

push for more reading of literature within my English classroom. I love books

and I truly believe that this love has made me a smarter, more

compassionate human being as you learn about different lives, experiences,

and ways of thinking from different novels that you may read. I have been

constantly trying to figure out how to make students pick up more novels

and want to read because so many of my students dont do the assigned

reading. This project gave me a way to figure out what makes my students

read and what they like to read. I wanted to see what they read, how often

they read, and how they think that schools could do a better job of making

students want to read novels and literature.

I used inquiry in the hopes of establishing answers to these questions

through a Google Form that students were asked to complete. This Google

Form had 18 questions regarding different aspects of their literary practices.

Some questions included: What can teachers do to make students more

engaged in reading?, What would make you read more?, Why do you like

to read?, Do your parents read?, What types of books/genres do you

read?, How often do you read?, etc. I also included a few questions about
their writing habits outside of school. The link to my full survey can be found

here(https://goo.gl/forms/FYXnyc0JlgUz3DEM2).

I teach at Woodhaven High School in Woodhaven, MI, which is a

southern suburb of Detroit. We are a large high school for the area with over

1200 students in enrollment in the tenth through twelfth grades. We have a

majority white school, but we have many African American, Asian, Latino,

and Arabic students. The community is relatively middle class with the

median household income around $55,000 per year, slightly above the

Michigan average (citydata.com). However, we are a school of choice school,

so our student population represents a diverse socio-economic spectrum and

we have many students on free/reduced lunch.

For this project, I had students in my Young Adult Literature class

participate in the survey. This class is an elective, with only 20 students

enrolled this semester. Since this is an elective, most of these students are

already taking AP classes, so they are the highly motivated students in my

school and most of them are avid readers already. I chose to look at this

class, rather than my other classes, because I felt like avid readers would

give legitimate reasons and responses about how to increase student

engagement in a text and student participation in reading, rather than a

student who never reads in the first place that will just usually say I hate

reading if you ask them anything about reading. I wanted to question

students who would take the survey seriously and give me honest and

intelligent responses.
PART ONE: DATA

I received seventeen responses to my survey, due to the fact that

three students were absent the day that I gave it in class. My class is

predominately female, so my results may be slightly swayed by gender, but

in the case of these questions, I really dont think that it makes a huge

difference in gender biases. I had fifteen female responses and two male

responses. When asked how many books students have read in their lives,

the majority of females answered over 100, with three saying they have read

more than 200. The male responses were in the lower group, citing that they

had only read between 50-100 books in their lives. The majority of students

said they liked to read, again, all of my students surveyed have admitted to

being avid readers. Most of the responses cited that they enjoyed reading

some type of fiction, especially young adult, with most students saying they

enjoy reading for pleasure doing summer vacation at home or in their

bedrooms. 52% of my students said they read two to three times per week,

with 38% of my students saying they read whenever they get a chance.

Novels were read the most frequently during the week by students. The two

charts below also show other options that my students enjoy reading.
 Figure 1

Figure 2

When asked of their writing habits, most students say they write

primarily for school work, text messages, or social media posts (see Figure 3

below). This doesnt really surprise me based on todays teenage society

being constantly attached to their phones.

 Figure 3

The most enlightening questions were the last three I asked which

were Why/why not do you like being forced to read for school?, What can

teachers do to make students more engaged in reading? and What would

make you read more?. These two questions allowed for students to express

their frustrations with reading and provide input into how teachers can make

classes more engaging. To the first question, I received a variety of answers.

The overall consensus was that it was boring, teachers dont assign books

students want to read, they have other homework, the books teachers assign

are bad, and they feel rushed when they like to read at their own pace. To

make students more engaged, students responded with suggestions of

giving students more time to read, choose books that are more recently

published, let us pick novels to read, assign fun projects, and have book

groups. More time, choosing novels, interesting books, and less homework.

PART TWO: REFLECTION

 My literacy goals for my students include having them enjoy reading

and want to read more in their spare time. I want to find a way to engage my

students in this practice of enjoying the books they read and being excited

about reading. So many of my students dont read or dont like to read. I

would love to find a way to connect the curriculum we teach to more modern

novels that will better engage students in topics. The idea that many schools

are shifting their curricular focus away from teaching the text and more

focused on teaching thematic inquiry based units is a great start to

increasing engagement, but I would love to do more. I think students should

also be reading independent novels of their choosing to better increase

student learning. The idea that many of the novels that are in curriculum are

written by people that students dont relate to or come from a different

Discourse than them prevents students from understanding or enjoying

these novels that were written hundreds of years ago. We need to be able to

expand our curriculum away from these literary classics and focus on more

modern texts and modern issues to truly engage students into our classes. If

students like their English classes, then maybe they will be more willing to

pick up a novel to read in their own time from another author. Overall, I just

want students to see the benefits of reading and the value of literature

overall. This is truly our job as English teachers.

PART THREE: SUMMARY

The responses that I received throughout my inquiry were not surprising to

me. Again, the students I surveyed are students who are excellent workers

and took an elective class about English. They enjoy reading and this idea is

reflected throughout their responses. They were overall very positive about

their reading experiences and they value reading and literature. The only

negative aspects were when talking about reading for school. These

responses reflected what I hear from many of my students regarding being

overworked with homework and wanting to choose their own novels.

Students are not enjoying the majority of novels that we force them to read

in the curriculum because to them, they see no connection between these

novels and their everyday lives as teenagers in 2017. Teachers need to work

to improve this issue and either shift towards a more inquiry based study of

classical texts to keep students engaged, or think about this when we are

redesigning curriculum and choosing texts for new curricular units.

Many of my students expressed that they wanted more choice in their

literacy practices and I think this is a good tool to use. Have students choose

what novel they want to read, or have a class vote on the book they want to

read. This makes them personally invested in the novel, because they had a

say in what it was. This can be the same for doing project based learning and

giving students options on projects to complete to show their understanding

and mastery of a skill. If students believe they have a choice, they are more

engaged in executing that choice effectively. We also need to respect that

students take more than one class, and that sometimes students do have a
lot of homework. Giving students time to read in class or a calendar of

reading dates, may increase student engagement because they know how to

keep pace with the class and may not feel as overwhelmed if they only know

about the reading the day before. This inquiry has just confirmed my beliefs

that we need to create more curricular units similar to the ones that Jeffrey D

Wilhelm proposes in his book Engaging Readers & Writers with Inquiry.

These units of inquiry can be used with the common canonical texts that are

in many schools curriculum, but they are focused around inquiry based

questions that bring these texts into the twenty-first century.

I stated previously how many students dont feel connection to these

texts because of the different discourse that the text is written in. With this

new inquiry based units, the text isnt a focus, its a compliment to a larger

unit and this way you can use discourses from multiple resources and time

periods to increase student engagements. Margaret Haygood in her essay

Using Discourse Study as an Instructional Practice discusses how

Discourse juxtaposition of contemporary print and non-print texts across

Discourses helps adolescents develop deeper knowledge and understandings

of their own and others literacies. Our job as English teachers is to educate

young readers on the skills needed to be strong readers and to be able to

analyze documents for their real life. But, in reality, I believe the job of an

English teacher is more than that. It is a segment of what Haygood says. We

need to use multiple perspectives, texts, discourses, and media to teach

students about other experiences than their own and see how these
experiences can relate to their lives. This makes them better individuals

suited to fit into the global society that we live in. While my students asked

repeatedly in the survey for more choice in their readings. This could be easy

to do if you model your units like Wilhelms as thematic concepts. Multiple

students could read their choice of text in a set theme and then discuss in

class around this common theme through different discourses. These

practices will increase in student interest and engagement in the classroom.

 Works Cited

Hagood, M. Using Discourse Study as an Instructional Practice to Develop 21st-Century

Literacies of Critically Conscious Citizens. in Hinchman, K.A., & Sheridan-Thomas, H.K. (Eds.).
(2014). Best practices in adolescent literacy instruction. New York: Guilford Press.

Wilhelm, J. (2007). Engaging readers and writers with inquiry: Promoting deep
understandings in language arts and the content areas with guiding questions. New York:
Scholastic.