“You Don’t Read a Science Book, You Study It”: An Exploration of Cultural Concepts of Reading

Jim Anderson
Lee Gunderson

Recent models and theories of reading instruction support interactive and transactional views that posit the importance of social interaction and authentic experiences in literacy teaching and learning (see, for example, Rosenblatt, 1978; Rummelhart, 1985; Shannon, 1989). However, the popular press, parents, and policy makers -- along with some reading educators -- may adhere to models of reading that endorse sequential instruction based on specific skills or “drill and practice” viewpoints. Thus, there is potential discord between what “counts” as reading education between and among parents, teachers, and students.

We believe the theories explicitly or implicitly held by teachers influence directly the way they teach, and the way their students come to view reading (see also Leu & Kinzer, 2000, online abstract). Differences in views about what constitutes reading and reading instruction -- whether of traditional print-based materials or in online environments -- often lead to acrimony and hostility among researchers, politicians, policy makers, legislators, administrators, teachers, students, and parents (Gunderson, 1997). These views also vary greatly by culture and cultural background. In this article we discuss how the differing views held by teachers and immigrant parents and their children affect early reading instruction, secondary content reading, and reading involving technology.

How Do Immigrant Parents’ Views Match Educators’ Perspectives on Emergent Reading?

Note, however, that some educators have cautioned that this commonly held view on emergent literacy is ethnocentric in that it describes literacy development in middle-class children (see, e.g., Katt, 1995; Reyes, 1992). We agree with Adams (1991) that the research base informing an emergent reading perspective continues to be narrow. Indeed, Anderson and Matthews (1999) found that kindergarten children from working-class homes in a rural area of Canada did not progress through the stages of emergent reading that Sulzby (1985) documented with the kindergarten children from middle-class homes with whom she worked.

The research in early literacy over the past three decades or so has shown that while children construct their own knowledge of reading, parents and other significant adults and family members play an important role in supporting children’s literacy development. But parents and families exist within particular cultures and, as Heath and Mangiola (1991) remind us, “all cultures have unique ways of transmitting background knowledge about the world and of asking their children to display what they know” (p. 14). During the past several years, we have interviewed parents from different ethnic and cultural groups about their views of early reading development and how they support their children’s early reading attempts. Many of these parents (as, indeed, many policy makers and nonimmigrant parents) think and behave in ways diametrically opposed to the perspective and approach to emergent reading widely pursued by their children's teachers.

As indicated earlier, one of the tenets of emergent reading is that children go through stages in which they engage in reading-like behavior. For example, children might use pictures, perhaps together with print cues, to retell familiar books repeatedly, with each subsequent retelling/rereading more closely resembling the text as written. But the parents with whom we worked tended not to see much value in these reading attempts. One Chinese parent, for example, commented, “It’s not real reading. It shows he’s just interested in the book.” Similarly, an East Indian parent commented, “Reading begins when they learn how to say the words correctly.”

The current perspective on emergent reading also encourages parents (and others) to reread favorite books to young children, which is thought to facilitate children's reading development. However, some of the parents we interviewed had different views of this practice. One of the East Indian parents stated, “It is not beneficial. [Parents should] read new stories which he [the child] hasn’t heard before.” Interestingly, one of the Chinese parents did think rereading was valuable, though not for the reasons held by emergent literacy theorists. “Have him memorize books by reading the same books over and over again,” this parent stated. As Ping (1995) explains, it is not uncommon in China for a reader to read a book 100 times in order to memorize it. Contextualizing reading from a Confucian perspective, Ping notes that, for the Chinese, knowledge can be directly extracted from books. Since learning is the accumulation of knowledge, most Chinese students focus on how much they have learned, not on how and when they are going to apply learning in practice. Therefore, they are often proud of the number of texts they have memorized. The purpose of repeated readings is thus seen as valuable in terms of memorization, rather than as a step in the process of acquiring literacy.

Research in family literacy reveals that preschool children’s literacy learning occurs as families engage in reading and writing together as they go about their daily lives (see, e.g., Taylor, 1983). As a consequence, in North America and elsewhere, reading education curricula in the early grades have moved to become more “authentic.” Many teachers at this level do not use workbooks (often seen as decontextualized and removed from real-world reading experiences) in their classrooms. However, the Chinese parents with whom we worked believed, as one parent said, that “children need them.” Another parent noted that “in the beginning period he needs them [workbooks]. When he gets familiar [with reading], he won’t need them anymore.”

A similar inconsistency exists between many teachers’ and immigrant parents’ views on the acceptability of “invented spelling” in the primary grades. While most teachers believe that a child's early attempts at writing with invented spelling play an important role in writing development, many are also coming to see them as important for reading development. That is, there appears to be increasing recognition that, through the process of inventing spelling, children enhance their phonemic awareness and knowledge of symbol-sound relationships. However, nearly all the parents we interviewed were adamantly opposed to tolerating invented spelling. For example, one of the East Indian parents remarked, “It’s important to learn correct spelling first [before the child attempts to write notes, stories, and so forth]. If a child gets used to writing anything, they will learn the wrong spelling.” In response to the question, “Would you correct your 5-year-old child who spells the word cat ‘k-t’?,” a Chinese parent emphatically responded, “ ‘C-a-t’ is right and ‘k-t’ is wrong.”

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How Do Immigrant Students’ Views Match Educators’ Perspectives on Secondary Content Reading?

To this point we have discussed immigrant parents’ views of reading and how these match or diverge from teachers’ views. Our studies have also revealed that the views of teachers might also differ from those of immigrant students, especially those in secondary schools.

Most educators and parents believe that reading and writing are central to success in school. For immigrant students who are learning the language of instruction in their new school environment, development of second-language (L2) oral and print literacy is viewed as critical. As Collier (1987) points out, “Language is the focus of every content-area task, with all meaning and all demonstration of knowledge expressed through oral and written forms of language.” Secondary students would appear to be most at risk academically since they often have difficulty with L2 acquisition. Gunderson (2000) explored the views on school and schooling of secondary students who were learning English as a second language (ESL). He used a structured protocol to interview approximately 400 Grade 8 to 12 students (aged approximately 13 to 17 years). Prompts included

• Do you enjoy reading first language (L1) or second language (L2)?
• For what purpose do you read (pleasure, study)?
• What do you read (L1 and L2)?
• How many hours a day do you read (L1 and L2)?

Students were encouraged to explain and expand their initial comments, and interviewers always sought explanations and expansions of answers when they did not appear to make sense or were terse.

Students were clear in their views of what constituted reading and what did not, and their views were surprising. They indicated that they “studied” about 4 hours a day, but only “read” on average 5 to 10 minutes a day. This was a mystery until the students explained that reading was something they did almost always for pleasure (involving comic books, magazines, or newspapers), and that what they did with schoolbooks was study. For these students, reading a social studies or science text -- or any kind of academic book -- was not reading, but studying. One tenth-grade student from Hong Kong reported that she “looked at the book and said the words out loud over and over again” until she could remember them. Several students stated that studying a textbook meant scanning the content to isolate items they thought would be on a test. We have subsequently found that in the Chinese language, different orthographies are used to convey the sense of reading for pleasure and reading to learn.

We also asked the secondary students whether knowing how to read a first language (L1) was helpful in reading English. We expected that individuals whose first language was nonalphabetic would indicate it was not helpful, while those whose first language was alphabetic would find it helpful. To our surprise, about 80 percent overall indicated that knowing how to read in a first language helped them read in English. Follow-up comments, however, suggested some fascinating differences among speakers of different languages. Speakers of alphabetic languages such as Spanish and Tagalog concluded it was helpful to know how to read their first language because the sounds and letters were similar in English and there were cognates. A twelfth-grade Tagalog speaker, for instance, reported that he had an advantage over some of his peers in learning English “because a lot of the words were similar in the two languages and I can guess.” Speakers of nonalphabetic languages such as Mandarin, Cantonese, Kurdish, Tamil, and Malayalam also maintained that knowing how to read L1 was helpful, but for them the usefulness was found in their ability to use bilingual dictionaries. “It’s good to know to read Chinese because I can look up English words in my Chinese-English dictionary,” noted one Cantonese-speaking twelfth grader.

Seventy-four percent of the secondary ESL students had a view of reading that differed from their teachers’ views. Reading, the kind done independently, was for pleasure or because “it makes me happy,” while reading a textbook was studying or “finding the test stuff.” It is clear to us that this is a deeply ingrained cultural view learned from parents and from the teaching methodologies these students experienced in classrooms in their native countries, methodologies that often focus on rote memorization and support a view of reading as involving spoken reproduction of printed words. These students’ view of reading focused on word-level processing -- a view quite different from their teachers’ conception of reading for expression, meaning making, and communication.

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How Do Immigrant Students and Parents View the Role of Technology in Reading?

From our continuing work with immigrant parents of young children (e.g., Anderson & Morrison, in press), we have learned that though most are very interested in technology, many do not have access to computers and the Internet. At a recent orientation meeting with 25 parents with whom we will be working in a family literacy program, several asked if they would have a chance to work with computers. Others lamented that they do not have computers at home and feel that their children are being left behind as a result. Though many had not worked with computers themselves, they did know that the popular view holds that technology is important to teaching and learning, and that technology skills are critical for employment.

Of course, technology does not mean only computers. Immigrant parents often say that they encourage their children to watch television because it helps them learn the new language, which, in turn, will help with L2 literacy acquisition (Anderson, 1995). Although many educators see television as anathema as far as children’s literacy learning is concerned, perhaps we need to consider these parents' insightfulness and pragmatism before we admonish them to turn off the television so that their children will read.

It is important to remember that during the 1960s television was viewed as a significant tool for teaching and learning (Cuban, 1986; McLuhan, 1964). One of us (Lee Gunderson) taught in a California school district at that time, where considerable money was spent to make certain all classrooms had access to instructional programs on television. The enthusiasm for television as educational technology appears to have waned somewhat, but perhaps we should rethink the contributions television could make if used in thoughtful ways in the classroom.

Today, of course, technology has come to mean computers and the Internet almost by default. We wonder, however, how these more current technological innovations will fare in classrooms and whether, in terms of educational use, they will meet the same fate as television. About half the secondary students we interviewed reported that they neither read nor studied information on the Internet; rather, accessing the Internet was viewed as a purely recreational activity, used for playing games or listening to, viewing, and downloading music, music videos, or film clips. No one in the study reported that the Internet involved reading, but about 60 percent indicated that they used the Internet to find material “to do reports.” It was disturbing for us to be told by about half these students that material on the Internet belonged to everyone -- that it was “stuff you can use because no one really owns it.”

In an earlier study concerned with access to the Internet, we concluded that it “has the potential for opening up vast teaching and learning possibilities for students and teachers” (Gunderson & Anderson, 1999, p. 9). We also concluded, however, that “change will be limited to those who have access.” Only about one-third of the secondary students indicated that they had access to the Internet at home, though all indicated they had access (sometimes limited) at school. Indeed, access issues have become less of a concern in recent years. Reports on computer ownership and use in the United States indicate that the gap in access is narrowing, with well over 70 percent of students reporting daily use of computers in schools (Kominski & Newburger, 1999, online PDF document; National Center for Education Statistics, 1999, online document). Even though access at home for immigrant children might be far from universal, public venues -- churches, community centers, after-school programs, public and school libraries -- are increasingly making Internet-connected computers available, and the growing market for low-cost, used (yet functional) computers is providing increased access for all members of society.

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What Can Teachers Do?

Many students, both native-born and immigrant, fail to learn to read and write and to achieve academically. Though numerous suggestions have been made about the reasons for such failure, we believe that in many cases, immigrant students particularly fail because there is a significant discrepancy in beliefs about teaching and learning among students, parents, and teachers. The discrepancy contributes to the difficulties encountered in school by students at all ages and grade levels. Gunderson (2000) notes:

As teachers we are convinced that what we teach, like English, math, physics, science, literature, and geography, is purely academic and objective. It is not. Indeed, our choice of what to teach is determined by local or regional political processes. The way we teach, how we view and interact with students, how they view and interact with us as teachers, and how parents view the relationship between school and home, are determined by processes informed by beliefs and values that exist within our culture. Immigrant students and parents often have different views and beliefs, those they have assumed are “normal.” The expectations for and about school and schooling are part of their cultural backgrounds. These differences can cause considerable difficulties for students, parents, and teachers....

[I]f secondary teachers do not take an interest in their students’ languages and cultures, then students will continue to fail to learn the academic content their teachers value so highly. (pp. 703-705).

We need to remember that many immigrant parents, such as those with whom we worked, are literate in their first languages and that literacy and education have been prized and valued in their cultures for centuries. However, many of these parents (and their older children) learned to read and write in their native countries in ways that we may think of as quaint, ineffective, or boring. We believe that educators need to respect and support parents’ efforts to help their children learn to read and write, even though what they do at home might not completely match what we do at school. We do not believe that parents will somehow impair children’s literacy learning if they emphasize committing texts to memory, have their children neatly copy texts, or ask them literal-level questions on texts just read or heard.

We also believe that attention must be paid to what parents tell us, and that we must adjust our instruction accordingly. For example, some educators are now questioning the appropriateness of using process-writing instruction across cultural groups and, indeed, are calling for instructional approaches that many progressive educators would decry (see, e.g., Delpit, 1995). However, we believe that it is imprudent to assume that there is a universal set of instructional strategies applicable to all contexts -- after all, such strategies are constructed within a particular ideological framework -- and, in many ways, we believe that such an assumption trivializes literacy learning and teaching. We concur with Delpit that we need to keep this in mind when teaching “other people’s children.”

We realize that what we are suggesting is hard and complicated work. Simply put, we do not believe that any single approach will work with all children; hence, we refrain from trying to be prescriptive here. We do know, however, that teachers working collaboratively as a group, and with the parents of their particular students, can begin to understand and address the literacy needs of their communities.

Students, parents, and teachers must come to understand that there are significant and basic differences in their views of teaching and learning, particularly as they relate to literacy. Making this statement is easy, while coming to a solution is difficult. Early and Gunderson (1993) suggest that one approach is to have teachers and students actually explore literacy practices to locate differences. We must continue to fight for recognition of and respect for the diverse ways in which literacy is learned and taught. Our work, we believe, will begin to inform educators of the issues we will continue to confront.

It is clear that computers and the Internet will need to play a part in immigrant children’s literacy learning. Teachers can use classroom technology in several ways with these students. First, computers and the Internet can facilitate communication and understanding among teachers and L1 and L2 students. Online translation services, at sites such as AltaVista World, can help teachers and students communicate, even though the translations provided are by no means perfect. And sites mounted by tourism ministries and bureaus in countries from which immigrants come can be used to educate all students in a class about the cultural backgrounds of newcomers (see, for example, the Korea National Tourism Organization and click on “About KOREA” for information about Korean history and culture, or visit the India Tourist Office's Welcome to India and click on “India Online” for similar information about India; for younger children, Kids Web Japan offers information about that country).

Second, teachers can elicit the help of community volunteers to enhance the presence of technology in their classrooms. Chavez (2000, online document) relates volunteer efforts enabled one school to acquire hardware and software specifically to address the needs of non-native English speakers.

Third, teachers can ensure that all students in their classrooms see the benefits of computer use for completing their assignments, perhaps through the use of WebQuests or Internet Activity, Internet Project, or Internet Workshop procedures (Leu & Leu, 2001). Doing so can facilitate the integration of immigrant children into the classroom community, celebrate their cultures, show how technology is useful in instruction, and let parents see that their children are being exposed to technology in the classroom.

There are also a number of Web sites related to second-language and ESL issues that are useful for students, parents, and teachers (see, for instance, www.eslmag.com). An interesting Web site, primarily for Chinese immigrant parents of very young children, is the Chinese Parents Resources Centres (in Chinese); the Asian/Pacific Pathway focuses specifically on the teaching and learning of Asian and Pacific students. There are many other resources in many different languages.

In conclusion, our work demonstrates that immigrant students and their parents hold different beliefs about reading and schooling than those held by many teachers. We believe that it is imperative that these groups begin to understand these different perceptions. While we do not think that the Internet is a panacea in this regard, we do see it as having potential, in ways such as those we have just described, for helping all of us develop more global understandings of literacy.

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References

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About the Authors

Jim Anderson is an associate professor and the graduate academic advisor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. His teaching and research interests are in early literacy and in family/community literacy. Reach him by e-mail at james.Anderson@ubc.ca.

Lee Gunderson is a professor and head of the Language and Literacy Education Department at the University of British Columbia, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in reading and second-language reading. He is the vice-president of the National Reading Conference and chairs the International Reading Association’s Evaluation Committee. His e-mail address is lee.gunderson@ubc.ca.

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Citation: Anderson, J., & Gunderson, L. (2001, February). “You don't read a science book, you study it”: Exploring cultural concepts of reading. Reading Online, 4(7). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/electronic/elec_index.asp?HREF=/electronic/anderson/index.html

Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted February 2001
© 2001 International Reading Association, Inc.   ISSN 1096-1232