Chapter 6: Motivational and Cognitive Aspects of Culturally Accommodated Instruction: The Case of Reading Comprehension

Several years ago, I worked on a research project investigating literacy development of Latino bilingual students in special education settings. The particular classroom I was observing was a combined fourth-fifth grade special education “pull-out” classroom where students spent part of their school day. The classroom, school, and community were heavily populated by low-income Spanish-speaking students. Low English proficiency, pervasive poverty, gang problems, poorly trained teachers, and other factors all characterized this setting, and academic achievement was noticeably low.

Part of the task in this project was to observe the dynamics of the classroom and the work in which students engaged. Most of the work in literacy was taken from packaged commercial programs on a piecemeal basis, for example specific worksheets and exercises. On the particular day that I was observing, the task was to write a one paragraph essay about Abraham Lincoln. Rather than focus on the quality of the narrative, or an understanding of the significance of Lincoln’s life, or connections to relevant concepts such as democracy and freedom, points were awarded for specific structural features such as use of capital letters, headings, indenting paragraphs, and use of proper punctuation. While these writing conventions are clearly important to academic success, the academic work of these students was almost entirely focused on these low level mechanics. The nature of the topic, or connections to other areas of the curriculum or to literacy, was apparently not seen as necessary. What was missing from these repetitive exercises, from the students’ perspective, was purpose and connections to existing knowledge and interests. Without these features, the exercises were meaningless activities done, if at all, for teacher approval. One student in particular was especially disruptive in the classroom, often joking, moving around the room, conversing with other students. The three-sentence paragraph he produced in response to the Abraham Lincoln prompt was torturously produced in the span of 45 minutes, but with a great deal of teacher monitoring and threatening. Even in Spanish, which the teacher allowed, there were many errors in the student’s text.