reading practices: from outside to inside the classroom

18 TESOL JOURNAL VOL. 12 NO. 3

L in,1 from China, has lived in Australia for 6 years. Shehas attended several classes through the Adult Mi-grant English Program (AMEP) and is now at the

intermediate level. In conversations at her home with herteacher, Judy Perkins, Lin highlighted what had helped herget started in literacy development.

She had to read a short simple book and give an oralpresentation about it . . . . When she told her teacher shecould not read it, the teacher spent some time with Lin,individually after class . . . . At first the teacher read aloudand Lin listened, frequently asking about vocabulary . . . .then Lin started to read aloud, very hesitantly at first, butwithin one session her speed increased and she stoppedtalking about the meanings of words so often. After three orfour sessions, she was reading much more fluently . . . . Linwent on to finish the book by herself in a few days. (Perkins,2000, p. 15)

Lin was one of the students from three differentlanguage groups who took part in an ethnographicallyoriented study on out-of-class literacy practices. Thestudents were current or recent ESOL students in theAMEP. Specifically, the aim of the study was to investigatethe nature of home reading practices in the L1 that stu-dents bring to the task of learning to read in an L2. Byjuxtaposing their L1 home reading practices with theirperceptions of their L2 reading experiences inside theclassroom, we hoped to gain student-oriented insightsabout classroom teaching for literacy development.

In terms of people’s daily literacy practices, recentresearch (e.g., Barton & Hamilton, 1998) recognizes thatreading is far more pervasive than writing. It is employedboth for learning (i.e., reading to learn) and action (i.e.,reading to do). It could be claimed, therefore, that its rolein language learning has been underestimated. In thisproject, our major focus was on people’s reading practices.

The study arose from the common interests of tworesearchers (myself and de Silva Joyce) and three teachers(Lahoud, O’Sullivan, and Perkins) in investigating thecultural and social reading practices of adult migrants incontexts outside the classroom. Although each of us hadspent several years teaching or researching L2 reading inESOL classrooms, we realized we had very limited knowl-edge of daily reading practices in the L1s and in Englishthat might be found within the family lives of AMEPstudents. We believed that understanding more about thesestudents’ interests and purposes for reading and the kinds

of texts they read would enhance our knowledge abouthow to teach reading more effectively (see Burns & deSilva Joyce, 2000).

A number of questions motivated our research:

• What were the common everyday reading practicesin family groups from different nationalities?

• What were the purposes for reading among thedifferent groups?

• What kinds of texts did the groups select forreading?

• What positive and negative learning experienceswere reported by the subjects?

• What implications for classroom teaching andlearning could be derived from the research?

The students we chose for the study came from threedifferent language and cultural backgrounds: Arabicspeakers from Lebanon, Chinese speakers from the People’sRepublic of China, and Spanish speakers from El Salvador.We based our choices partly on our experiences of teachingthese groups of students and, in one case, on the ability ofthe teacher (Lahoud) to interview students in their nativetongue.

The project aimed to reflect trends in the field of newliteracy studies that draw on ethnographic accounts of theliteracy practices of different community groups. Theresearch team had three further, more specific, overlapping

Reading Practices: FromOutside to Inside the ClassroomAnne Burns

Our reasons for shaping our insights for theclassroom from detailed descriptions of

students’ home reading practices were thatfew current approaches to teaching L2reading take these issues into account.

aims. The first was to develop descriptions of how studentsfrom three different cultural backgrounds use reading intheir daily lives. In pursuing this aim, we wanted to knowmore about how the reading practices of individuals relatedto and interacted with those of immediate family members.The second aim was to investigate student perceptions oflearning experiences in AMEP classrooms, specifically inrelation to reading. The descriptive accounts developedfrom these first two aims contributed to our third aim,which was to draw out implications for the teaching ofreading in AMEP classrooms.

19VOL. 12 NO. 3 TESOL JOURNAL

Our reasons for shaping our insights for the classroomfrom detailed descriptions of students’ home readingpractices were that few current approaches to teaching L2reading take these issues into account. We wished tocomplement pedagogical strategies developed for theteaching of reading in English with in-depth accounts oftheir own practices provided by AMEP students them-selves.

Drawing on New Literacy StudiesApproaches to literacy research emerging over the past 15years from sociolinguistic paradigms and referred to as newliteracy studies have argued for a focus on social perspec-tives. A central notion is that literacy is a socially situatedlanguage activity embedded within home, work, or educa-tional settings.

New literacy theorists (Barton, 1994; Cope &Kalantzis, 2000; Heath, 1983; Street, 1984) argue thatreading practices are inherently contextual, relative, andpluralistic, and need to be understood in relation to broadcultural and social roles and purposes. Different culturaland community-based perceptions of literacy lead todifferent ways of using and interpreting written texts, and,in turn, the particular kinds of meanings drawn from textsdepend upon the nature of the reading task in its socialcontext. A central idea is that reading is ideological rather

including literal and figurative meaningswithin the text.

Text user: The reader is concerned with what to doas a result of reading the text. Thisinvolves using the text in social situationsto achieve social purposes and participat-ing in events where written texts play apart.

Text analyst: The reader is concerned with how thetext attempts to position the reader andwhat viewpoints are absent from the text.This involves looking for implicit mean-ings, opinions, and biases, and eitherendorsing or rejecting the viewpointsexpressed in the text.

New literacy studies have developed as a field of research intheir own right. Various writers (e.g., Barton, 1994; Barton& Hamilton, 1998; Heath, 1983; Prinsloo & Breier, 1996;Street, 1993) have investigated how literacy interacts withpeople’s daily lives and what significance and value indi-viduals place upon it in terms of their social goals andpurposes. Some studies have highlighted the cultural andsocial practices of people operating in multilingual settings,looking at how literacy practices and meanings in onelanguage interact with those in another.

Using ethnographic methods, researchers are able tolook at literacy within its natural context. They are inter-ested in not only literacy practices, or “what people do withliteracy” (Barton & Hamilton, 1998, p. 6), but also in whatvalues, attitudes, feelings, and social relationships areinvolved in various literacies. Practices include people’s ownperspectives on literacy and its meaning in their daily lives.Also important are the daily events or repeated, routineactivities where literacy plays a role in the family or com-munity group.

Drawing on EthnographicMethodologyIn our project, we drew on a situated approach involvingrich descriptions about students, their families, and theirpersonal situations before and after arriving in Australia.We looked at how students’ L1 and L2 reading practiceshad changed, and were still changing, as a result of theirresettlement experiences. The following describe the threespecific data sources we used.

1. We conducted three home interviews with eachfamily from the three language backgrounds. Weselected families in which three generations wererepresented to gain a sense of how readingpractices and events impacted on overall familyliteracy. We also wanted to see how these practicescompared and differed across family groups andindividuals.

than autonomous (Street, 1984). Rather than being aneutral cognitive skill, it is situated in contexts of history,power, and culture. Teaching practices in this approachemphasize the reading of whole, socially authentic textsand equipping learners with the ability to question andanalyze the ideological messages of the text.

From this brief description, it can be said that readingis increasingly viewed as a complex mix of decoding skills,cognitive processes, and social experiences. Freebody andLuke (1990) explain this complexity by outlining fourinterconnected roles that skilled readers adopt when theyengage with text, which I describe below.

Code breaker: The reader is concerned with crackingthe code. This is a matter of understand-ing the symbolic graphic conventionsthat make up the code.

Text participant: The reader is concerned with the mean-ings within the text and how the textcorresponds to the reader’s experiencesand knowledge. This involves the waythe text is constructed to make meaning,

A central notion is that literacy is a sociallysituated language activity embedded

within home, work, or educational settings.


2. We analyzed the material read in the L1 and L2during 1 week, which students were asked torecord in a reading diary.

3. We conducted follow-up interviews with otherstudents from the same cultural and languagebackgrounds to gain broader perspectives on theissues raised in the first interviews and a greatersense of how individual or general the experienceswere.

We conducted our study over 6 months, with regularmeetings of the project team interspersed with periods ofdata collection and analysis. We focused on making thestudy descriptive and action-oriented by uncovering anddescribing everyday reading and identifying potentialchanges for classroom approaches from what we learnedabout students’ personal reading practices.

Introducing Joseph, Lin, and SusanThis section describes the main subjects within the threefamily groups we worked with. These accounts trace thefamilies’ typical reading practices and note how these werechanged or adapted as a result of their experiences ofmigration, language learning, and settlement.

Joseph

Joseph, a 45-year-old man, was a member of a largeextended family of 18 people from Jieh, in south Lebanon.The first family members arrived in Sydney in 1988 andthe remainder in 1990. Joseph and his wife, Wadad, hadfive children, the eldest of whom was his 15-year-old sonGeorge. The family lived with Helen, Joseph’s mother, onthe farm owned and run by the whole family on theoutskirts of Sydney. The family spoke Arabic at home, butused English with neighbors and for business. An impor-tant literacy practice in Arabic was keeping in touch withrelatives and friends in Lebanon through letters. Social liferevolved around the Maronite church as well as weddingsand cultural gatherings in their community.

Before coming to Australia, Joseph was a customsofficial in Beirut. He read a lot, mainly newspapers andmagazines, but also poetry. In Australia, his reading inArabic included newspapers, magazines, and letters. Healso read local English-language newspapers and TV guidesas well as various texts related to running his business, suchas labels, bills, letters, machine instructions, street directo-ries, seed catalogues, advertisements, and signs. Some ofthese texts he found difficult, particularly letters frombanks. He spent time discussing news items, bills, andletters with his wife and family as well as reading lettersand news to his mother, Helen, age 67. As she was notliterate in either Arabic or English, she relied on Joseph tokeep her up to date.

George received 2 years of primary education in

Lebanon. Now in Grade 10, he was fluent in English andArabic and was studying standard Arabic and the languageof media and literature in the Arabic world at his school,which offered instruction in these areas as well as inMaronite church teachings. He helped his parents withdifficult texts in English, such as letters and school reports.He spent many hours reading school texts, newspapers, andshort stories, and also enjoyed reading novels in his sparetime.

Both Joseph and Wadad attended AMEP classes onarrival in Australia. They commented that their oral andlistening skills improved markedly, but they did not feelthey had made good progress in literacy development.

Lin

Lin’s family consisted of her 6-year-old daughter, Susie, hermother, Jin Li, and her father, Dong. The family lived inan area with few Chinese, so Lin often acted as interpreter.Lin, a chemical engineer, had come to Australia to join herhusband, but her marriage had failed, and her parents hadjoined her to give her support. The family had experienceda rich reading life in China. Dong, an officer in a large citycouncil department, had read a wide range of work-relatedmaterials, and especially enjoyed reading newspapers andfamous Chinese classical novels. Jin Li, a former kindergar-ten principal, read newspapers and magazines, classical andother novels, biographies, and Chinese editions of TheReaders’ Digest. Apart from workplace documents, Linherself often read novels and magazines about health,beauty, and fashion.

In Australia, the family’s reading life had becomedrastically altered. The few books they had were those theyhad managed to bring from China—three favorite classicalnovels, a recipe book, books on food and health and onchild health and development. Jin Li had brought Chinesepicture books and cards containing Chinese characters forSusie, and spent considerable time reading to her. Readingin English was limited: Jin Li could now read the alphabet,and Dong had learned to negotiate the TV guide.

Lin was articulate about her literacy learning needs inAMEP classes. First, she wanted to read more, but she hadno idea what to read. Reading aloud had helped her finisha book, and she had felt a great sense of achievement. Shewanted her teachers to help her select appropriate readingmaterials. None of her teachers had done this. Second, shewanted her teachers to focus more on vocabulary learningstrategies. She had found that knowing about prefixes,suffixes, and root words, for instance, was very helpful, andwanted more explicit vocabulary teaching to meet what shesaw as one of her biggest challenges as a reader. Third, nowthat she was more advanced, she wanted to develop betterresearch skills to help her locate information throughsources such as the library and the Internet. She had begunto do this in her new class, which was offering her newpossibilities and building her self-confidence.


Susan

Susan and her family came to Hobart, Tasmania, in 1991,as El Salvadorean refugees fleeing religious persecution. Shewas interviewed with her daughter, Dorothy. Susan’s formaleducation had not extended beyond Grade 4 of primaryschool. Nevertheless, her association with the Jehovah’sWitness Fellowship in El Salvador, through which shevisited homes and preached religious messages, had donemuch to improve her literacy skills. The reading demandsof constant Bible study, ministry broadsheets, and maga-zines meant that she considered herself a good reader inSpanish. She had had little time or interest in reading forpleasure and found ideas expressed in fiction to be “a littlecrazy.”

In Australia, Susan’s reading in Spanish continued tobe church related, and the books in her home were almostentirely related to her faith. At church, she participated indiscussions in English about this material, but often sanghymns in Spanish using her own hymn book. In contrast,reading in English consisted mainly of practical texts, suchas business letters, supermarket labels, and timetables, butshe also liked to read “Lady Diana stories” in magazines.

Susan’s daughter, Dorothy, married Juan and left schoolin El Salvador before completing her high school diploma.There, Dorothy had enjoyed reading fiction for pleasure,such as short novellas, longer novels, and comics. She alsoread newspapers regularly. In Australia, her daughter, Jane,had occupied much of her time, and she now had a newbaby to care for. She read a lot of information in Englishfrom the baby clinic as well as other practically relatedmaterial, such as mail advertisements and business letters.For pleasure, she read women’s magazines and newspapers.Both Susan and Dorothy took great interest in helping Janewith homework and encouraged her to read in bothlanguages. Susan’s main desire was to see her grandchildrengain good jobs through education. Dorothy felt that Janewas progressing well at school, showed great interest in herschool program, and was completely bilingual, speakingand reading Spanish at home.

In relation to formal English learning, Susan, who wascurrently attending a work-focused AMEP course, felt thather progress had been painfully slow, interrupted by illhealth and feelings of homesickness and loneliness. Interms of literacy development, she had made only limitedprogress. In contrast, Dorothy’s classes had given herconfidence in her literacy abilities, despite occasionaldifficulties reading formal letters from Jane’s school orgovernment departments. When this occurred, she con-sulted a dictionary or received help from one of heryounger sisters.

Experiencing L1 and L2 ReadingOne overall pattern that emerges from these accounts isthat, in numerous ways, the migration of Joseph, Lin, andSusan had delimited their L1 reading practices, particularly

their ability to read widely for pleasure. Joseph no longerread texts in French or poetry as he had done previously.Lin was severely limited in her access to Chinese novels,apart from those in the home. The rich literacy develop-ment in Spanish that Susan gained by reading the Bible asan active part of her church advocacy had been curtailed.

Similarly, the texts all three read in English character-ized the students more as text users than as the text partici-pants or text analysts (Freebody & Luke, 1990) they hadpreviously been. They focused mainly on practical orfunctional reading practices, for example, in Joseph’s case,reading business and other formal letters, bills, and ma-chine instructions.

Joseph, Lin, and Susan seemed to have experiencedtwo kinds of reading losses in their transitions from mothertongue to English literacy. First was the loss of reading forself, where L2 reading no longer pervaded their individuallives in the same way as when they lived in their L1contexts. Second was the loss of reading for contact, wherereading to gain knowledge and to connect with the broaderlocal community and the world was curtailed. Their accessto L1 materials was limited, and difficulties with meaningand interpretation limited their access to L2 materials.

On the other hand, the research highlighted the rangeand nature of the reading practices undertaken by thefamilies. The most significant aspect was the intimaterelationships between the reading practices and the readers’major social interests and concerns (e.g., educating theirchildren, running their businesses, practicing their religiousfaiths, maintaining contact with families back home) andtheir personal interests (e.g., farming, childcare, health,beauty). It also highlighted the main areas in which thefamilies had difficulties in reading English, mainly unfamil-iar vocabulary and formal written correspondence (e.g.,letters from government agencies, such as the tax office orsocial security department) as well as the strategies theyadopted to overcome them (e.g., using bilingual dictionar-ies and consulting family members, community members,and community organizations).

Such insights into the significance of literacy inpeople’s lives outside the classroom raise important ques-tions: What are the implications for classroom readingpractices? What are the implications for teaching reading?

Renewing Concepts About LiteracyTeaching: Insights From LearnersTo gain further perspectives on the responses furnished bythe family case studies, we interviewed 7–10 other AMEPstudents from each of the same language backgroundsabout their experiences of learning to read. Some of thedistinct themes that emerged led us to reconsider ourassumptions about students’ classroom reading develop-ment.

First, students, even at beginning levels, were notparticularly interested in reading the kinds of short textsaccompanied by questions designed for language learners.


Several students expressed a strong desire to read materialthat would connect them with local and internationalevents. They wanted to learn “how the system works” inAustralia so that they could feel more a part of communitylife. Some indicated that they valued having teachers bringa range of texts to class to discuss their purposes andaudiences, as this exposed them to reading possibilities andviewpoints. As one student said, “We can read about anytopic—shopping, government, council, local area. We don’tknow about council, where we live, what is there.”

until recently been a relatively neglected area in languageteaching. However, its significance in the eyes of thesestudents was considerable. They wanted teachers to assistthem with strategies to learn vocabulary, to understandhow words are formed and word units combined, andwhich items of vocabulary they should focus on forfrequent usage.

Renewing Concepts About LiteracyTeaching: Suggestions for TeachersIt is now a truism in our field that good teaching practiceis learner centered. However, the concept of learner-centeredness in much of the literature might be toonarrowly limited to what centers on learners inside theclassroom—diagnosing their overall language proficiency,analyzing their reading comprehension skills, and discuss-ing skills and strategies for reading. As our research shows,centering on learners’ practices outside the classroom canprovide rich insights about personal reading histories, thenature of L1 and L2 reading, learners’ reading interests,and what motivates them to read. Thus, teaching practicescan become learner mediated as well as learner centered.

To explore learners’ reading experiences, classroomdiscussions could include some of the questions posed inthis research, such as the following.

• How did you learn to read (i.e., what are yourmemories of learning to read) in your own lan-guage?

• What did or what do you enjoy reading for leisure(as a child or as an adult)?

• What kind of reading did or does your workinvolve?

• What kinds of reading did or do you need to do indaily life? How easy or difficult is this?

• Do you read to or with anyone else? In what typesof situations does this happen?

• What kinds of texts do members of your familyread? Which do they enjoy most?

• In your country, how much do people seem to readin general and what kinds of texts?

• What kinds of texts do you read in English? Whatwould you like to be able to read?

• What questions or problems do you have in findingmaterials you would like to read in English?

Teachers can also ask students to keep a simple readingdiary over a period of time to reveal and compare the kindsof texts read among the class. We used versions of thetemplate in Table 1 (p. 23) to solicit this information.

Literacy is intimately bound up with theirlives outside the classroom in numerous andcomplex cultural, social, and personal ways

that affect their L1 and L2 identities.

A third (and surprising) theme was thatstudents were almost unanimous in their

desire for teachers to read aloud to them.

There were other pedagogical insights. Some studentsindicated that they were unsure when and whether teach-ing focused on literacy development. They knew thatreading was being practiced, but often it was mixed withworksheet and textbook writing activities. They were notsure when an activity was specifically for reading develop-ment purposes. They wanted teachers to be literacy men-tors, indicating clearly when an activity focused on readingor writing. Another desired aspect of mentoring was thatteachers should be reading guides and advisors, introducingthem explicitly to English texts through which they couldreplicate some of their L1 reading practices. Lin, forexample, wanted to know where she could go to findcertain kinds of L1 and L2 reading materials and how shecould select materials of interest to her.

A third (and surprising) theme was that students werealmost unanimous in their desire for teachers to read aloudto them. Reading aloud has something of an old-fashionedfeel for many ESOL teachers, but students clearly valuedthe opportunity to hear fluent reading in English, to listento the written word, to hear correct stress and intonationpatterns, and to learn new vocabulary. Possibly this wasbecause listening to someone read helped counteractdifficulties they experienced when reading to themselvesand gave them opportunities to enhance their own pronun-ciation and intonation skills by listening to a nativespeaker. Several students commented that reading aloudhelped improve their speaking and listening abilities.

In early learning especially, students wanted interestingfictional and nonfictional texts within their reading capa-bilities that were written specifically for ESOL learners andthat controlled the amount of new vocabulary and gram-mar. Finishing such texts gave students a strong sense ofachievement and motivation to continue reading. Thisraises the issue of the importance of “language learnerliterature” (Bamford & Day, 1998, p. 748) in the readingclassroom and challenges teachers to think carefully aboutthe kinds of authentic texts they are using.

The fifth theme was the significant role that vocabularyplays in literacy development. Vocabulary development has


ConclusionThis research raises awareness of the role of reading instudents’ daily lives. At any stage of learning, students donot come to us as blank slates, and their literacy practicesare not fixed. Literacy is intimately bound up with theirlives outside the classroom in numerous and complexcultural, social, and personal ways that affect their L1 andL2 identities. Taking time through classroom activities toexplore students’ reading practices and preferences offersnumerous insights. As one of the teachers involved in thisproject stated:

It is clear that assumptions cannot be made about thereading needs of students. Therefore it is necessary to planclassroom teaching and learning activities after consultationwith students as to what specific needs they have in reading.(Lahoud, 2000, p. 11)

Acknowledgment

I wish to thank the Australian Commonwealth Department ofImmigration, Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs for fundingthis research project.

Note1 The names of all students and their family members in this

article are pseudonyms.

References

Bamford, J., & Day, R. (1998). Comments on Jeong-Won Leeand Dianne Lemonnier Schallert’s “The relative contributionof L2 proficiency and L1 reading ability to L2 readingperformance: A test of the threshold hypothesis in an EFLcontext”: Two readers react. TESOL Quarterly, 32, 747–749.

Barton, D. (1994). Literacy: An introduction to the ecology ofwritten language. Oxford: Blackwell.

Barton, D., & Hamilton, M. (1998). Local literacies: Reading andwriting in one community. London: Routledge.

Burns, A., & de Silva Joyce, H. (Eds.). (2000). Teachers’ voices 5:A new look at reading practices. Sydney, New South Wales,Australia: Macquarie University, National Centre for EnglishLanguage Teaching and Research.

Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (Eds.). (2000). Multiliteracies. SouthYarra, Victoria, Australia: Macmillan.

Freebody, P., & Luke, A. (1990). “Literacies” programs: Debatesand demands in cultural context. Prospect, 53(3), 7–16.

Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Lahoud, H. (2000). Reading practices of students from Lebanon.In A. Burns & H. de Silva Joyce (Eds.), Teachers’ voices 5: Anew look at reading practices (pp. 3–11). Sydney, New SouthWales, Australia: Macquarie University, National Centre forEnglish Language Teaching and Research.

Perkins, J. (2000). Reading practices of Chinese-speakingstudents. In A. Burns & H. de Silva Joyce (Eds.), Teachers’voices 5: A new look at reading practices (pp. 12–23). Sydney,New South Wales, Australia: Macquarie University, NationalCentre for English Language Teaching and Research.

Prinsloo, M., & Breier, M. (Eds). (1996). The social uses ofliteracy: Theory and practice in contemporary South Africa.Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Street, B. (1984). Literacy in theory and practice. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Street, B. (Ed.). (1993). Cross-cultural approaches to literacy.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Author

Anne Burns is dean of the Division of Linguistics and Psychology atMacquarie University, in Sydney, Australia, where she teaches in theApplied Linguistics master’s and PhD programs.

Table 1: Sample Template for Soliciting Information About Students’ Home Reading Practices

Texts Did I read this Did I read this in For how long Did I discuss whattoday? my native language did I read? I read with others?

or in English?

Newspapers

Magazines

Materials from school

Materials from work

Novels or short stories

Textbooks

Other

reading practices: from outside to inside the classroom

Documents