Perceptions of Beginning Readers: Those Who Struggle and Those Who Succeed

Statement of the problem. Viewing beginning readers through the lens of Vygotsky's (1978) notion of semiotic mediation, learning to read is a complex process in which meanings are not only encoded in print but shaped by the social and cultural experiences of the reader, the text, and the context in which the reading takes place. The purpose of this case study was to gain a holistic picture of four beginning readers of varying ability levels as they engage in literacy-learning activities in a first grade classroom and to answer the following questions, giving voice to each child as a beginning reader: (1) How do beginning readers perceive the nature of reading? (a) How do these perceptions differ according to reading ability? (2) What meanings do beginning readers construct from their literacy-learning experiences? (a) How do these perceptions differ according to reading ability? Sample. Two successful beginning readers and two struggling beginning readers in a first grade classroom were selected based on fall benchmark assessments and in-class performance as observed by the teacher. Efforts were made to balance the sample according to gender, SES, and ethnicity. Methods. Students were observed one day per week for twelve weeks. One semi-structured interview was conducted with each participant during the study to gain a sense of the child's understandings about the nature of reading and to see what meanings s/he constructs from literacy-related activities. Participants were also interviewed informally throughout the study as they engaged in various literacy learning activities. Documents and artifacts were collected as an additional way to give voice to the beginning reader (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Discourse analysis (Gee, 2005) was used as a frame for developing individual case studies and cross-case analysis (Creswell, 1998; Merriam, 1998) to better understand the meanings children constructed about the nature of reading and the literacy-related instruction they experience. Results and conclusions. The findings of this study suggest that succeeders and strugglers perceive the nature of reading differently, with succeeders viewing reading as a process of decoding text for meaning and strugglers viewing reading as a process of remembering. In addition, the findings suggest that succeeders and strugglers have different views of their instruction; print mediates the meanings constructed by succeeders in ways it does not for strugglers.