Reading the Media: Media Literacy in High School English by Renee Hobbs. New York: Teacher’s College Press; Newark, DE: The International Reading Association, 2007, 190 pp. Reviewed by Myrna Goldstein Are You in Your English File?® Second Language Learning Research Center, Milan, Italy This book, written by national expert in media literacy education and com- munications professor at Temple University, Dr. Renee Hobbs, is a highly scien- tific, reflective and exhaustive account of the inception and outcome of one year of a pioneering project in Grade 11 high school media literacy in Concord, New Hampshire. The project, already in its ninth year, was created by teachers with the help of Hobbs. The project’s goals focus on empowering students to effect meaningful social change by developing the skills to receive, decipher, analyze, and put to productive and creative use the daily media bombardment that all of us face. Hobbs’ research goal is to use micro- and macro-analyses to lead to gen- eralizations about the usefulness of media literacy within the context of English language arts education. The book is written in a scientific but quite readable, down-to-earth style. Therefore, the information it contains is highly accessible for all types of profes- sionals interested in the topic, including those who may be interested in conceiving a similar program in their own institutions, but perhaps may not be interested in pursuing scientific research. This volume, a joint publication effort of the International Reading As- sociation and Columbia University’s Teachers College Press, traces the project’s development and outcome, capturing the complex kinds of learning that students experienced. The in-depth research includes valuable quantitative and qualitative data including over 700 pages of teacher and participant interview transcripts, classroom observations, four handwritten field notebooks, and nearly 200 differ- ent samples including student writing, videos, lesson plans, and assignments. The qualitative data was used to help Hobbs understand the contextual details of local practice, and the quantitative data was examined in order to better comprehend the program’s impact on student performances, attitudes, behaviors, and literacy practices. Hobbs gathered quantitative data from both Concord High School and a matched control group school to map changes in students’ interpretation of media texts, in print, visual, electronic, and audio formats. The research included 200 variables culled from nearly 400 students at two points in time, resulting in almost 16,000 pieces of data. Sixteen questions about four focused categories served as the inquiry springboard: teacher, students, program, and community. For example, Issues in Applied Linguistics © 2009 Myrna Goldstein ISSN 1050-4273 Vol. 17 No. 2, 167-168