Secondary School Literacy Research Articles

Exploring information literacy in secondary schools in Hong Kong: A case study

Current curriculum reforms in Hong Kong emphasize learning how to learn and project-based learning. The most recent reform introduces “Liberal Studies” as a mandatory school subject in senior secondary school. This article reports on an exploratory case study of the information searching process (ISP) among Form 6 (Grade 12) students in a Liberal Studies course. Researchers examined sources of information used by students, students' cognitive and emotional experience during the ISP, and communication within the collaborative groups. Findings indicated that Internet-based sources were predominant but that most students had difficulty completing the ISP. Work is needed to help students develop a theory of knowledge in which the meaning of information is contextual and the process of interpreting information requires effort. Such work is important if collaborative inquiry projects in Liberal Studies courses are to lead to deep learning.

Do Test Formats in Reading Comprehension Affect Second-Language Students' Test Performance Differently?

Large-scale testing in English affects second-language students not only greatly but also differently than first-language learners. The research literature reports that confounding factors in such large-scale testing such as varying test formats may differentially affect the performance of students from diverse backgrounds. An investigation of test performance between ESL/ELD students and non- ESL/ELD students on the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT) was performed to investigate whether test formats in reading comprehension affected the two groups differently. The results indicate that the overall pattern of difficulty levels on the three test formats were the same between ESL/ELD students and non-ESL/ELD students, except that ESL/ELD students performed substantially lower on each format and that more variability was found among ESL/ELD students. Further, discriminant analysis results indicated that only the multiplechoice questions obtained a significant discriminant coefficient in differentiating the two groups. The results suggest a lack of association between test formats and test performance.

Addressing Literacy in Secondary Schools: Introduction

his special issue of Language and Education reports on an independent threeyear research evaluation of a major professional development initiative to promote cross-curricular, whole school literacy policies – also known in the wider literature as ‘school language policies’ – in secondary schools in New Zealand. The findings from this evaluation, we believe, have significant implications for other national contexts. The professional development initiative in question – the Secondary Schools’ Literacy Initiative (SSLI) –was funded by the New Zealand Ministry of Education between 2003–2005 and involved a group of 60 pilot secondary schools, 20 each year.

Pedagogy, School Culture and Teacher Learning: Towards More Durable and Resistant Approaches to Secondary School Literacy

The relational, cultural and contextual view of literacy discussed in this paper has profound and widespread implications for the way teachers think about their students, their families, backgrounds and experiences and the aspirations students hold for the future. Focussing on the theoretical construct of teacher identity, the paper discusses the ways teachers worked and what happened to the culture of their schools when a structured literacy intervention enabled them to develop some agency as educational professionals, when provided with some ‘social space’ in respect of their literacy practices. The paper concludes that the teachers were involved to varying degrees in embracing changes that represented a move in the direction of a socially just pedagogy–the paper explains why.

Abstracts: Language testing

07–604Abbott, Marilyn (Alberta Education, Canada; marilyn.abbott@gov.ab.ca), A confirmatory approach to differential item functioning on an ESL reading assessment. Language Testing (Sage) 24.1 (2007), 7–36.07–605Barber, Richard (Dubai Women's College, UAE), A practical model for creating efficient in-house placement tests. The Language Teacher (Japan Association for Language Teaching) 31.2 (2007), 3–7.07–606Cheng, Liying, Don Klinger & Ying Zheng (Queen's U, Canada; chengl@edu.queensu.ca), The challenges of the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test for second language students. Language Testing (Sage) 24.2 (2007), 185–208.07–607Cohen, Andrew (U Minnesota, USA) & Thomas Upton, ‘I want to go back to the text’: Response strategies on the reading subtest of the new TOEFL®. Language Testing (Sage) 24.2 (2007), 209–250.07–608Dávid, Gergely (Eötvös Loránd U, Hungary; david.soproni@t-online.hu), Investigating the performance of alternative types of grammar items. Language Testing (Sage) 24.1 (2007), 65–97.07–609Elder, Catherine (U Melbourne, Australia; caelder@unimelb.edu.au), Gary Barkhuizen, Ute Knoch & Janet Von Randow, Evaluating rater responses to an online training program for L2 writing assessment. Language Testing (Sage) 24.1 (2007), 37–64.07–610Qian, David (The Hong Kong Polytechnic U, China; David.Qian@polyu.edu.hk), Assessing university students: Searching for an English language exit test. RELC Journal (Sage) 38.1 (2007), 18–37.07–611Scott Walters, Francis (U New York, USA; Francis.Walters@qc.cuny.edu), A conversation-analytic hermeneutic rating protocol to assess L2 oral pragmatic competence. Language Testing (Sage) 24.2 (2007), 155–183.07–612Shiotsu, Toshihiko (Kurume U, Japan; toshihiko_shiotsu@kurume-u.ac.jp) & Cyril Weir, The relative significance of syntactic knowledge and vocabulary breadth in the prediction of reading comprehension test performance. Language Testing (Sage) 24.1 (2007), 99–128.07–613Vanderveen, Terry (Kangawa U, Japan), The effect of EFL students' self-monitoring on class achievement test scores. JALT Journal (Japan Association for Language Teaching) 28.2 (2006), 197–206.07–614Xi, Xiaoming (Educational Testing Service, USA; xxi@ets.org), Evaluating analytic scoring for the TOEFL® Academic Speaking Test (TAST) for operational use. Language Testing (Sage) 24.2 (2007), 251–286.

Student Accounts of the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test: A Case for Validation

Abstract: The Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT) is a cross-curricular literacy test issued to all secondary school students in the province of Ontario. The test consists of a reading and a writing component, both of which must be successfully completed for secondary school graduation in Ontario. This study elicited 16 first language and second language student accounts of their OSSLT test-taking processes immediately after the March 2006 test administration. The analysis of these students’ accounts provided valuable information about the validity of the inferences drawn from the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test. These accounts suggest the complexity of the processes that the students engaged as they attempted to demonstrate their reading and writing skills on the test. The study has implications for test developers and test users regarding the interpretation of student test performance on the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test.

“I Was Bitten by a Scorpion”: Reading in and out of School in a Refugee's Life

This study examined the progress of Hayder, a high school student, in becoming a reader within an English language learner (ELL) reading program. The authors delve into the relationships between this young man's masculinity as a Yezidi Kurdish refugee, the reading instruction he received, his attempts to stay in school, and his successful literacy practices at home and in his workplace.There is a relatively small body of published literature on youth cultures and literacy in secondary schools, especially as it relates to ELL students who take part in innovative reading programs based on elementary reading research and curricula. Findings indicate that the reading instruction the teachers implement works for students such as Hayder when certain support structures are in place and when teachers are aware of the multiple literacies with which students engage outside of school.

The challenges of the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test for second language students

Results from the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT) indicate that English as a Second Language (ESL) and English Literacy Development (ELD) students have comparatively low success and high deferral rates. This study examined the 2002 and 2003 OSSLT test performances of ESL/ELD and non-ESL/ELD students in order to identify and understand the factors that may help explain why ESL/ELD students failed the test at relatively high rates. The analyses also attempted to determine if there were significant and systematic differences in ESL/ELD students' test performance. The performance of ESL/ELD students was consistently and similarly lower across item formats, reading text types, skills and strategies, and the four writing tasks. Using discriminant analyses, it was found that narrative text type, indirect understanding skill, vocabulary strategy of reading, and the news report writing task were significant predictors of ESL/ELD membership. The results of this study provide direction for further research and instruction regarding English literacy achievement for these second language students within the context of having to complete large-scale English literacy tests designed and constructed for first English language students.

Did we take the same test? Differing accounts of the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test by first and second language test‐takers

Within the context of increasing numbers of second language (L2) learners in Canadian schools and expanding standards‐driven testing frameworks, a passing score on the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT) is a recently imposed secondary school graduation requirement in Ontario. There is evidence, however, that tests designed on the basis of first language (L1) populations may have lower reliability and validity for L2 students. This study elicited accounts of the OSSLT in 33 focus groups of 22 L1 students and 136 L2 students, attending 7 Ontario secondary schools, prior to and immediately after the March 2006 test administration. The results suggest important differences in L1 and L2 accounts of test constructs and suggest a gap between what is valued as literacy on the test and what is valued in classroom literacy practice, raising some concern regarding the test’s consequential validity. By examining how different groups of test‐takers interpret test constructs and the interaction between these interpretations, test design, and accounts of classroom practice, we may better address issues of fidelity in test construct representation (i.e., understand what may constitute construct under‐representation and construct‐irrelevant variance). This study highlights what may make a test more L2‐friendly, i.e. what supports (or impedes) L2 test performance. Although in the washback literature test‐taker accounts of tests have been the least researched, the results of this study suggest that such accounts have the potential to increase test fairness, enhance the validity of inferences drawn from test performance, improve the effectiveness of accommodation strategies, and promote positive washback.

Literacy is Just Reading and Writing, isn't it? The Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test and its Press Coverage

This article examines how the public discourse of print news media defines and shapes the representation of the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT) based on coverage in three primary newspapers between 1998 and 2004. The data were analysed using qualitative and quantitative measures to identify types of coverage, themes, and inclusion/exclusion of voices. The analysis, which is framed by discourse about conceptions of literacy relating to Dewey's democratic vision for the press, suggests some disappointments on the measure of democratic representation and participation. The article concludes that, if the media is to represent the diversity of voices and provide a wide range of views so as to fulfil its democratic responsibility as envisioned by Dewey, a wider debate over representations of literacy must occur and more perspectives and voices must be included in newspaper coverage.

Theme Issue on Poverty and Human Development

POVERTY IS AN INVETERATE CONSEQUENCE AND CAUSE of ill health. Without financial resources, people cannot pay for basic human needs: food, water, sanitation, housing, and health care services. In addition, poor people often live in poor countries that have limited or deteriorating health care systems and not enough physicians, nurses, and other trained health care workers. Others live in countries with governments that ignore or are too ineffectual to address the health care needs of the poor. Individuals who arepooralso lackadequateeducationtomakeappropriatedecisions about health and prevention of disease and often lack equity and empowerment to attain education, employment, and skills needed to escape the cycle of poverty. The first of the United Nation’s 8 Millennium Development Goals, determined by 189 countries in 2000, is to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. This specific goal is to halve the proportion of people living on less than $1 a day (the World Bank’s definition of extreme poverty) and those who suffer from hunger by the year 2015. This goal cannot be achieved without improving the level of human development—the opportunity to escape poverty through “the choices that come with a sufficient income, an education, good health, and living in a country that is not governed by tyranny”—among the poor. Such development requires careful evaluation and study of interventions aimed to address the needs of poor individuals within their unique local conditions and socioeconomic context, with sufficient follow-up to determine whether effects are sustainable. In 1990, more than 28% of the developing world’s population (1.2 billion people) lived in extreme poverty. By 2002, this proportion had decreased to 19% but still represented more than 1 billion people. While substantial declines in extreme poverty have been reported for Eastern and Southern Asia between 1990 and 2002 (from a rate of 33% to 14% in Eastern Asia and from 39% to 31% in Southern Asia), progress in other regions has been mixed or marginal at best. Limited reductions in poverty rates have been seen in Latin America and the Caribbean (from 11% to 9%), but this region now still has more than 47 million people living in poverty. Rates of poverty in Western Asia and Northern Africa have remained almost unchanged since 1990 (approximately 2%) and have increased in the transition economies of Southeastern Europe and many of the countries of the former Soviet Union (from 0.4% in both regions to 1.8% and 2.5%, respectively). In sub-Saharan Africa, which has the largest regional proportion of extreme poverty in the world, the poverty rate declined only marginally from 1990 to 2002 (from 44.6% to 44.0%), and the number of people living in extreme poverty has increased to 303 million. Among all regions of the world other measures demonstrate some progress toward achieving the Millennium DevelopmentGoals, includingdeclines in theproportionofpeople with insufficient food and sanitation, increased enrollments in education, increased proportion of women employed, decreases in child mortality rates, increases in measles vaccination rates, and increased proportion of births attended by skilled health care workers. Each of these successes will contribute to reducing poverty and promoting human development, but some of this progress has been only marginal and much additional work, aid, funding, and research are needed. Despite huge increases in wealth and prosperity throughout the world in the last several decades, the gap between the wealthy and the poor has widened, with more than 1 billion people still living in extreme poverty. The United Nations Human Development Index is a composite of 3 dimensions of human development: living a long and healthy life (measured by life expectancy), being educated (measured by adult literacy and enrollment in primary, secondary, and tertiary schools), and having a decent standard of living (measured by purchasing power parity and income). According to the most recent report, Norway has the highest level of human development, and Niger the lowest. Individuals in Norway are nearly 50 times wealthier and live almost twice as long as those in Niger and have nearly universal enrollment in education, compared with 21% in Niger. People in the 31 coun-

Beyond externalizing and finalizing definitions: Standards for Teachers of English Language and Literacy in Australia (STELLA)

This article explores issues relating to the development of the Standards for Teachers of English Language and Literacy in Australia (STELLA). STELLA is the product of work by members of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English (AATE) and the Australian Literacy Educators’ Association (ALEA), the two key professional bodies in Australia representing secondary English teachers and primary school literacy teachers respectively. However, the question remains as to the extent to which English literacy teachers around Australia can meaningfully identify with these standards. This article asks whether professional standards can provide a framework for practitioner inquiry and the renewal of the English teaching profession in contradistinction to managerial pressures to impose standards for regulatory purposes.

Evaluating Emotional Literacy in Schools: The Development of the School Emotional Environment for Learning Survey

This paper describes the development of the School Emotional Environment for Learning Survey, an instrument for evaluating the perceived level of emotional literacy of the school as an organization. It elicits student and staff perceptions of their affective experience of being a part of the school community. It was designed to look at the extent to which a school enables members of its community to interact in a manner that builds an understanding of their own and others' emotions, which can then be used to shape their actions. Emotional literacy is seen here as a potential in everyone that is contingent on the interaction between a person and their social context, rather than a capacity that is either present or absent in the individual. Qualitative data were collected from an ethnographic case study of two schools using closed- and open-ended questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, focus groups, a draw-and-write exercise and participant observation. The data were used to generate grounded theory and to build a theoretical framework for organizational emotional literacy. This theoretical framework is described as the CORE framework, addressing the domains of communication, relationships, organization and emotional experience. These domains are then characterized by particular qualities and values that are described in the ‘matrix of emotional literacy’. This framework and matrix were then used to develop a questionnaire, which was trialed as a tool to audit the level of emotional literacy in both primary and secondary schools.

Re‐framing adolescent literacy research for new times: Studying youth as a resource

In this paper I analyze various perspectives on adolescence, adolescent literacy, and youth culture to argue that the field of education has not attended adequately to the literacy learning and development of adolescents. Moreover, when researchers and policy makers do attend to adolescent or secondary school literacy, the focus of research or policy is typically on adolescents who struggle with mainstream literacy processes. Drawing from this analysis, 1 contend that if the field would turn its attention to youth and study how they learn increasingly complex literacy practices required in disciplinary discourse communities, how they reinvent literacies for unique contexts, and how they use literacy as a tool to navigate complex technologies and fragmented social worlds, then all literacy could be expanded. Adolescent literacy researchers cannot stop there, however. We must also continue to examine the contexts of secondary schooling, with a focus on the literacy demands made by different content areas, so that we can support students as they navigate the different discourse practices of their everyday lives, secondary schools, and life beyond formal schooling. The future of adolescent and secondary literacy research, I argue, is in research that examines the connections between the everyday discourses of adolescents and the academic discourses they navigate each day in school.

Political education in schools

Political education is now backon the agendain Britain following the election of the Labour government and the report of the working party, under the chairmanship of Bernard Crick, set up to investigate ways as to how citizenship issues for all pupils can be better, or at least formally, introduced intoschools. In Central and Eastern Europe the ending of Communist one-party rule has put the issue of education for democracy to the fore. Also, it is to be positively noted that the European Ministers of Education, meeting in Madrid in Summer 1997 at the 18th session of their standing conference, concluded that there was a need for a coherent and sustained approach by schools to education for democratic citizenship. This paper hopes tobe part of this process by explaining the experiences of 30 years of the formal teaching of political literacy (albeit nottoevery pupil) in Scottish secondary schools through the unique Modern Studies, while touching on recent experiences in Central and Eastern Europe, evidence as to the effectiveness of political education and its role in a democracy.

Locating the Social and Political in Secondary School Literacy

The authors suggest a number of possible futures for research on adolescent literacy issues. They emphasize the importance of the social and political with respect to the teaching and learning of older students, and pose numerous questions for those working in this shifting field.

How Educators Perceive Computers in the Classroom

A survey was conducted to assess knowledge and attitudes of Nebraska K-12 teachers, Teachers College faculty and student teachers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Results indicated Nebraska educators strongly favored instruction to foster computer literacy in secondary schools; however, the respondents did not feel qualified to teach computer literacy. Findings also reflected mixed feelings regarding computer-assisted instruction and computer-managed instruction. Information from the survey was used to design teacher preparation courses and inservice computer workshops to assist educators at all levels to use computers as instructional tools.