Good Readers Get Smart: Reading Orientations in a Second-Grade Classroom

The primary goal of this research is to better understand my students' reading orientations - what they believe it means to be a successful reader. I also seek to identify the relationship between those beliefs and my teaching. The data come primarily from six focal students in my second-grade classroom in an urban public charter elementary school in Oakland, California. Focal students were observed, interviewed, and asked to discuss and rank vignettes of readers with varying reading behaviors, skills, and habits. In addition, I drew on systematic reflections about my own teaching and students. Results showed that focal students shared reading orientations toward aspects of fluency, such as accuracy, and knowledge-level comprehension skills, such as retelling events from a story. Results also showed that students' responses correlated closely with teaching points emphasized both within my classroom and around the school. These results, in combination with data from observations, led me to discover that students' reading orientations may have both public and private aspects. In other words, their stated preferences might differ from their private inclinations. These findings suggest that teachers need to be organized and intentional around the messages that they send to students about successful reading. They also suggest that teachers create environments in which various purposes and reading behaviors are valued.