What Research Tells Us About Improving the Literacy Achievement of Students of Diverse Backgrounds
Dr. Kathryn H. Au

You have to interpret the research results uniquely and apply them for a unique situation in every school and in every classroom.

Dr. Au started by defining what she means by the term “students of diverse backgrounds.They are students who differ from mainstream students because of their ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and primary language. In the United States, these students are usually African American, Latino American, or Native American. They are from low-income families and speak a language at home other than standard American English.

Next, she discussed the literacy achievement gap, i.e., the inequality in opportunities to become literate in this country. The number of students who reach the proficient level in literacy by twelfth grade is much lower for African American and Latino students than for White and Asian/Pacific American students. In addition, about half of the questions on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) now require higher-level thinking with text, which is not taught to students of diverse backgrounds as much as to White higher income students.

Dr. Au spent most of the session discussing seven research-based principles for closing the literacy achievement gap. One principle is ownership of literacy by students and motivation to use reading and writing for purposes they set for themselves. Another principle is respecting students’ home language and building on the language strengths that students bring with them from their home language.
In the United States, the content presented in schools is oriented to mainstream students and presented from a mainstream perspective. The social processes, e.g., the ways we develop rules for speaking, listening, and turn taking, are also oriented to mainstream students. Whole-class teaching and use of the pattern of teacher initiation, student response, and teacher evaluation present difficulties for many students of diverse backgrounds.

With culturally responsive instruction we want to build bridges between students’ experiences at home and at school and to foster what is necessary to maintain competence in the heritage language and culture. We need to use different strategies with students of different backgrounds to achieve equality of educational outcomes.

There are two paths for improving literacy achievement:
1. The direct, or assimilationist approach, which is the basis for the instruction preferred by the dominant society

2. The indirect, or pluralist approach, which affirms and reinforces the cultural identity of students of diverse backgrounds, and then from that base gives students access to mainstream content and interactional processes.

In the latter approach, cultural identity is a mediating variable between the student and academic achievement that can help students of diverse backgrounds to be successful.

What Dr. Au suggests we do in the classroom is to create hybrid classroom events that creatively combine elements of diverse home cultures and the school culture so as to allow students to be comfortable and successful in the classroom, to achieve in academic learning and maintain connection to their cultures. In multi-ethnic, multilingual classrooms this means focusing on the many values shared by members of different non-mainstream cultural groups along with mainstream values. It also involves using a variety of participation structures and different forms of student groupings.

Some other principles Dr. Au discussed were:
• Ties between the school and community are also important. For example, teachers and parents need to work together, seeing both as learners rather than teachers as superior.
• Students need to understand the purposes for literacy in order to be motivated to learn.
• Informal (classroom-based) assessment needs to be used as well as formal assessment. The former allows teachers to monitor student progress in an ongoing way. It is also valuable to have students set goals for themselves and assess their own progress.

Dr. Au concluded by stating that improving literacy achievement is a complex process that requires simultaneous consideration of several different principles and combining different elements together to produce the program that will work best in each school.