Struggling Adolescent Readers: A Cultural Construction

Abstract

Despite good intentions, reform-minded schools in the United States are coming to grips with the possibility that traditional school culture is making struggling readers out of some youth, especially the ones who have turned their backs on a version of reading and writing commonly referred to as academic literacy. Why might this be the case? I argued elsewhere (Alvermann, 2001) that in their effort to raise the bar by implementing high standards-a noteworthy goal by most people's reasoning-schools are promoting certain normative ways of reading texts that may be disabling some of the very students they are trying to help. The practice of constructing certain types of readers as "struggling"1 is even more problematic when one considers that many such normative ways of reading are losing their usefulness, andperhaps to some extent their validity, in the wake of new media and interactive communication technologies and the changing literacies they evoke (Chandler-Olcott & Mahar, 2001; Lankshear, Gee, Knobel, & Searle, 1997; Mackey & McClay, 2000; O'Brien, 1998).