“Listening to my readers”: the personal literacies landscapes of children learning to read

Smith, Gillian Mary (2022) “Listening to my readers”: the personal literacies landscapes of children learning to read. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This thesis explores my practice supporting children who find learning to read particularly difficult, focusing on my work with five children aged between five and seven. My study began as a mixed methods Action Research investigation of aspects of the structured multisensory reading intervention that I based my teaching on, but gradually changed to become a purely qualitative study that strived to make explicit the implicit knowledge and skills that I brought to the role of a reading support teacher. In a series of vignettes, I have interrogated my work with each of the children, writing both about the moments of intensity that were unique to that individual, and also the common threads that ran through their experiences. Drawing on concepts developed by posthumanist thinkers led me to re-imagine my practice as an assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), in which the cognitive aspects of learning to read, in the form of the reading intervention, intra-act with the agential properties of time, space and the material resources (Barad, 2007), and with affective ‘flows’ (Stewart, 2007). This theoretical framework was methodologically challenging, but using Gullion’s (2018) diffractive ethnography helped me to identify the aspects of my practice which I have termed the “more-than-cognitive” elements of reading support teaching, which work together to create the positive emotional experiences that learning to read is based upon. In this process, I have also explored how the children’s emotional as well as cognitive experiences with literacies, both in school and at home, have combined to become an important part of their ‘ways of being’ in the world. I have described this concept as “Personal Literacies Landscapes”, and explored its potential to deepen our understanding, not only in the sphere of literacy support teaching but also in the lives of readers of all ages. My vignettes illustrate how exploring children’s “Personal Literacies Landscapes” can help in finding literacy activities which appeal strongly to them and also help them to navigate the affective challenges of becoming a skilled reader. I argue that this process is fundamental to the success of reading support interventions. My hope is that this thesis will form a springboard from which I can both generate ideas and approaches that will help other practitioners doing similar work, both by increasing the understanding of the experience of struggling to learn to read for young children, and also of the type of support that might best help them.