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Título: Comprehension as Social and Intellectual Practice: Rebuilding Curriculum in Low
Socioeconomic and Cultural Minority Schools
Autores: Allan Luke , Annette Woods & Karen Dooley
Temas: prácticas letradas, lectura y escritura
Referencia: Luke, A., Woods, A. & Dooley, K. (2011) Comprehension as Social and Intellectual
Practice: Rebuilding Curriculum in Low Socioeconomic and Cultural Minority Schools. Theory Into
Practice, 50 (2), pp. 157-164,
Historically, comprehension has denoted
reader understanding. The cognitive and linguistic
turns in the 1960s and 1970s initiated important
investigations of reader cognitive processes
and linguistic competences for constructing and
representing meanings
This highlights the place of intercultural and

sociocultural interventions that focus on improved
comprehension outcomes. In early work
on reciprocal teaching, Palincsar and Brown
(1984) demonstrated that student comprehension
can be reconceptualized and reshaped through alterations
in face-to-face activity structures around
texts. Lai and colleagues’ (Lai, McNaughton,
Amituanai-Toloa, Turner, & Hsiao, 2009) work
with Maori and Pacifika students in South
Auckland schools seeks continuity of activities
between home and school to optimize direct
comprehension instruction.
Cognitive and psycholinguistic

approaches to comprehension can
be brought together with substantial engagement
with (a) student cultural and linguistic resources
and (b) rich, culturally relevant, and intellectually
demanding themes, topics, and field knowledge.
Rearticulating Comprehension in the

Four Resources Model
In the current policy environment and in many
instructional settings, comprehension often denotes
skills, strategies, and processes that are
set in opposition to those of decoding.
However,
a recent 2-year quasi-experimental study by Mc-
Keown et al. (2009) began to question the priority
accorded strategies. The study found that low-
SES fifth graders, who engaged with “content
instruction” that focused on open questions about
text meaning, outperformed students exposed to
strategies instruction on measures of narrative
and expository learning. T
Here we use the four resources model (Freebody

& Luke, 1990) as a heuristic. The model was
developed at a time when single method solutions
to literacy problems were proliferating, accompanied
by a divisive rhetoric about “old and wrong”
and “new and best” methods (Luke & Freebody,
1999).
The four resources model outlines a repertoire

of practices required to engage in literate societies:
coding, semantic, pragmatic/interactional, and critical/text analytic. The model is not an
instructional script or program, but a framework
for examining focus and balance in curriculum
and instruction.
Rather, it enables teachers

to analyze community cultural and linguistic context,
student resources and needs, developmental
age/stage, and educational goals.
To take up code breaker practices,

the individual must know about patterns of and
relationships between semiotic codes—spoken,
written, visual, and multimodal.
To take up
text participant/meaningmaker practices requires
competence in connecting texts’ semiotic systems
to reader background knowledge, experiences,
and understandings—an epistemological
connection with cultural ways of seeing.
The
emphasis here is not just on meaning per se,
but on connectedness to everyday and scientific
worlds (Newmann & Associates, 1996), on using
texts to construct possible meanings, and making
links to other social and textual worlds.
To use
texts pragmatically requires tacit and explicit
understandings of institutional dynamics, rituals,
constraints, and possibilities of text use.
To critique or analyze texts begins

from the premise that all texts are value-laden
actions that attempt to do something to readers.
Their truth claims aside, all texts position, define,
and influence people’s ideas and opinions in particular normative directions, with interests and
intents.
Comprehension does not necessarily entail

verification of literal and inferred meanings, but
critical analyses of their possible origins, motivations,
and consequences through understanding
of semiotic codes and pragmatic and interactional
conventions.
comprehension
is in the first instance a cultural phenomenon,
in so far as cultural standpoint, takenfor-
granted disciplinary knowledge and content,
along with shared perspectives, are necessarily
in play (Kintsch & Greene, 1978). Second, it
is a social phenomenon, insofar as readers do
comprehension both through interactional display
and deployment of meanings in literacy events
(Freebody, Luke, & Gilbert, 1991). Third, it is a
political and intellectual phenomenon, insofar as
it entails entry into ideologically and culturallybased
readings or sociohistorical scripts (Cole,
1996; Woods & Henderson, 2008) for understanding
social worlds, everyday and technical
knowledges, values, and beliefs.
This necessarily requires a “reading of the

world” (Freire & Macedo, 1982) and a “goalseeking”
(Wilden, 1981) engagement with substantive
knowledge. Reading intellectually demanding
disciplinary content in relation to world
and community knowledges calls forth code
breaking, text use, and text analytic practice that
is not necessarily required in autonomous comprehension

instruction
To illustrate, we offer a brief account of

our current research on literacy education at a
primary school in a low SES community in an
Australian city.
The
two focal points of our intervention to date are
on: (a) implementation of a digital arts production
program to reengage middle-years students
in learning; and (b) development of a coherent
whole school literacy program using the four
resources model.
There was little explicit connection
to the Aboriginal community knowledge
and engagement resource program, few linkages
with other curriculum fields, or hitching of the
autonomous skills emphases with innovation in
digital and multimodal media.
Autonomous skills models

(Street, 1984) are autonomous not only in their
theoretical and practical framing, but also in isolating
literacy instruction from the rest of school
curriculum and from students’ community and
service learning
After discussion, the school has expanded

the teaching of comprehension. Cognitive and
metacognitive strategies are being explicitly
taught in many more classrooms and we have
observed students completing strategies exercises
for homework.
In a recent reanalysis of
achievement test score impacts of comprehension
programs, Slavin and colleagues (Slavin,
Lake, Chambers, Cheung, & Davis, 2009) noted
improved test score effects of comprehensionbased
curriculum and instruction.
We argue that direct instruction in comprehension,

reciprocal teaching/strategy based
instruction, can set the table for improved equity
performance—but cannot, in itself, generate
sustainable gains in achievement across
the curriculum and improved longitudinal engagement
and participation levels.
This entails a
close engagement with community knowledge
and institutions, a “tuning up of the eyes and
ears” (Heath, 1983) to how literacy works in
everyday life, social institutions, and a scaffolded
and motivating engagement with the substantive intellectual fields of school subjects and world
knowledge.
Comprehension is a social practice for “reading

the world” (Freire & Macedo, 1992) and for everyday
social and cultural action in its institutions
and fields.

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Título: Comprehension as Social and Intellectual Practice: Rebuilding Curriculum in Low

Socioeconomic and Cultural Minority Schools

Autores: Allan Luke , Annette Woods & Karen Dooley

Temas: prácticas letradas, lectura y escritura

Historically, comprehension has denoted

reader understanding. The cognitive and linguistic

turns in the 1960s and 1970s initiated important

investigations of reader cognitive processes

and linguistic competences for constructing and

This highlights the place of intercultural and

Cognitive and psycholinguistic

Rearticulating Comprehension in the

Here we use the four resources model (Freebody

The four resources model outlines a repertoire

Rather, it enables teachers

To take up code breaker practices,

To critique or analyze texts begins

Comprehension does not necessarily entail

This necessarily requires a “reading of the

is not necessarily required in autonomous comprehension

To illustrate, we offer a brief account of

Autonomous skills models

After discussion, the school has expanded

We argue that direct instruction in comprehension,

Comprehension is a social practice for “reading

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