Date of Conferral

2021

Degree

Ph.D.

School

Education

Advisor

Ruby R. Burgess

Abstract

AbstractAdolescents are not acquiring the necessary literacy skills to engage with complex texts for high school, higher education, and eventual employment. However, it is unclear what strategies teachers use to infuse literacy instruction across the curriculum and how useful training they have received to use these strategies has been. Guided by Dewey’s theory of experience, this basic qualitative study sought to understand the strategies teachers use to infuse literacy through experience, training teachers received, and their views regarding how strategy training can be improved. Participants were 12 purposefully selected teachers from three junior secondary schools in an urban school district in the English-speaking Caribbean. Data were collected through face-to-face interviews. Data were analyzed using open and axial coding to identify themes and patterns. Results indicated teachers used four instructional categories: interaction, continuity, curriculum flexibility, and fusion of subjects to teach literacy in their content areas. In addition, teachers used teacher-student interaction, infusion, student-student interaction, student-resource interaction, integrated content, flexible learning, and previous knowledge to teach literacy in their content areas. Teachers were trained to infuse literacy in their content areas mainly through a reading course. They suggested that training can be improved by offering all subject teachers specialized literacy training given to English teachers. This research contributes to positive social change by providing teachers with strategies to increase adolescents’ literacy skill development and administrators with suggested methods to improve teacher literacy training.

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