Coping with classroom reading : an ethnographic investigation into the experiences of four dyslexic pupils during the final years of primary schooling

TL;DR: In this article, an ethnographic case study explores how four dyslexic pupils coped with classroom reading during their final two years at a large primary school in an exmining village on the outskirts of a northern city.

Abstract: This ethnographic case study explores how four dyslexic pupils coped with classroom reading during their final two years at a large prim3IY school in an exmining village on the outskirts of a northern city. The research takes a constructivist view of childhood which regards pupils as competent reporters of their experiences, and connects the psychological concept of dyslexia with a socio-cultural view of literacy development. The central tenets of symbolic interactionism and ideas put forward by the mid-twentieth century sociologist, Erving Goffinan, form a theoretical underpinning and frame the qualitative analysis of the observational and interview data. The findings suggest that the pupils' dyslexic difficulties had a negative effect on their reader identity and that this resulted in low self-esteem in the academic domain. Problems with word reading meant that many texts encountered at school were beyond their independent level and the consequence was marginalisation within the classroom community of literate practice, an effect intensified by attendance at withdrawal sessions. However, the need to present themselves in a favourable cultural light resulted in the use of impression management techniques designed to enable them to appear more competent readers than they really were. The pupils also developed a repertoire of inter-person and within-person coping strategies for difficult reading which all had the effect of minimizing the amount of text they read themselves. These strategies could be viewed as positive in the short term in that they enabled them to function in the classroom with some semblance of normality, but were damaging to learning in the longer term as problems with reading were disguised. Electronic multimodal texts, especially those associated with internet use, have increased the complexity of classroom reading in recent years, and the findings of this study suggest that they may have added to the marginalisation experienced by dyslexic pupils.