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

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.