This research examines the specialized knowledge of reading comprehension articulated by 12 middle school English language arts teachers sampled from three different regions of the United States and representing various levels of teaching experience. Using detailed interviews, concept mapping, and think aloud methods, we identified salient touchstones that characterize the teachers’ understandings of how and why readers interact with texts to construct meanings and change as readers. In this article, we present examples that illustrate the many ways that these understandings of comprehension were mobilized and transformed in their explanations of instructional practices.

Recent events, including the widespread acceptance of misinformation about political, social, and environmental issues, call literacy teacher educators to carefully interrogate the supports we provide teachers in their development of specialized knowledge of reading comprehension. Every English language arts (ELA) teacher must be knowledgeable about reading comprehension practices and processes. Such knowledge helps teachers design instruction that promotes engaged, critical reading among all students. But specifically what kinds of knowledge about reading processes and practices do teachers have? And how do teachers mobilize and transform that knowledge in their instruction?

Our research addresses these questions by examining the linkages between middle school ELA teachers’ specialized knowledge of reading comprehension and their representations of their text-focused instructional practices.

Middle school teachers in ELA and other disciplines have been found to have robust metacognitive understandings of reading strategies (Gilles, Wang, & Johnson, 2016). This study builds on these findings by characterizing variations in how teachers draw on their specialized knowledge of comprehension in their descriptions of their instruction. Specialized content knowledge (Ball, Thames, & Phelps, 2008) is the unique knowledge teachers have that nonteachers neither have nor need. Instructional practices are more effectively wielded when teachers understand the conceptual foundations underlying the practices.

Several programs of empirical work have been carried out in recent years to examine the specialized knowledge needed for teaching reading. Phelps (2009) found that teachers’ knowledge bases about reading processes, language, texts, and text structures were distinct compared to those of nonteachers. In other research (Kucan, Hapgood, & Palincsar, 2011; Kucan, Palincsar, Khasnabis, & Chang, 2009), teachers’ specialized knowledge for teaching reading comprehension was studied by assessing their knowledge of specific instructional practices like reciprocal teaching (Palincsar & Brown, 1984) and Questioning the Author (Beck & McKeown, 2001). This research has suggested important directions for how to support teachers’ development of specialized knowledge of these instructional practices. Our research extends this work by examining teachers’ specialized knowledge of processes and practices involved in reading comprehension within and beyond the classroom (Davis, McElhone, & Tenore, 2015).

Our approach to studying teachers’ specialized knowledge is sensitive to teachers’ knowledge about the cognitive processes in reading comprehension that have occupied much of the discourse around comprehension instruction for several decades (RAND Reading Study Group, 2002; Ruddell & Unrau, 2004). However, we recognize that other aspects of what readers do with texts (to construct meanings from and with them) are better explained through sociocultural (Lee & Smagorinksy, 2000) and critical lenses (Janks, 2000). Consequently, our research attends broadly to teachers’ cultural models of what counts as appropriate text use and socially inscribed ways of conceptualizing comprehension.

From this broad interperspectival viewpoint (see Davis et al., 2015), we focused our analysis on three categories of specialized knowledge of comprehension that might be germane to teaching: the resources and tethers (or constraints) that are brought into readers’ interactions with texts; the moment-to-moment improvisations that readers make when texts, readers, and contexts converge; and the intra- and interpersonal changes that result from having comprehended a text. These interactions are inherently ideological, recursive, and messy, and readers can build multiple acceptable meanings within established community norms.

In our attempts to characterize, not evaluate or quantify, teachers’ specialized knowledge related to reading comprehension, we draw primarily on a situative view of knowledge. In this view, knowledge is shared among members of a community—in this case, the professional community of teaching—and is both individual and social (Collins & Greeno, 2010). An individual’s knowledge is a customized version of the community’s distributed knowledge influenced as much by personal experience, beliefs, and values, as it is by formalized disciplined knowledge (Kelly, 2006; Verloop, Van Driel, & Meijfer, 2001). This knowledge is often tacit (Alexander, Schallert, & Hare, 1991) and takes the form of a personal working theory that informs action (Levin & He, 2008).

This cross-case analysis addresses the research question: How are middle school ELA teachers’ conceptualizations of reading comprehension mobilized and transformed into representations of instructional practice? Our larger study also includes science and social studies teachers’ conceptualizations of reading comprehension, but this article focuses on ELA teachers. Despite research evidence in support of integrating disciplinary and reading instruction, the ELA classroom remains the home of reading instruction in many secondary schools.

Participants

We present analysis of the 12 cases of middle school ELA teachers who participated in a larger sample of 60 teachers across five experience categories (preservice, first year, 2–4, 5–9, and 10+ years) teaching multiple disciplines in grades 3–8 in three regions of the United States (see Table 1). Of the 12 teachers discussed in this article, 10 identified as female and 2 as male. All identified as White except Zara who identified as Hispanic. The racial homogeneity of our sample, although generally reflective of the current teaching population, is a limitation of this study.

Table

Table 1. Participant Demographics and Interview Protocols.

Table 1. Participant Demographics and Interview Protocols.

Data Sources

Data were generated during two, 90- to 120-min semistructured interviews per teacher. Interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed and artifacts were collected. The interviews included the following components to elicit teachers’ overt and tacit knowledge of processes and practices of reading comprehension. Complete protocols are available from the authors upon request.

Semistructured think aloud interview

Participants read one of the three text sets: fictional narrative, expository print and online texts, or online texts as part of an open Internet inquiry (see Table 1). Participants thought aloud about their interactions with texts, what made the texts challenging, and what strategies they used to make sense of the text.

Typical reading interview

Participants described their typical reading practices by naming a recent text they had read or were reading, explaining why and how they selected that text, and their ways of interacting with it.

Concept and process maps

Our protocol was based on previous uses of concept mapping to examine teacher knowledge and conceptual change (e.g., Artiles & McClafferty, 1998). Participants generated a list of concepts regarding what they do as experienced, proficient readers when they interact with texts, then organized their lists into categories that represented their knowledge of the relationships among the concepts. They named and explained their categories. Then, participants created and explained visual process maps of their understandings of how reading comprehension unfolds as a process from start to finish (with the specific “starts” and “finishes” named by the participants based on their own understandings).

Comprehension and learning from text survey

Participants orally responded to this instrument developed by Kucan, Hapgood, and Palincsar (2011). They read an informational text, identified important ideas and features that could impact students’ comprehension, and answered questions about a hypothetical teacher–student classroom discussion of the text.

Typical lesson interview

Participants described a lesson they had taught involving a text, the challenges posed by the text, and how the teacher supported students’ learning. Participants were asked to select a lesson that is typical of their instruction. They provided and discussed artifacts relevant to the lesson.

Analyses

We partitioned the data sources into two sets: (1) those which speak to teachers’ conceptualizations of reading comprehension (A, B, and C above) and (2) those which speak to the participants’ representations of their instructional practices (D and E). We analyzed all of Set 1 before analyzing Set 2. A limitation of this study is that we have only captured teachers’ representations of their instruction rather than direct observations. However, allowing teachers to describe their practices helped reveal ways in which they prioritized particular facets of their knowledge.

Recursive phases of analysis followed conventions of constant comparison (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). For each set of data sources for each participant, we open-coded the transcripts. We added codes reflecting emergent ideas to our original coding framework, which was guided by our theoretical frame. We generated reports by code for each teacher and identified recurring ideas, concepts, priorities, and strategies within each group of data sources. Each researcher wrote analytic memos for each teacher representing the two sets of data. Researchers met multiple times to compare codes and analytic memos and identify themes that appeared across memos for each set of data sources. We then synthesized our memos and our discussions into two profiles for each teacher (a profile of their conceptualizations of reading comprehension, and a profile of representations of instructional practice).

To address our research question, we compared teachers’ conceptualizations profile to their representations of instructional practice profile. For each case, we constructed a two-column data display. The left-hand column displayed each of the themes in the conceptualizations of reader–text interactions profile. The right-hand column indicated how each of those themes was mobilized directly into the instructional practices described by the teacher, transformed in some way into those practices, or not represented in the descriptions of practices. Data display helped us identify patterns in the mobilization and transformation of the teachers’ specialized knowledge into their reported practices.

We synthesized across our sample of middle school ELA teachers to identify patterns of mobilization and transformation of knowledge. Across the 12 cases, we identified nine facets of knowledge relevant to the ways teachers understand reading comprehension. While certainly not an exhaustive list of what teachers know, these nine touchstones are: knowledge of genre, identity, end points for reading, author(ity), text as resource, criticality, grappling/striving for coherence/meaning, sociality, and affect. In this article, we have selected three touchstones—author(ity), grappling/striving for coherence, and identity—that illustrate the larger patterns we identified in the ways different types of knowledge were mobilized and transformed (or not) from teacher knowledge into instructional practices.

Teachers tended to describe comprehension as a sociocognitive accomplishment more than a critical practice, emphasizing strategies for meaning-making and observable consequences of reading rather than critiquing the social worlds and givens assumed in a text. Nonetheless, based on our initial analyses that suggested that teachers were at times theorizing about authors and sources of texts and using these theories to inform their skeptical—if not entirely critical—readings, we identified authorial presence as a touchstone to explore further. Multiple perspectives on reading comprehension hold that readers theorize an identity for the author as part of the metatextual knowledge used to make meaning (Collins & Slembrouck, 2007; Davis, Huang, & Yi, 2017; Davis et al., 2015).

Two participants in our sample who were most attentive to authorial theorization in their conceptualizations of reading comprehension differed starkly in the way this touchstone was represented in their descriptions of practice. One of these participants strongly emphasized the importance of identifying authors in her description of teaching, and the other one described a lesson in which the source, provenance, and even the content of the text were less important than successful completion of the schooled practices of close reading.

Mobilizing author(ity) into comprehension instruction

In her think aloud about the Pluto reclassification as a dwarf planet, Brooke (5 years, seventh/eighth grades) read with an almost immediate instinct to source and query the origin of the ideas expressed in the online article. After reading only a few short sentences, she stopped and commented:

So when I read the title, because I pre-read the title, I noticed there is a controversy and now I’m seeing the controversy that the decision is being hotly debated. Like is Pluto a planet or not a planet?…So they are saying, they are taking the side of that it’s not a planet or they are stating that officially so I’m wondering who are these officials and who do they mean?

Her desire to uncover the identities of the sources continued throughout her interaction with the texts. For example,

What I’m noticing about the text is that it started up here as very scientific, straightforward and now they are using words like “stinks” and, yeah, I don’t know. What I’m saying I guess up here [in previous section of the article] it feels like there is a little bias and that the author’s thinking that it was officially not a planet and you see sort of safer vocabulary.…I don’t know for sure, I’m guessing he has a point that is coming out in his word choice.

This tendency to blend authorial theorization into her interpretation of the text also showed up in the concept map she created to explicate her view of what readers do when they comprehend. She labeled one of the prominent actions in her map as “using text structure to understand an author’s intent.” She explained this as a process of “taking the lines [of text] chunked together that the authors intentionally chunked together and this is looking at the page as its whole self and understand why it’s organized the way it is and what the intent is.” Her data suggest that she tacitly understands comprehension as partly a process of humanizing the text, sometimes overtly by trying to uncover the author’s specific identities and perspectives, and other times, more subtly, in statements like “they are saying…” and “her interpretation is…” that acknowledge a specific human voice responsible for the text content.

This conceptualization appears to be mobilized in her representation of her teaching. When asked to describe a typical lesson, she chose to highlight a series of lessons in which students learned how readers think about authors’ use of tone and word choice to uncover point of view in argumentative text. She described examining authors and texts (e.g., Malcolm X and Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai) with her students to spark conversations about present-day inequities and racism. Students read biographical information about the authors prior to analyzing their speeches. The lessons culminated in students crafting their own speeches about self-identified topics. Her goal in these lessons was to help students learn “how authors use language to make a change in their world.”

Schooling author(ity) out of instructional practices

Like Brooke, Tracy (5 years, fifth/sixth grades) placed high value on understanding where information in a text was coming from, partly by thinking about an author’s experiences and how it might inform their writing. For example, she described her own reading of a nonfiction text about training for distance running by discussing her interest in the authors and the way their ideas have been positively received in the running communities she is affiliated with:

They [authors] started this developmental running club…. They’ve become very big and have been very competitive winning different races…. It’s an elite program, but they wrote their training in this book to kind of give it to anybody, which is nice.

In the lesson she selected as typical of her instruction, however, she did not create a place for readers to consider authors or their authority. She described a multiday close reading protocol, using a historical text. The cycle of lessons progresses through multiple readings including teacher read-alouds that focused on genre conventions, vocabulary, sentence-level annotation, and responding to preprinted teacher questions. Tracy stated that the purpose of the lessons was to help students become close readers, defined as those “who re-read a text multiple times and they take the time to underline and circle and annotate…develop a relationship with the text and digs in the text really deep.”

While the focus of her lesson was on building a particular kind of identity, the identity made available to her students was one in which procedures like marking the text in a certain way or producing repeated readings were more prominently legitimized than critical theorizations of where the text comes from and why it presents the historical information in a particular way. She went on to explain, “the big push with the Common Core is bringing in more of the informational text. The reading [text content] itself is not as important as the actual learning how to read and learning how to comprehend it.” This example of how Tracy’s complex tacit understanding of author(ity) is not evident in her close reading instruction raises important questions about the practices and policies that have conferred legitimacy and power to forms of instruction that constrain the way teachers mobilize their knowledge.

Grappling/Striving for Coherent Meanings

In our analyses, we sought data that would help us understand how teachers engage with texts during the moment-to-moment process of recursively constructing mental representations, responses, and emergent knowledge. While these analyses addressed multiple facets of in-the-moment improvisation practices, such as efforts to maximize coherence, integrate across texts, and selectively notice information, strategy use was the process highlighted most often in teacher think alouds, concept and process maps, and descriptions of their own teaching. Among the strategies mentioned, such as visualizing settings and characters, using context clues to solve word meanings, and constructing inferences, teachers mentioned “making connections” or linking to “prior knowledge” most often. For instance, Colleen (23 years, sixth grade) conceptualized comprehension as a recursive process in which connections messily intersect with visualizations, predictions, self-evaluations of knowledge, and other resources and practices to inform her ongoing coherence building (see Figure 1).


                        figure

Figure 1. Colleen’s reading process map.

While all the teachers in our sample discussed making connections, their characterizations of this strategy varied in focus, specificity, and purpose. For some teachers, such as Robert (26 years, sixth/eighth/ninth grades), Sammie (1 year, eighth grade), and Janie (9 years, sixth/seventh grades), the processes of making connections and attending to or constructing visual imagery were tightly linked.

Janie emphasized automaticity and effortlessness in her own reading and indicated that for proficient adult readers, connections, predictions, and visualizations happen automatically, whereas for students, strategy use must be effortful and intentional. Teachers differed in the targets for their connections: Most, such as Robert, Raquel (2 years, eighth grade), Sammie, and Tracy described forming connections to prior knowledge or their own experiences. Some teachers framed connecting in terms of making links across chapters or texts, or to further reading, such as a Wikipedia page about an author.

Purpose for connecting

Our participants demonstrated in their own reading and process maps a range of stances toward the purposes for constructing connections. As Zara (10 years, eighth grade) read, she oriented toward the task in terms of seeking a clear answer to an external school or text question. She described a mechanistic use of strategies aimed at systematically compiling pieces of information into an answer. In contrast, Raquel continually formed and revised conjectures, using her connections to her background knowledge to move tentatively and recursively through the text. Sammie oriented her strategy use, including noticing knowledge gaps, unclear information, and new information, and calling on relevant background knowledge to fill in gaps and construct visual images toward the end point of constructing a mental model of the larger celestial, social, and political situations described in the informational texts about Pluto’s status. For Robert, making connections was a component of inferring the motivations of characters. Some of the teachers characterized the process of making connections as simultaneous and layered, a part of grappling back and forth across a text or multiple texts. In this sense, connections are opportunities to draw up relevant sensory images, empathy, knowledge of words and word parts from other disciplines, and so on, for the purpose of constructing mental representations of situations, responses to texts, and new understandings.

Connections in the classroom

While our 12 ELA teachers varied widely in the specificity and complexity of the knowledge they articulated about making connections, there were similarities across the data set in terms of instruction about making connections. The view of connections articulated in teachers’ descriptions of their instruction was more mechanistic and less purposeful than was the characterization of connections among some teachers as they discussed their own reading. Similar to findings in previous research (Kucan, Hapgood, & Palincsar, 2011), several teachers, such as Robert and Raquel, were satisfied with a student response to a question that articulated a personal connection without extending the connection to explain how it helped the student engage with the text. The connection served as evidence of comprehension on its own.

Just as teachers tended to describe the processes and purposes of constructing connections in narrower terms when referring to their instruction than to their own reading, the reading process as a whole was more constricted in the context of descriptions of teaching than in descriptions of teachers’ own reading. For example, when teachers conceptualized their own reading they acknowledged starting points (e.g., interests, prior knowledge, or authentic purposes for reading; Figure 1) that tended to precede the starting points that children are allowed in school literacy events. In the text-based lessons described by most teachers, text selection and reading purposes were highly constrained or predetermined.

Identity and Orientation Toward Reading

We conceptualized identities in reading comprehension as socially negotiated positions created, offered, and occupied (or not) during interactions among readers, texts, authors, and contexts (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999; Holland & Leander, 2004). Three facets of identities emerged that characterized how participants oriented themselves as readers. The first, kinds of people, depicts the ways readers’ interactions with texts are influenced by their own interests, idiosyncratic ways of reading, and/or their expectations of themselves and texts. The second facet, rules of engagement, refers to readers’ agency to determine the purpose and responsibilities of the reader, text, and author throughout a textual interaction. Finally, reader’s status, represents participants’ efficacy toward their domain knowledge, experience, and levels of expertise relative to the text and author. In the examples below, we illustrate the variety of ways teachers did and did not mobilize particular personal identifications as readers into their descriptions of reading instructional practice.

Kinds of people

Participants’ knowledge of identity as kinds of people was often presented in a present tense or stable representation of self such as “I’m a reader” or “because I’m me, I notice stuff like this.” Teachers recognized themselves as having idiosyncratic tendencies as readers and by extension acknowledged that reading is at least in part an idiosyncratic activity. Readers also oriented toward the future and expected interactions with text to be consequential to dynamic identities and perspectives—they anticipated being changed by texts.

For example, Robert expressed a visceral response to favorite texts. He explained

That’s why I read books. It moves me. That’s what real art is. If it can change your emotion, can push you in a direction. Happy, sad, angry it doesn’t matter. If art can move you, it has accomplished something. I like that.

However, while his students self-selected texts for independent reading, Robert’s knowledge that art may change readers did not travel intact to his representation of instruction. He explained, “We practice objective summaries, removing your opinion. What is the exposition? Tell me what the story is. The setting, character, conflict kind of thing.” Robert’s instruction suggests that readers identify as kinds of people who extract bits from texts rather than as people preparing to be moved by art.

By contrast, Ida (9 years, sixth/seventh grades), after reading Long Walk to Water (Park, 2011), described being so affected by the challenges and tragedy the text’s focal children from Sudan experienced she researched ways to participate in relief efforts to support Sudanese people. She carried the knowledge that texts can influence the kinds of people readers become into her classroom as well. She asked,

What could I do with my students to…create a motivation of what can you do to help with this situation?…What could [I] talk to them about and…what could I do to support those kind of efforts?

Ida was planning for the kinds of people her students may become while reading Long Walk to Water.

Rules of engagement

Participants understood that their orientations to texts may confer consequential allowances and responsibilities to the reader. Raquel assumed authors of fiction had meanings in mind for their works and she took on responsibility for understanding authors’ intentions. She believed the author provided “clues” to meaning, and it was incumbent upon her to recognize the clues and synthesize them to perceive the author’s message. Instructionally, she mobilized her text-tethered stance into teaching students to “chunk” and annotate texts to accurately summarize information and uncover the author’s meaning.

When reading online about diapers, Tracy questioned the text often and allowed her personal queries to guide her research, despite her admitted lack of experience with the topic. She was not a passive consumer. Instructionally, she described inviting her students to take up purposeful positions even when they were novices in a domain. She explained, “I want students to be encouraged to ask questions, because they know they could get a possible answer to it or it might lead to a discussion to get more information.” Tracy exercised her knowledge that readers can and should use personal inquiry to inform their pathways across texts and imparted that to her students.

Reader’s status

Readers positioned themselves among authors and texts based on degrees of knowledge, experience, or expertise in a domain. One indicator of readers’ perceptions of their status was their willingness to engage in a dialogic interaction with the text (Wilkinson & Son, 2011). Lilia (30 years, seventh/eighth grades), who was formerly a newspaper reporter, applied her knowledge of genre and conventions of reporting information to her interaction with our Pluto protocol. She was only slightly familiar with Pluto’s plight, but she understood how the text worked and leveraged that knowledge into critical dialogue with the text’s form and content throughout her reading.

Lilia also focused on helping students understand how texts work. Her instruction emphasized recognizing rhetorical strategies and literary tropes as tools to support constructions of meaning. She explained,

There are things that they are looking at, when they see this in a text, they should stop and ask themselves some questions…. They are looking at…character, epiphanies, motives, mentor archetypes, tough questions, those kinds of things.

Thus, even as a reader new to a topic, Lilia was committed to helping students use genre knowledge to position themselves as capable meaning-makers.

Janie, reading to compare and contrast disposable and cloth diapers, had no direct experience with diapers, but she leveraged her knowledge of generic conventions, establishing credibility, and conducting online searches to occupy a position from which she could critically think across texts. She explained,

[The article] named the chemicals…in traditional diapers, so it sounds a little more credible, but,…[the authors] also used both so it does kind of give her some credibility, too.…I think it just gives you a better argument and it helps you make a better decision.

The classroom instructional practice she described, however, did not promote her students’ adopting empowered status with the text. While reading self-selected texts, students engaged in the schooled practices of answering “response questions” and defining unfamiliar vocabulary.

By showing the variability in the ways that knowledge is used as a resource in teaching, our findings add to the existing literature on teachers’ specialized knowledge of reading comprehension practices. A great deal of knowledge has been generated from different scholarly perspectives regarding reading comprehension processes and practices (e.g., RAND Reading Study Group, 2002), the complexities of making meaning in multimodal and online environments (Cho, 2014), and the social and historical situatedness of reading (Barton & Hamilton, 2000). Our approach extends this work by beginning to characterize the individualized conceptualizations middle school ELA teachers have constructed from this wide pool of available knowledge and from their own experiences and backgrounds. In this study, we found that teachers have multifaceted knowledge about how readers interact with texts and that they mobilize that knowledge into practice in different ways.

Our findings prompt important questions about specialized knowledge for future work. First, what contextual and policy features of schools might account for different forms of knowledge mobilization? In the case of Tracy, for example, it would appear that a political emphasis on a rigid form of close reading could be constraining her ability or willingness to introduce a more author(ity) centered and critical orientation in her teaching. This suggestion is speculative, but future investigations would benefit from directly exploring these policy and contextual constraints on how teachers mobilize their complex knowledge into practice. Previous research has suggested that the relationship between knowledge and practice is complex (Fairbanks et al., 2010), in part because teachers’ practices are situated within sociohistorically shaped norms and exist within accountability systems that seek to manage what teachers do (Zoch, 2015).

Also, might some facets of teachers’ complex specialized knowledge be easier to mobilize than others? For example, our data suggest that some touchstones (like knowledge of using strategies for coherence building) are easier to square with schooled expectations than others (like engaging dialogically and humanistically with texts). Robert valued being “moved” by art when he reads. However, schooled expectations for literacy can narrow how readers define textual interactions, and Robert’s students were taught to “remov[e] [their] opinion” from textual experiences to produce objective summaries. This pattern aligns with work that sees traditional schooled literacy practices as limiting the range of identities and accomplishments available to readers and writers (Gee, 2015; Warner, 2016), especially those from marginalized communities (Haddix, 2010).

We also wonder about the directionality of the relationship between teachers’ conceptualizations of comprehension and their teaching practices. To what extent do schooled expectations constrain the possibilities teachers imagine in their own working theories of reading comprehension? And how might teachers with more or less experience respond differently to schooled expectations? We certainly see a tendency in our data for teachers to rely on schooled conceptions of meaning construction through the use of narrow end points for student reading experiences and the interpretation of any personal connection as evidence of robust comprehension.

Finally, if we hope teachers will help students come to use layered and simultaneous processes synergistically to make meaning with texts and critique those meanings, how should we craft our literacy methods instruction? Additional work in this area can enable teacher educators to develop clearer understandings of how to help teachers not only develop rich, multiperspectival conceptualizations of reading but also leverage those conceptualizations into instructional practices that reflect their depth and richness.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflict of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was funded by the Spencer Foundation, grant #201400125.

Alexander, P. A., Schallert, D. L., Hare, V. C. (1991). Coming to terms: How researchers in learning and literacy talk about knowledge. Review of Educational Research, 61, 315343.
Google Scholar | SAGE Journals | ISI
Artiles, A. J., McClafferty, K. (1998). Learning to teach culturally diverse learners: Charting change in preservice teachers’ thinking about effective teaching. The Elementary School Journal, 98, 189220.
Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI
Ball, D. L., Thames, M. H., Phelps, G. (2008). Content knowledge for teaching: What makes it special? Journal of Teacher Education, 59, 389407.
Google Scholar | SAGE Journals | ISI
Barton, D., Hamilton, M. (2000). Literacy practices. In Barton, D., Hamilton, M., Ivanič, R. (Eds.), Situated literacies: Reading and writing in context (pp. 714). New York, NY: Routledge.
Google Scholar
Beck, I. L., McKeown, M. G. (2001). Inviting students into the pursuit of meaning. Educational Psychology Review, 13, 225241.
Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI
Cho, B. Y. (2014). Competent adolescent readers’ use of internet reading strategies: A think-aloud study. Cognition and Instruction, 32, 253289.
Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI
Collins, A., Greeno, J. G. (2010). Situative view of learning. In Aukrust, V. G. (Ed.), Learning and cognition in education (pp. 6468). Oxford, England: Elsevier.
Google Scholar
Collins, J., Slembrouck, S. (2007). Reading shop windows in globalized neighborhoods: Multilingual literacy practices and indexicality. Journal of Literacy Research, 39, 335356.
Google Scholar | SAGE Journals | ISI
Davis, D. S., Huang, B. H., Yi, T. (2017). Making sense of science texts: A mixed method examination of predictors and processes of multiple text comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly, 52, 227252.
Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI
Davis, D. S., McElhone, D., Tenore, F. B. (2015). A dialogic account of reader-text interactions. English Teaching: Practice & Critique, 14, 335349.
Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI
Fairbanks, C. M., Duffy, G. G., Faircloth, B. S., He, Y., Levin, B., Rohr, J., Stein, C. (2010). Beyond knowledge: Exploring why some teachers are more thoughtfully adaptive than others. Journal of Teacher Education, 61, 161171.
Google Scholar | SAGE Journals | ISI
Gee, J. P. (2015). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses (5th ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.
Google Scholar
Gilles, C., Wang, Y., Johnson, D. (2016). Drawing on what we do as readers: Discovering and embedding strategies across the disciplines. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 59, 675684.
Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI
Haddix, M. (2010). “Goin’ for broke”: Reaping the rewards of teaching toward cultural and linguistic diversity. Language and Literacy Spectrum, 20, 8390.
Google Scholar
Harré, R., van Langenhove, L. (1999). Positioning theory: Moral contents of intentional action. Oxford, England: Blackwell.
Google Scholar
Holland, D., Leander, K. (2004). Ethnographic studies of positioning and subjectivity: An introduction. Ethos, 32, 127139.
Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI
Janks, H. (2000). Domination, access, diversity and design: A synthesis for critical literacy education. Educational Review, 52, 175186.
Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI
Kelly, P. (2006). What is teacher learning? A sociocultural perspective. Oxford Review of Education, 32, 505519.
Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI
Kucan, L., Hapgood, S., Palincsar, A. S. (2011). Teachers’ specialized knowledge for supporting student comprehension in text-based discussions. Elementary School Journal, 112, 6182.
Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI
Kucan, L., Palincsar, A. S., Khasnabis, D., Chang, C. (2009). The video viewing task: A source of information for assessing and addressing teacher understanding of text-based discussion. Teaching and Teacher Education, 25, 415423.
Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI
Lee, C. D., Smagorinsky, P. (2000). Introduction: Constructing meaning through collaborative inquiry. In Lee, C. D., Smagorinsky, P. (Eds.), Vygotskian perspectives on literacy research: Constructing meaning through collaborative inquiry (pp. 115). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Google Scholar
Levin, B., He, Y. (2008). Investigating the content and sources of teacher candidates’ personal practical theories (PPTs). Journal of Teacher Education, 59, 5568.
Google Scholar | SAGE Journals | ISI
Palincsar, A. S., Brown, A. L. (1984). Reciprocal teaching of comprehension-fostering and comprehension-monitoring activities. Cognition and instruction, 1, 117175.
Google Scholar | Crossref
Park, L. S. (2011). A long walk to water. New York, NY: Clarion.
Google Scholar
Phelps, G. (2009). Just knowing how to read isn’t enough! Assessing knowledge for teaching reading. Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Accountability, 21, 137154.
Google Scholar | Crossref | ISI
RAND Reading Study Group . (2002). Reading for understanding: Toward an R&D program in reading comprehension. Santa Monica, CA: Office of Education Research and Improvement.
Google Scholar
Ruddell, R. B., Unrau, N. J. (2004). Reading as a meaning-construction process: The reader, the text, and the teacher. In Unrau, N. J., Ruddell, R. B. (Eds.), Theoretical models and processes of reading (5th ed., pp. 14621523). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
Google Scholar
Strauss, A., Corbin, J. (1998). Basics of qualitative research: Techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Google Scholar
Verloop, N., Van Driel, J., Meijer, P. (2001). Teacher knowledge and the knowledge base of teaching. International Journal of Educational Research, 35, 441461.
Google Scholar | Crossref
Warner, J. (2016). Adolescents’ dialogic composing with mobile phones. Journal of Literacy Research, 48, 164191.
Google Scholar | SAGE Journals | ISI
Wilkinson, I. A. G., Son, E. H. (2011). A dialogic turn in research on learning and teaching to comprehend. In Kamil, M. L., Rosenthal, P. B., Pearson, P. D., Barr, R. (Eds.), Handbook of reading research: Volume IV (pp. 359387). New York, NY: Routledge.
Google Scholar
Zoch, M. (2015). Growing the good stuff: One literacy coach’s approach to support teachers with high-stakes testing. Journal of Literacy Research, 47, 328369.
Google Scholar | SAGE Journals | ISI

Author Biographies

Dot McElhone is at Portland State University.

F. Blake Tenore is at Florida State University.

Dennis S. Davis is at North Carolina State University.