Literacy Tutoring That Works —
Abstract of

Chapter 4
“You Gotta Read It With Awake in You”: Marginalized High School Readers, Engagement, Agency, and Reading as Performance

Mellinee Lesley

This chapter describes a reading tutoring project created for at-risk high-school students. The students participating in the project were identified as at risk for academic failure through definitions created by the Communities in Schools Program involving degrees of probability for dropping out of high school. A primary goal of the tutoring project was to foster reading engagement with the students to facilitate their ability to read successfully in school settings. Using grounded theory and discourse analysis as a tool for analyzing data, findings from the study include a trend of students defining reading as a public performance. Reading performance was viewed around the following two factors: (1) the ability to read text fluently with expression and (2) the ability to talk about text with authority. Engagement in reading hinged on the students' facility with controlling these aspects of reading tasks successfully.

Lesley, M. (2009). “You Gotta Read It With Awake in You”: Marginalized High School Readers, Engagement, Agency, and Reading as Performance. In J.C. Richards, & C.A. Lassonde (Eds.), Literacy Tutoring That Works (pp. 46-55). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.