Teaching and Learning
Tom Salsbury
Understanding and Addressing the Social Aspects of Reading Instruction

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Children come to American public schools from a variety of social and cultural backgrounds. When the native languages and experiences of these children are foreign to their teachers and classmates, it is difficult for children and adults to communicate or connect at a basic level of understanding.

Teaching children to read starts with an understanding of the background knowledge or schema they bring to the reading experience. Learning to read is first and foremost a social activity. Often, language minority children do not receive the necessary scaffolding needed because schools do not know how to connect with them. In these cases, there is frequently a mismatch between school, home/community, and individual student goals. Simply generalizing children’s literacy expectations based on their country of origin, race or ethnicity is not enough—languages and cultures can vary greatly within a country or region—thus, stereotyping a child based on these factors is particularly misleading.

Dr. Salsbury’s research attempts to develop assessments of children’s background or schema—their perceptions going into a literacy experience—and measures this against types of reading instruction. Assessing the effects of schema on reading development will take the form of scaffolding reading instruction, before, during, and after the literacy event and will measure variables such as first language, country and community of origin, and home/community literacy experiences and expectations. The research will catalogue the myriad of ways that children enter literacy experiences and the effectiveness of different types of reading instruction scaffolding.

This research will be valuable in aiding teachers to make basic connections with their language minority students before, during, and after a reading experience, and brings us one step closer to the foundation of a laboratory to better facilitate the study of these phenomena.

Contact Information
Tom Salsbury, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Teaching and Learning

Washington State University
PO Box 642132
Pullman, WA 99164-2132

Telephone: 509-335-8853
E-mail: tsalsbury@wsu.edu