Reading and Writing Quarterly- Seawright

Reading and Writing Quarterly Journal Review
by Leslie Seawright

I reviewed three issues of the Reading and Writing Quarterly Journal, one from each of the last three years. The journal is produced four times a year and all issues since 1997 are available online through the University of Arkansas library, with the exception of the most recent 12-month period. It is published by Routledge, a Taylor and Francis, Inc. company. Their website claims that the journal “provides direction in educating a mainstreamed population for literacy” by disseminating information about students who struggle with reading and writing. The content of the reviewed journals reflects the journal’s focus on pedagogical goals related to reading and writing. Most articles deal directly with students in the classroom or students in tutoring situations. In most cases the students are dealing with a literacy problem or the author of the article is evaluating literacy techniques in the classroom.

Most articles are either direct experiments or a review of the current and past research in order to derive implications and suggestions for teaching. The articles are academic in nature, ignoring lore or “storytelling” from the classroom. The authors go to great lengths to show they are well-read by listing several other theorists and articles in their own pieces. The bibliographies of all the articles I reviewed would be great resources for any student/researcher looking to do work in literacy. Each journal issue is centered on one main literacy topic; the three I reviewed included vocabulary skills, reading mathematics and its ties to more conventional reading, and tutoring for better reading and writing. Within these three issues I found several of the topics discussed in our class. From Jul-Sep2005, Vol. 21 Issue 3 an article described Dual Coding Theory and how it affected the teaching of sight words with flash cards for young learners. The author argued that children should be shown only words, not pictures, on flash cards. Another article in that same issue demonstrated that Shared Storybook Reading could build vocabulary and present more challenging novelistic ideas to students that can not yet read independently or at least, can’t read at the shared level independently.

In the Apr 2007, Vol. 23 Issue 2 the idea of what can be “read” was taken up. The issue dealt entirely with reading mathematics and math assignments. We have discussed in class the idea of what can be “read” several times, and I was delighted to see a journal devote an entire issue to a topic seemingly (but not really so) out of its realm.

It would seem that the pedagogical nature of the journal would suggest a clear audience; however, I found the articles to be too broadly scoped for an elementary teacher and too narrowly designed for the graduate teacher/researcher. While many articles review current theories on reading and writing approaches, there are very few pedagogical implications in the “discussion” sections of these articles. Likewise, the more experiment based articles seldom condone putting their method in place based upon their research or throwing out old ideas based on their new discoveries. This is common in all academic journals, I know, but I did expect to see a bit more of a suggestive nature in this journal since it claims to “provide direction” for the teaching of students.

I also found the age of most of the subjects a limiting audience factor. Most of the experiments were with subjects in elementary school. Perhaps literacy specialists and the like are reading these articles, but I doubt that any other “normal” elementary teacher is delving into an academic journal for their teaching points. This focus on younger subjects also left me and perhaps other graduate student researchers with little to hang my hat on, so to speak. I didn’t feel I could replicate many of the experiments or put into practice many of the suggestions found in the articles, although there must be others that use the findings in their own research or in the development of other theories.

The journal doesn’t appear to be interactive. While it is available online, the actual journal itself is not, and I could find no blog or comment site online for the journal. It appears the Reading and Writing Quarterly is devoted to developing dialogue through its own publication and interaction is limited to the publication of articles it endorses.