ECOLENGUA Project (UCR)

Analysis of Different Views and Conceptualizations of the Literacy Practices of Pupils, Families, and Teachers in Costa Rican Primary Education

University of origin: University of Seville

Destination University: University of Costa Rica

Department: Institute for Research on Education. Education Faculty.

Head of project: Doctor Ana Lupita Chaves Salas

This project analyzed the reading and writing practices of students in the first and second cycles of Basic General Education in the Western Region of Costa Rica. Its purpose was the evaluation of informational, digital and media literacy that students possessed in the initial stages of formal education.

The project fell under the work carried out by Dr. Ana Lupita Chaves Salas’ team at the Institute for Research in Education (INIE) of the University of Costa Rica, entitled "The processes of reading comprehension and their interaction with ICT, other cultural mediators and pedagogical action at the transition level, I and II of Basic General Education”, and developed during 2014-2017. Collaboration with this project consisted of the following stages:

Phase 1: Diagnosis of the project, led by Professor Chaves.

Phase 2: Design of a collaborative action research project.

Recent years have seen the appearance of new reading and writing practices due to the increased use of social networks, mobile phones, web pages or blogs of various kinds. This has given rise to new skills that pose a challenge in training contexts such as the University (Lea & Stierer, 2000). At the same time, various methodologies have been developed in the analysis of literacy (Duke & Mallette, 2011), especially through the sociocultural approach and New Literacy Studies (Barton, 1994; Gee, 1996; Street, 2003).

Literacy processes were approached in this research as a sociocultural practice (Cook-Gumperz, 1985; Barton, 1994) developed in the field of Primary Education, which focuses on the analysis of the four sub-ecosystems described in the works of Douglas (1970), Martos García (2009) and Martos García (2010). These elements made it possible to describe the reading and writing practices of students in Primary Education and the different literary events in which they regularly participate.

The project attempted to analyze the reading and writing practices currently present in Primary Education (I and II cycle in the Western Region in Costa Rica), based on various instruments designed to respond to the following objectives:

1. Identifying reader and writer profiles in Primary Education students (Pahl and Rowsell, 2005; Barton, 2007).
2. Describing the characteristics that define these profiles (Cope, 1999; Barton, 2007; Poveda & Sánchez, 2010).
3. Evaluating the influence of ICT in the new reading and writing processes that students enrolled in Primary Education exhibit (Chartier, 1993).
4. Determining the didactic strategies that enable teacher mediation in the new contexts of informational, digital, media and academic literacy (Cassany, 2006)

For this, the following classification of the ecosystem of literacy events was chosen (Barton & Hamilton, 1998), structuring the analysis into the following sub-systems:

• Entrepreneurship culture (writing events that take place outside the academic field)
• Socialization / instruction culture (academic reading and writing)
• Producción y consumo cultural (eventos letrados relacionados con el mercado editorial)
• Cultural production and consumption (literary events related to the publishing market)

The interaction between traditional reading and writing and informational, digital, media and academic literacy was studied in the same context.

The choice to carry out this research at the University of Costa Rica was made because of the ongoing collaboration between both universities within the DevalSimWeb project, part itself of the European ALFA III project (2011), developed by the EVALfor research group. In addition, Costa Rica offers a series of guarantees regarding the educational evaluation chapter (PIRLS, PISA and OECD member tests) and efficiency (the University of Costa Rica occupies the 5th place in the ranking of Latin American universities that have Spanish as a first language) that allowed us to work effectively in the field of learning to read and write the Spanish language. The result of the execution of the project in Costa Rica sought the development of a comprehensive strategy for teaching and assessing language communication competence, designed to be used in schools that provide Primary Education, in order to precipitate a change in the way the teaching of this basic competence in a contemporary context is approached, and improving the students’ performance in this area of learning.

The work plan of this research project was structured in phases, which were in turn divided into activities or tasks. Four phases of realization are contemplated, during which we worked collaboratively with the teachers of the centers participating in the project, and information on the reading-writing habits of the students in school and family environments was collected.

1. Phase 1:constitution of working groups in each center, formed by one or more members of the research team and by Primary Education teachers from the participating schools in Costa Rica.
2. Phase 2: fine-tuning techniques for the analysis of school practices.Fine-tuning the instruments and establishing the guidelines in order to apply the information gathering techniques used in the study. For each of the planned techniques, application guidelines were established specifying the purpose for which they were to be used, the source of information, the procedure to be followed, or the way to record the data. The collection of information on the reading and writing practices of the students was carried out through two questionnaires: one on reading and writing practices in students (Questionnaire 1), consisting of closed questions (multiple choice, with the option others) and scaled questions (Likert type), and a second questionnaire for the teachers participating on the project on reading and writing practices in the classroom (Questionnaire 2), which consisted on open answer questions.

• Phase 3: collection and analysis of evidence.Using the previously indicated techniques, field work was carried out in the different centers participating in the study, collecting an important volume of information on the reading and writing habits of the students, both in classrooms and in their family environment. The analysis of the data from Questionnaire 1 was carried out using different statistical methods, and the identification of the profiles of the current writer and reader profiles was carried out by means of a principal component analysis with varimaxrotation. A multiple correspondence analysis for categorical data was used to identify the students who best represented each of the writer and reader profiles in PD. The method chosen was a non-parametric analysis (Kruskal-Wallis H test or Mann-Whitney U test), in order to determine possible differences between profiles. The information in Questionnaire 1 was contrasted and expanded using Questionnaire 2.

• Phase 4: drafting a report on the reading and writing habits of the students of I and II cycles of the western regional headquarters (Costa Rica).This activity, which concluded the first phase of the study, consisted of the preparation of a joint report by the research team in which they analyzed the methodology followed and the results and conclusions reached. The report sought to be the basis for the dissemination of the results within the scientific community, and for their presentation to the participating centers. In the same way, this report sought to identify a common literacy profile to elaborate and develop a plan to improve reading comprehension in schools in the Western Region, as well as to detect the training deficiencies of teachers on the new challenges of contemporary literacy, in order to design an improvement plan in the Costa Rican school teaching practice.

The full research is available in the following publication:

Guzmán-Simón, F., Moreno-Morilla, C., & García-Jiménez, E. (2018). Analysis of Different Views and Conceptualizations of the Literacy Practices of Pupils, Families, and Teachers in Costa Rican Primary Education, Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 32(3), 268-282. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02568543.2018.1464527