Literacy, Language, and Culture: Research
Majoring in LLC at the University of Michigan gives you many opportunities to work with faculty members who are leaders in Literacy, Language, and Culture.
Here is a list of some of the projects that LLC faculty and students are working on now, or have been involved with in the past. Links on this page will open in a new window. To return to this page, please close the window.
Faculty Research Projects
Addison Stone is facilitating a collaboration among special education, speech-language, and ESL specialists from U of M and Wayne State Univ. on a federal model demonstration project focused on enriching the language and early literacy skills of children in local Head Start and high-risk preschool programs, with an eye to maximizing the engagement of students with disabilities.
Lesley Rex and her colleagues study the classroom interactions of White and African American teachers to explore how teachers and students manage conflict when race is a confounding factor. In research on professional development contexts, Lesley and doctoral student, Laura Schiller investigate how practitioners re-conceptualized and contextualized complicated problems of practice—even when socially threatened—by sustaining norms for exercising power and politeness.
Jay Lemke is interested in sociocultural approaches to the role of language and literacy in learning across multiple sites and timescales. He is currently doing a pilot study towards a larger project"I3W: Investigating Interactive Immersive Worlds" that will examine what we can learn from commercial computer and video games about designing next-generation learning environments that integrate language and multiple visual representations.
Seeking to understand the complex relationship between the cognitive and linguistic demands posed by increasingly advanced content area reading and writing tasks and the motivational demands posed by adolescents’ development and exploration of many different pathways to adulthood, Elizabeth Moje and her colleagues are using an array of methods to understand what motivates adolescents in Detroit schools and communities to persevere in the face of content literacy challenges. In a second project, Professor Moje seeks to provide a model for discipline-based adolescent literacy teacher education.
Joanne Carlisle directs the state of Michigan’s assessment project for the Reading First initiative. In addition, she and her colleagues are engaged in an effort to develop measures to assess the content and pedagogical content knowledge that teachers use in the teaching of reading.
In efforts to support the achievement of students who struggle with literacy demands in subject matter learning, Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar and her research group are investigating the effects of various digital environments designed to help students to interpret graphics, and integrate prose and graphics, particularly in science text. In addition, they are designing video case materials to support collaborations between subject matter teachers and literacy coaches in the middle school grades.
Student Research Projects
"Taking a Stance": Resolving Frame Clashes in a High School English Professional Learning Community
Second language acquisition in a Head Start classroom
