Research and Policy: How Should Readers Develop across Time? Mapping Change without a Deficit Perspective

When reading comprehension is primarily treated as the ability to reach sanctioned interpretations or to use sanctioned interpretive techniques, students’ existing reading practices that do not fit expectations are often treated as problems to be fixed. While some scholars have been troubled by this notion, justly aligning it with a deficit perspective, few of them have offered a way of conceptualizing comprehension development that honors all student textual sensemaking while still allowing educators to trace patterns of growth across time. This conceptual article provides such a framework, elaborating on six developmental domains for comprehension that stem from a transformative perspective rather than a deficit perspective on students’ reading development across time. These developmental domains are literate identity, intellectual integrity, textual curiosity, imaginative engagement, sociopragmatic agency, and textual dexterity. The article details these domains and some of their pedagogical implications.—