Understanding Reading Sponsorship Through Analysis of First-Year Composition Studentsâ•Ž Literacy Narratives

Through qualitative coding and analysis of 121 literacy narratives, this study examines first-year college students’ references to former reading sponsors, defined as the people, institutions, and entities that played a role in their reading development. The study was designed to locate the sponsors present in the narratives, to determine patterns that emerged in their experiences, and to examine factors that were formative to the participants’ reading identities. The study reveals the highly social nature of reading development, providing evidence that the participants’ perceptions of themselves as readers are shaped by the individuals, institutions, and entities who sponsor them including parents, grandparents, teachers, tutors, school systems, authors, and books/genres. Participants’ earliest memories of reading development reveal the uneven nature of early reading sponsorship, particularly for ESL or slower readers. Participants also share accounts of a dramatic reduction in reading involvement during high-school which is linked through the participants’ narratives to lack of choice with regard to book selection, teacher-driven topics, excessive quizzing, and standardized testing. The researcher discovered three meta-themes in the data providing evidence that many participants are engaged readers both in and out of school, but that a large percentage lose or gain interest in reading, report that they hate or hated reading, and desire more choice in reading and topic selection. The researcher suggests that there is a correlation between reading proficiency and reading engagement, calling for more studies and curriculum re-design.


Introduction and Review of Literature
College-level reading is a complex act. In Reconnecting Reading and Writing (2013) Alice Horning and Elizabeth Kraemer define reading as: getting meaning from print, whether the print is viewed on paper or on a screen. In college courses in writing and elsewhere, however, reading must go beyond just getting meaning: Readers must be able to analyze texts to see how parts fit together. They must be able to synthesize different readings on the same topic or issue so that they can see a range of perspectives and/or research on the topic or issue. In addition, students must be able to evaluate the materials they read. Finally, critical reading entails students' ability to make use of what they read for their own purposes. (p.10) Although it is clear that effective reading is critical to college students' success, many first-year college students are underprepared for the college-level reading that will be required to complete their degrees (U.S. Department of Education, 2014). In response, because they perceive reading and writing as interconnected processes, a growing number of professionals in the field of composition believe that writing instructors should spend more time addressing reading practices and processes in their classrooms (Bunn, 2010;Carillo, 2015;Horning & Kraemer, 2013;Salvatori & Donahue, 2012;Sullivan, Tinberg & Blau 2017). This belief stems, in part, from an awareness that first-year college students bring a wide range of reading competencies with them to college, that many first-year students have substantial difficulty reading academic texts, and that reading and writing are counterparts in the construction (or composition) of meaning. Thus, many scholars advocate that composition studies focus on reading because they believe reading is a deliberate intellectual practice that "helps us make sense of and interpret that which surrounds us," and this interpretive capacity is essential to a student's ability to think and write clearly (Carillo, 2015, p. 5).
In order to better understand students' reading and writing histories, and to help students better understand their own literacy histories, instructors in first-year composition classes may ask students to write what is known as the "literacy narrative." John Trimbur has included a literacy narrative assignment in several additions of his textbook A Call to Write, and a multitude of approaches to the genre are widely available on the Web. Students' literacy narratives-stories about prior experiences with reading and writing-may offer instructors some insight into students' backgrounds which can assist composition instructors in understanding the personal, educational, behavioral, and cultural entities that shape students' reading practices (Chandler, 2013;Patterson, 2001;and Young, 2015). Through qualitative analysis of first-year composition students' literacy narratives, this study aims to better understand the literacy experiences students bring to the first-year composition classroom by analyzing students' references to literacy sponsors (Brandt, 1998), which I will define as people, institutions, and entities that play an influential role in a student's literacy development, particularly with regard to reading (sponsors will be further defined below). Specifically, I seek answers to the following questions:  To what extent do students refer to sponsors of reading in their literacy narratives?
 What patterns emerge in students' narratives with regard to literacy sponsors?
 What factors regarding literacy sponsors and reading development do students report as being formative to their identities as readers?
In "Sponsors of Literacy," literacy theorist Deborah Brandt (1998) references literacy sponsors as "any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy-and gain advantage by it in some way" (166). Brandt formulated the concept of literacy sponsorship as a concrete analytical tool to investigate the economic, technological, and social issues that shape individuals' literacies, whether referencing reading or writing. The concept of literacy sponsorship provides a useful frame or exemplar for this study as it defines my role as instructor and investigator and provides a theoretical framework for analyzing the experiences students report in their literacy narratives. I will use Brandt's concept of literacy sponsorship to assist in examining people, institutions, and other forces that shape students' reading experiences as reported in their narratives. Brandt (1998) mentions several common sponsors of literacy, including "older relatives, teachers, priests, supervisors, military officers, editors, and influential authors" (p. 26). For my research, I will add to this to create an operative definition which will allow for coding of data. For the purposes of this study, reading sponsors are defined as entities that students report helped or hindered their reading literacy, including teachers, schools, parents, siblings, friends, authors/books, genres, places of worship, organizations, technologies, and hobbies.
In the conclusion of her book, Literacy in American Lives, Brandt (2001) calls on educators to build more "realistic, socially responsive pedagogies" (p. 194). In response to this call, this study will provide new insights into first-year college students' reading experiences (involving sponsors) that could assist composition instructors in understanding how the reading identities of first-year students are shaped by sponsors.

National Reports on Preparedness for College-level Reading
National reports on reading find that many first-year college students are underprepared for college-level reading. For example, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report finds that only 38% of U.S. high-school seniors are likely to possess the reading skills necessary for college success (U.S. Dept. of Education, 2014) while the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that roughly 70% of U.S. high-school graduates attend college (U.S. Dept. of Labor, 2012). These statistics, when conflated, are concerning because they suggest that many new college students may be unable to manage the demands of college reading. Similarly, according to a National Endowment for the Arts study (NEA, 2007), only "one-third of U.S. 13-year olds are daily readers, and little more than one-third of high school seniors now read proficiently" (Groenke and Scherff, 2009, p. 1). Many of these highschool students reading below proficiency levels become our college students.
Literacy narratives are a useful tool for gathering information about reading sponsors because the narratives often reveal information about the people and conditions that shape students' reading abilities and interests.

Literacy Narratives: Students' Self-Reports
A literacy narrative can be defined as a story told or written by an individual about experiences with reading and writing. Historically, narratives have been written as autobiographies (Rose, 1989;Villanueva, 1993) or delivered orally or in writing to a researcher through an interview process or ethnographic study (Brandt, 2001;Brice-Heath, 1983). Early qualitative case studies of American literacy, such as Shirley

Brice-Heath's Ways with Words and Deborah Brandt's Literacy in American Lives,
focused on how literacy is shaped by social, political, and economic forces; these studies paved the way for future research on literacy. Sally Chandler's New Literacy Narratives from an Urban University: Analyzing Stories about Reading, Writing and Changing Technologies (Chandler, 2013) uses participatory action research (PAR) to analyze the literacy experiences of five student co-authors. Chandler's work extends the work of Deborah Brandt, Cynthia Selfe, and Gail Hawisher by integrating narrative analysis and reflective participant collaboration with students from an urban university (4).
Composition instructors began to use literacy narratives as a tool for understanding and sharing students' reading and writing processes and experiences in the 1990s (Trimbur, 2013), and there is currently renewed interest in literacy narratives. Approximately 230 dissertations on literacy narratives have been conducted in the past ten years; however, no current studies using literacy narratives to better understand the reading sponsors of a large number of first-year students in composition classrooms could be located in the Proquest or MLA Dissertation databases. Although there are many studies associated with literacy, I have yet to find one that examines the reading narratives of first-year college students with a focus on using students' self-reports on reading to better understand their interactions with literacy sponsors for the purpose of informing the design of reading curricula for the college writing classroom. If composition instructors are to better understand their students as readers and how their experiences and identities as readers shape their writing and learning experiences, more research on how students are shaped as readers is required-this dissertation is one such study. Resources for this dissertation will be drawn from many fields including English (Rhetoric and Composition), Education, Linguistics, Reading, Neuroscience, and Psychology.

Reading and Composition Theory
It is clear to many composition theorists that a substantial number of college students need help navigating the texts they will encounter in college, and most composition scholars agree that students' prior reading experiences shape their ability to manage college-level reading. Composition scholars are becoming increasingly vocal about students' reading abilities and habits, noting that students do not like to read (Thelin, 2012), lack experience as critical readers of difficult texts (Tetreault and Center, 2009), lack appropriate skills for academic success (Mason-Egan, 2009), and read differently because of technology (Gere et al., 2008). As Alice Horning notes with regard to college readers, some "don't, won't, and can't" (Horning & Kraemer, 2013). This study aims to examine how students report their experiences with prior reading sponsors, from their own perspectives. through the aether, the skill that nobody wants to teach directly…yet for our incoming Pathways students, reading competency -from sheer vocabulary to cultural background to rhetorical constructs-may be the unmentioned ball and chain that sinks their success.
 What do we do when there aren't developmental reading courses, but reading still needs to be taught developmentally?
In Securing a Place for Reading in Composition, Ellen Carillo (2015) suggests that many composition instructors do not teach reading because doing so would "'lower' themselves to do work that should have been done by K-12 teachers" (p. 9).
In other words, instructors may be aware that many of their students do not complete or cannot understand required readings, but they may not have developed a pedagogy to help their students become better readers. A closer analysis of students' experiences with literacy sponsors through their literacy narratives will assist with understanding the challenges and successes that first-year students have had regarding reading.
Dehaene states, "Surveys indicate that about one adult in ten fails to master even the rudiments of text comprehension. Years of hard work are needed before the clockwork-like brain machinery that supports reading runs so smoothly that we forget it exists" (2). Dehaene explains that after years of practice, when our reading processes become automatic and unconscious, we are "under the illusion that reading is simple and effortless" (8). Wolf and Dehaene's work suggests that college-level reading may be cognitively problematic for first-year students who have not been regularly engaged in sustained reading activities nor exposed to a wide variety of advanced texts. Wolf also emphasizes the importance of early reading experiences: Learning to read begins the first time an infant is held and read a story.
How often this happens, or fails to happen, in the first five years of childhood turns out to be one of the best predictors of later reading. A little-discussed class system invisibly divides our society, with those families that provide their children environments rich in oral and written language opportunities gradually set apart from those who do not, or cannot. A prominent study found that by kindergarten, a gap of 32 million words already separates some children in linguistically impoverished homes from their more stimulated peers. In other words, in some environments the average middle-class child hears 32 million more spoken words than the young underprivileged child by age five (p. 20).
For strong reading skills to develop, Wolf and others emphasize the importance of early exposure to environments rich in oral and written language. Because these early environments require interaction with sponsors (according to my operative definition), first-year students' literacy narratives often reveal information regarding students' early exposure to language and reading and to the individuals and institutions, or sponsors, that provided or denied access to that exposure. Any insight that instructors can gain about a student's former interactions with reading sponsors may assist both the instructor and the student in understanding how a student's reading habits, interests, and identities were shaped.
Literacy narratives also often reveal the genres of reading and writing with which students are familiar and can inform instructors about a student's interest or lack of interest in reading. These prior experiences may also shape students' reading behaviors. According to composition theorist Charles Bazerman et al. (2009), "Genres are forms of life, ways of being. They are frames for social action…Genres shape the thoughts we form and the communications by which we interact" (1). Genre theory recognizes that there is a variety of discourse communities with "their own norms and conventions for constructing and debating knowledge" and that texts vary linguistically according to purpose, context, and community. As such, students may be familiar with particular genres of poetry, or say, a Shakespearean play, but very unfamiliar with the variety of genres they will be called upon to read and write in college and their professional lives, such as analytical reports and scholarly articles.
Students, bringing their own roadmaps from their previous experience, would also benefit from signs posted by those familiar with the new academic landscape. However, guideposts are only there when we construct them, are only useful if others know how to read them, and will only be used if they point toward destinations students see as worth going toward. (p. 1) Because genres and books both entice students to read and also dissuade them from reading, they may act as sponsors and play a key role in a students' reading identities.
An understanding of the kinds of genres students have engaged with in their precollege years and how those genres have shaped reading practices and behaviors will be helpful in understanding their reading experiences and capabilities and, perhaps, their assumptions about the reading that will be required of them in college. These issues may surface in students' literacy narratives as they share information about their interactions with books, authors, families, friends, and discourse communities and other sponsors.
Affective issues, such as motivation to read, or lack of it, may emerge during interaction that occurs between a student and various reading sponsors. Reading experts John Guthrie and Alan Wigfield (1997) assert that motivation is cognitively generated, but with "considerable impact from affective factors" (v), yet few studies have been done to explore how affective factors shape students' learning behaviors while reading. Guthrie and Wigfield lament the fact that during the 1990s, interest declined in studying motivation and other affective factors with regard to reading instruction and practice. How literacy sponsors develop curriculum and present instruction relating to reading may play a key role in determining what texts students value and their motivation to read.
In her 2010 plenary address at the National Reading Conference, "Why Can't We Read Something Good?" Gloria Ladson-Billings (2010) complains that "every year millions of young people enter our schools and classrooms and find themselves subjected to a curriculum, a pedagogy, and a set of required texts that do little more than push them away from our so-called stated goal-to educate all students so they can…use their minds well" (15). Ladson-Billings links choice and motivation in her address, calling on instructors-as literacy sponsors-to integrate new genres of literature into the classroom that will be more appealing to students based on a student's cultural background and personal interests. Students often reveal in their narratives how reading prescribed texts in high school reduces their motivation to read; literacy narratives provide insight into how the texts selected by reading sponsors have both positive and negative effects on reading engagement and motivation.
As the numbers of English Language Learners (ELL) and English as Second Language (ESL) students continue to grow in public colleges and universities, it is also essential that literacy sponsors understand each student's cultural background.
Many first-year students in public institutions have had limited exposure to academic texts and language through family sponsors and are further hindered from success by language barriers; some have had limited exposure to Standard English because English is not a first or second language. New Literacy Studies proponent James Paul Gee (2012) argues that language acquisition (literacy) is not purely cognitive; it is, in fact, largely social and cultural and stems from discourses or "socially accepted associations among ways of using language, of thinking, and of acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or a social network" (Gee, 2012, p. 1). Even among speakers of English there are socio-culturally different primary discourses; lower socio-economic black children use English to make sense of their experiences differently than their middle-class counterparts (4). For example, in Social Linguistics and Literacies Gee notes that: Many lower socio-economic African-American people in the United States, though they are literate, have ties to a former rich oral culture, both from the days of slavery in the United States and from African cultures, and are at the same time less influenced than mainstream middle-class groups by essay-text literacy and the school systems that perpetuate it. (p. 69) Gaining a better understanding of a student's cultural background may help literacy sponsors better understand a student's identity as a reader. Gee stresses the importance of understanding how different cultural practices call for certain uses of language and suggests that one major motif of contemporary socio-cultural approaches to literacy development is to study the features of various communities' social practices. A better understanding of the roles students' communities and families play as literacy sponsors may assist instructors in helping students acclimate to academic conventions while honoring their particular backgrounds.
In Diversity Matters, Lynn Spradlin and Richard Parsons (2008) claim that as the American classroom becomes increasingly diverse, such diversity has "important implications for educators" (p. 2) They call for the professional development of all educators (literacy sponsors) on the concepts of culture, race, ethnicity, social class, sexual orientation, gender, status and marginalization (p. 3). They also suggest that teachers should be sensitive to the values of each particular student noting that not all cultures and communities share the values of the dominant culture; this process starts by examining one's values to see how they shape one's pedagogy and approach to teaching.
Our cultural heritage and background influence our lives in many ways.
No aspect of human life is not touched and altered by culture. Our personalities, the way we think, and the ways we solve problems, as well as methods we use to organize ourselves, are all given shape, in large part, by cultural experiences. However, we frequently take the great influence of culture on our lives for granted and fail to identify the significant and sometimes subtle ways culture affects our behavior (p. 4).
Understanding literacy sponsorship through students' literacy narratives may offer insight into students' cultural backgrounds, helping composition instructors to better understand how each student's reading identity was shaped by the sponsors within that particular culture.
As Alice Horning and others suggest: Because first year writing is a common, shared experience, and because it is meant to help students develop key abilities they will need to succeed in other courses, it is surely a good place to work on reading in conjunction with writing. Writing teachers can help students become better readers through reconnecting reading and writing. (p. 7) The goal of my research is to hear what students report about their experiences as readers through analysis of their literacy narratives, using sponsorship as a preliminary frame. Through the analysis of students' reports of their literacy sponsors, this research may offer rich insights as to how reading sponsors shape students' reading identities.

Developing the Research Design
This study was designed to explore first-year college students' reading experiences through their literacy narratives using Deborah Brandt's (1998Brandt's ( , 2001 work on literacy sponsors as a preliminary frame. The study first aims to investigate the people, places, and things that students report influenced their reading

Why Use Qualitative Research?
Creswell states that researchers use qualitative research when a human problem, social problem, or issue needs to be explored (Creswell, 2013). During the qualitative research process, the focus must be kept on learning the meaning the participants hold about the problem or issue, not on the perceptions researchers bring to the research.
Additionally, Creswell notes that qualitative research should "reflect multiple perspectives of the participants in the study" (2013, p. 47). According to Creswell: We conduct qualitative research when we want to empower individuals to share their stories, hear their voices, and minimize the power relationships that often exist between a researcher and the participants in a study. To further de-emphasize a power relationship, we may collaborate directly with participants by having them review our research questions, or by having them collaborate with us during the data analysis and interpretation phases of research. We conduct qualitative research when we want to write in a literary, flexible style that conveys stories … (p. 48) While noting that there is no single specific research design for qualitative research (research design often evolves during the research process), Creswell offers five possible approaches: narrative research, phenomenological research, grounded theory, ethnographic research, and case study research. For the purposes of determining the role literacy sponsors play in students' learning experiences specifically related to reading development and for discovering more about students' reading experiences, habits, and behaviors, a qualitative coding research approach was developed for this study. This allowed the researcher to examine how a large cohort of student participants articulate their lived experiences as readers as shared through their literacy narratives (written texts).
As Creswell notes, "the type of research best suited for this kind of research is one in which it is important to understand several individual's common or shared experiences of a phenomenon" (Creswell, 2013, p. 81). W. Newton Suter explains that, "To understand a complex phenomenon, you must consider the multiple 'realities; experienced by the participants themselves-the 'insider' perspectives" (Suter, 2012, p. 344). Suter also asserts that the "depth afforded by qualitative analysis is believed by many to be the best method for understanding the complexity of educational practice" (352). In phenomenological studies, the researchers' intent is to make sense of or interpret the meanings others have about the world, to look for patterns, concepts, insights, and understandings, in this case through students expressed experiences with reading prior to entering college. Rather than starting with a theory, researchers generate patterns of meaning during the research process based on the data they interpret (Creswell 2009, 8). For this study, researchers coded the data in three cycles as explained below in the data coding section. Qualitative research is interpretive which means that researchers must assign meaning to data using the participants' expressed experiences. The results for this study will be presented in Chapter Three: Findings and interpreted in Chapter Four: Discussion.
Finally, qualitative research should contain an action agenda for reform that may change the lives of participants, the institutions in which they live and work, or even the researchers' lives (Creswell, 2013). Suggestions to address the findings will be found in Chapter 5: Implications.

Student Researcher's Disclosure: Positioning Myself as Researcher
As a teacher/student/researcher, self-disclosure about my initial interest in this study is important. I returned to teaching writing, after a six-year hiatus from teaching, During 2003-2004, I was becoming increasingly concerned about students who reported that they did not like to read or were not reading for coursework. For example, many students claimed that they did not think it was necessary to read their college texts to pass a class and some shared that they had not read a complete book since the start of high school. This lack of interest bothered me for many reasons. As a lifelong reader, I was troubled by student reports that they "hated" reading. What did they really mean when they said they didn't "like to read"? I was also concerned with my students' lack of information literacy, which made teaching academic and evidence-based writing difficult. Where and how were they getting information? How could they, as Charles Bazerman discusses in his 1980 "Conversational Model" essay, become "informed respondents" to important ongoing conversations, let alone successfully complete their coursework, if they were not strong and habitual readers?
These questions troubled me, and through discussions with colleagues it seemed some instructors were convinced many students "just don't read anymore." I wanted to explore what and how students were reading and what experiences were shaping their attitudes and behaviors towards reading.
In 2008, searching for a pedagogical model for the writing classroom that addressed reading more directly, I located a literacy narrative assignment in the third edition of John Trimbur's A Call to Write. Although I only used the textbook for a few semesters, I continued modifying a literacy narrative assignment in my firstsemester writing classes as a way to diagnose students' writing abilities, orient myself with their literacy experiences, and start conversations about the connections between reading and writing. Since the classes were run as workshops, sharing narratives would often initiate class conversations about students' prior reading and writing experiences. In 2010, I also began taking graduate classes towards a doctorate at the University of Rhode Island as a non-matriculated student, ultimately becoming a

Researcher's World View
I approach this research from the perspective of a social constructivist-that is, of a researcher striving to understand what is happening with students' reading experiences from their own reports and perspectives and from an awareness that students' reading experiences, habits, and behaviors are also a product of their individual, cultural, and social experiences. Although quantitative reports are highly useful in understanding reading levels and trends on local, regional, and national levels, a qualitative approach may help reveal individual and group experiences with reading, helping educators to better understand how approaches to reading in the writing classroom may be reconsidered and improved.
As a social constructivist, I seek to understand the complexity of views of the situation being studied, questions should be constructed to be broad and general so as to allow participants to construct their own meaning of the situation to be studied (Creswell, 2009, p.8). "The more open ended the questioning the better, as the researcher listens carefully to what people say or do in their life settings" (8). From a social constructivist world view, rather than starting with a theory, researchers develop a pattern of understanding from analyzing and interpreting the subjective meanings of others as those meanings are shaped by each individual's experience.
My Assumptions as Researcher 1. Consideration of reading and its relationship to writing is, or should be, a fundamental concern for writing instructors.

Students can assist teachers in better understanding students'
individual experiences with reading and literacy development.
3. The student narrative can be an effective vehicle for conveying students' experiences to instructors, particularly if students feel comfortable articulating their experiences. The "open" nature of narrative allows for more freedom of expression than might interviewing, questionnaires, or surveys.
From the perspective of the social constructivist, the literacy narrative seemed the ideal method of data collection for this qualitative research.

Participants and Location of Study
The participants for this study were first-year English students at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, a state university located in Southeastern Massachusetts.
The university is well known for its College of Engineering and College of Nursing, and it has traditionally served students from this region, including a large number of first-generation college students. In the 2013-2015 first-year cohorts, 30% of students were first-generation college students. Roughly 40% of all students were students of color, and roughly 40% were Pell Grant recipients. The average SAT scores for these cohorts of students was 1035 with an average math score of 527 and an average verbal score of 509 (Trial, 2016).
All students entering the university must complete two semesters of English composition, unless they have transferred these credits from another institution. Most students complete both English 101 and 102 in their first year of college, and passing these classes is considered a strong indicator of college success. English 101 and 102 both require students to meet objectives related to reading and information literacy; thus the English 101 classroom is a fitting place to assign a literacy narrative assignment which may illuminate students' previous reading experiences. The narrative assignments were both distributed and collected in on-campus writing classrooms.

Data Collection Procedures
In order to best hear students' voices and understand their experiences, I used student literacy narratives to gather data which were collected over a twenty-two month period. Literacy narratives are generally defined as "reflective stories about reading and writing, and they have been created either through autobiographical, reflective writing, or through the collection and analysis of interviews or oral histories" (Chandler, 2013, p. 2).
To collect data about students' reading experiences, I invited students in their first semester of first-year English (whether spring or fall semester) to participate in the study during the first two weeks of class before they wrote their literacy narratives.
I explained to all of the students that after the semester was over I was planning to conduct a study in which I would analyze their narratives to see what I could learn about their prior literacy development with the intention of better understanding the literacy backgrounds of first-year college students. All students were welcome to participate if they were interested, and all participants signed a consent form and were told that no data would be analyzed until the semester was completed. Students were also told that their narratives would be de-identified before the analysis began. In total, 230 students agreed to participate in the study, although only 121 narratives were used in this study because only 121 narratives were directly related to students' prior reading experiences. As noted above, these narratives were collected over a twentytwo month period from four separate semesters, or 12 different sections of English 101: Critical Reading and Writing I, providing a range of data from four consecutive semesters.
In keeping with a social constructivist framework, the narrative writing prompt was designed to gather a wide variety of participant responses; the questions were developed to be open-ended and general so as to gather a variety of experiences and encourage the complexity of views. "The more open-ended the questioning the better, as the researcher listens carefully to what people say or do in their life settings" (Creswell, 2009, p. 8). The prompt (Appendix A) was used as a guide for the student writers who participated in the study. The use of literacy narratives for this study makes sense for the following reasons: 1.
The narrative allows students the freedom to discuss the experiences they feel are most relevant to their individual lives.

2.
Most students are comfortable with writing narratives.

3.
The narrative format can give the researcher a substantial amount of data (2-4 pages per essay).

4.
The data set allows the researcher to build from individual's specific experiences to larger themes or categories of meaning.

5.
The data set has been created by students in natural settings (the classroom, at home or in a dorm room/library etc.).

6.
Students may be more apt to provide details in writing than they may express verbally.
No effort was made by the researcher to guide student responses other than encouraging them to write what seemed most important to them using the questions to prompt their responses. All papers were de-identified and stored in a file cabinet for future analysis. My data collection process is depicted below in Figure 1.

The Qualitative Coding Process
As discussed earlier, John Creswell describes qualitative research design as "a means for exploring and understanding the meaning individuals or groups ascribe to a social or human problem" (Creswell, 2009, p. 4). This process includes collecting data in a natural setting, analyzing data from particular to general themes, and interpreting the data. Creswell describes the coding process as "preparing and organizing the data for analysis then reducing the data into themes through a process of coding and condensing codes, and finally representing the data in figures, tables or discussion" (Creswell, 2013, p. 18). Miles, Huberman, and Saldana believe that coding is its own form of analysis and allows for deep reflection of the data's meaning (Miles et al. 2013, p. 72). The cycles of qualitative coding employed in this study are as follows: Cycle One: Identifies sponsors in 121 narratives. Begins to look for themes that emerge related to students' reading identities.
Cycle Two: Verifies sponsors. Develops and refines eight thematic categories from patterns located in the narratives related to students' reading identities.   During Cycle Two coding, 50 narratives (or 41% of the data pool) were randomly selected from the data pool to be coded by two coders. To prepare for Cycle Two Coding, the coders read and discussed Creswell's "Data Analysis and Representation" chapter from Qualitative Inquiry and Design (Creswell, 2013) and practiced coding for sponsors with a sample literacy narrative. Although neither of the second coders had ever engaged in a formal coding process, both were familiar with the literacy narrative genre and both were familiar with the college-level writing of first-year students. 2 I also provided the coders with a working definition of literacy sponsors and an excel spreadsheet for storing the following data: Narrative #, Sponsor(s), Key Words, Potential Categories/Themes.
In "Data Analysis and Representation," Creswell describes data collection, analysis, and report writing as interrelated activities that go on simultaneously in a research project. Qualitative researchers learn by doing (182). As such, the coders were instructed to read through the narrative several times, to immerse themselves in the details and get a sense of the text as whole (183). I then asked them to identify the sponsor(s) according to the definition provided and to consider what the student was conveying about his or her experiences as a reader (his or her reading identity)-these experiences would be categorized by themes. After the coders completed their coding, I met with each to discuss his/her findings, and as a cohort we developed eight thematic categories related to the participants' reading identities.

Cycle Three Coding
In order to verify the findings in Cycle One and Cycle Two-verification of both sponsorship and thematic categories related to reading identity--two randomized sets of 26 narratives were created and provided to an additional two coders. 3 These coders, both experienced composition instructors and qualitative researchers, were provided with the working definition of sponsorship and the thematic categories related to reading identities created during Cycle Two coding, as well as a sample narrative for practice coding which I conducted with them. They were asked to identify the primary sponsors in the narratives (as opposed to all sponsors present in the narrative), select passages from the texts that they felt represented students' experiences and In other words, they were asked to look for what the first and second cycle coders might have missed in the data set as a means of verifying second cycle findings and presenting new insights about the data. Figure 3 below depicts Cycles Two and Three of the coding process. As the chart shows, Cycle Three Coders also verified three meta-themes related to students identified labeled the "I Hate Reading Category" and the "Desire for Choice" categories.

Figure 3: Cycles Two and Three Coding Processes
The findings from qualitative coding will be shared in Chapter 3: Results and discussed in detail in Chapter 4: Discussion.

Chapter 3: Results
Chapter Three shares the results of the study and is divided into four sections: Sponsors, Thematic Categories, Meta-Themes, and Coding Reliability. In this chapter, I will provide an overview of the results with limited corresponding examples from the narratives. 4 The results will be elaborated upon in much more detail in Chapter 4: Discussion.

Sponsors
In this study, sponsors are identified in all but four of 121 narratives. Many of the narratives reference more than one sponsor; therefore, coders focused on sponsors and passages that they felt were central to participants' expressed experiences. As Figure 4 and School, and Girlfriend. Clearly, many participants found reading sponsorship from relationships with people and entities one might not expect.

Teachers as Sponsors
As Figure 4 and Table 1 show, teachers were coded as sponsors in 51 narratives comprising the largest category of sponsors. Students reported a wide range of experiences with teachers, often including excerpts about teachers who inspired them to read and curricula that they found engaging and/or helpful. Example: Students also reported reading-related problems they associated with teachers.
Often, these excerpts reveal frustration with early reading problems or "boring" high school curricula. Example: Although students reported diverse and highly individualized experiences with teachers in their narratives, it is possible to summarize some of their experiences. In general:  Most students name the teachers they had, and they can recall in detail whether or not they had positive or negative experiences with individual teachers and their curricula.
 Students make emotional associations between the curricula and the teacher-if they report liking their teachers it is usually because they had a positive learning experience.
 Students who write about positive reading experiences with teachers use words like amazing, passion, motivation, confidence, favorite, love, journey, proficiency, knowledge, mentor, and trust.
 Students who report negative reading experiences with teachers use words and phrases like struggle, hate, killing creativity, difficult, nervous, boring, forced, lost passion, aversion, enemy, and doubleedged sword.

Books/Authors/Genres as Sponsors
Thirty-one student narratives were coded for books, genre, and/or authors as sponsors. Books/Authors/Genres as sponsors is characterized largely by students who report that they located genres, books, or authors (either on their own or through the help of a teacher, parent, or friend) that inspired them to continue reading. Students in this category report largely positive experiences with reading once they locate topics, genres, and/or authors of interest.  Typically, students report that positive experiences with a book in a particular genre leads to more reading in that genre and/or more reading in general.
 Students often reported liking a book, but not the assignments and tests associated with it.
 Students in this category may continue to read books of interest outside of school while not completing reading for school.
 Students often reported that they prefer to select their own books.
 Students reported locating books of interest both in and outside of school.

Mothers as Sponsors
The third largest category of sponsors coded for was that of Mothers. Mothers played an important role in 24 of the student narratives. Thirteen of the twenty-four (more than half) of the narratives in the "Mothers as Sponsors" category were written by English Language Learners or L2 students, providing information about the roles mothers play in their children's literacy development.
Mothers often surface as advocates for their children in and outside of school settings. In addition to reading to their children, in many instances, mothers act as role models by inspiring their children to read and sharing their love for reading as in the following excerpts:  My mom always helped me compete and win prizes by reading me stories like "Clifford the Bid Red Dog" and "Madeline." I loved spending time with her; she was such a good story teller and she inspired me to want to read.
The narratives in this category portray mothers as having a strong investment in their child's literacy development. Additionally:  Mothers often require their children to participate in out-of-school literacy development at home or with a tutor or other sponsor whether or not the child willingly cooperates.
 International students report that mothers are proactive in assisting them in mastering English skills.
 Mothers frequently intervene in their child's literacy development problems, assisting them with addressing developmental issues and/or anxieties.
 Shared reading with mothers creates strong bonding experiences.
As Figure 4 depicts, references to parents, friends, fathers, grandparents, peers, tutors, and siblings are also present in students' literacy narratives, and many of these sponsors play a vital role in both motivating and assisting with reading development.
Some will be discussed in more detail in Chapter Four. Most of the interactions with sponsors denoted as "Other" are described by participants as being both positive and beneficial. In this data set, the sponsors reported most frequently as providing the most negative sponsorship were teachers.

Others as Sponsors
For ease of depiction in Figure 4, thirty-three sponsors coded for less frequently were grouped in a category called "Other." These sponsors include a wide range of individuals and entities including Schools, Grandmothers, Peers, Music, Grandfathers, Tutors, Sisters, Cousins, Video Games, Brother, Uncle, Grandparents, Television, Technology, Boys and Girls Club, Family, Principal, Special Needs School, and Girlfriend. As the excerpt below shows, sponsors who fall in the "Other" category also provided strong sponsorship. For example, Television was listed as a sponsor in the shown below in Figure 5 and Table 2. Additionally, coders identified three meta themes in the narratives. For the purposes of this study, meta themes are defined as categories pertaining to 25 or more narratives. The meta themes are "Lost/Gained Lost/Gained Interest (25) Empowerment (19) Conflict (14) Reading & Writing Connections (13) Sponsor Responsible (13) Knowledge Seeker (12) Reading Process (4) Inauthentic (1) Interest," "I Hate Reading," and "Desire for Choice." These are depicted in Figure 6 in the upcoming section on meta themes. Creating thematic categories was helpful because it allowed the researcher to begin to understand how the participants perceived themselves as readers. The idea of each participant having a "reading identity" will be discussed further in the Discussion and Implications section. Below I will describe each category briefly and provide an example of the type of passage coders selected to place the narrative in a particular category. Note that these categories are not directly connected to interactions with sponsors, rather they reflect the participants' expressed sense of themselves as readers as interpreted by the coders. Also note that any category applying to 25 or more narratives will be considered a meta-theme. For example, Lost/Gained Interest Category below pertained to 25 narratives, so it was placed in the meta theme category.

Lost/Gained Interest
No quote has been provided here because Lost/Gained interest will be discussed below in meta theme section.

Empowerment
Nineteen participants in this category express taking responsibility for their own learning and feeling empowered by reading activities. International students with less privilege frequently articulate the value of education. Positive reading experiences with a life-changing book often produce articulations of empowerment.
 I went from a careless reader to a person who embraces and sees the power of reading.

Conflict
Fourteen narratives were placed in this category because they present negative experiences with reading, often creating anxiety. Much of the conflict occurs when students are young and first learning to read. Conflict is often reported as being related to learning English, dyslexia, or a classroom/socially traumatizing experience.

Reading Process
In Reading Process, four students write about their former or current reading processes.
 "There is still so much I need to do to improve my reading and writing skills."

Inauthentic
This category was created for one narrative that appears to be writing to the teacher to complete the literacy narrative assignment without an authentic voice. We only found one of these where the student identifies her negative attitude toward reading, and the student writes that she wants to learn to read a broader range of materials, but the reflection seems disingenuous to coders.

 I have spent a few days thinking about my attitude toward reading and writing
and I am slowly discovering …without the skills of reading and writing I will not be as successful as I want to be in life.

Meta-Themes
In addition to the above categories, three overarching meta-themes were located in the narratives by the identification of the key root words "hate" and "choice" which surfaced repeatedly in the data set. The first meta theme concerns students who articulate that they "hate" reading in their narratives, and the second concerns the desire for more "choice" regarding school-based reading selections or assignment. I will address both below and then further in Chapter 4: Discussion. Lost/Gained Interest Participants in this data set frequently wrote about the inconsistency of their reading experiences by expressing how they lost and gained interest with reading. In total, 25 students reported that they lost and/or gained interest in reading at a certain age, usually over stretches of time such as a year or two, but sometimes for several years such as throughout high school. Often, this lack of interest is attributed to lack of choice in school-based reading. Many students report not reading the books required of them in high school, or they report that reading was "boring" and that they read because they were going to have to take a test. Example: Students Who Report They "Hate" Reading Twenty-six of the 121 narratives, or 22%, were written by students who report that they either hate reading or hated reading at some point. Nine students claim that their dislike for reading started in high school, and twelve students reference early educational experiences as the start of their reading problems. The remaining five essays do not specify when their problems began. Some of the titles students used for their stories are: "Forced Enjoyment," "The Things I'd Rather Do," "Why I Hate Classical Literature," and "My Struggle with Reading and Writing." Students describe their reading experiences by using the following terms: inadequacy, torture, struggle, chore, hopeless, embarrassed, shame, nervous, anxiety, humiliation, challenging, discouraged, painful, and distracted.
 "I hated reading because I was not good at reading fluently or even understanding the reading." Students Who Report They Want More Choice Twenty-six out of 121 narratives, or 22%, of the total data pool offer participants' perspectives on the desire for choice in reading materials. These narratives can be broken down roughly into two subcategories: those who want to self-select reading materials that they find interesting and those who blame the curriculum for ruining their interest in reading.

Selecting Topics/Books of Interest
Many students articulated that they enjoyed reading much more when they were allowed to choose their own books.  Although the Second Cycle Coders coded for more sponsors than the first and Third Cycle Coders, there was almost always some match between sponsors. For example, Table 4 below depicts a match in coding for sponsors between First and Second Cycle Coders for Narrative 26. Table 4 shows that Cycle One Coder determined that the sponsor for Narrative #26 was "Parents." Cycle Two Coder designated Narrative #26 has having two sponsors: "Parents" and "Books." Because there was an overlap in the coding for sponsors, this was considered a match. If no match was found the sponsors would be categorized as not being a match as was the case for Narrative 17 which was coded for different sponsors, as depicted below in Table 5. were directly connected to people, places, hobbies and/or specific books-a connection that I now refer to as "reading sponsorship." These connections make clear the highly social nature of reading development. In addition to revealing the social interactions that take place with sponsors, the student narratives also reveal insights about reading-related factors such as access and choice, and affective concerns such as personal interest and motivation and how these factors play a role in a person's identity or self-concept as a reader (Gee, 2012;Willingham, 2017).
Whether articulating joy, apathy, or frustration, the students in this study have vivid recollections of their reading experiences, most from the time they are read to as young children right up until they enter college. Although many of these experiences are positive, others are alarming, particularly those about environments and events that either leave young readers feeling humiliated and/or dissuade them from wanting to read. Similar to Kelly Gallagher's report in Readacide (2009) Since the majority of the narratives are written chronologically, participants often start their stories with their earliest memories of being read to by others, whether parents, grandparents, early teachers, or other family and friends, and then continue on to share their experiences as readers with school-based sponsors in elementary and middle school and into their high school years. In many cases the narratives directly reveal the people, places, books, genres, authors, and events that they express as fundamental to their reading identities. They share how reading becomes a way to understand oneself and to build relationships with others-to learn about oneself, others, and the world. This discussion section begins with narratives about students' earliest memories of reading with family sponsors and continues on to address sponsorship outside of family circles, in school, and in the community. After the narratives, I will discuss the important roles that motivation, access, choice, and interest play in reading development. Finally, the discussion culminates with insights on how students connect reading and writing activities.

Families as Literacy Sponsors: Moms, Dads, and Grandparents
Mothers, fathers, and grandparents turn out to be the most important and influential of early family-based literacy sponsors in most of the narratives. Experts agree that early exposure to language helps children develop the skills necessary for academic and social success. In some cases, children from literacy-rich households are years more advanced in their literacy development than their peers who don't have parents or guardians reading to them regularly (Gee, 2012;Murnane et al, 2012;Wolf 2009). The stories below are shared by students who remember their mothers, fathers and grandparents reading to them at the age of two and three years old, before they could read to themselves.

Lisa (#71)
Lisa tells the story of how her mother and father shared stories with her from a very young age. In Lisa's case, strong early sponsorship from her mother resulted in reading becoming an essential part of both her personal identity (self-concept) and her relationship with her mother. Reading, for Lisa, was both personal and social, connecting her to both her mother and her community--a fundamental part of her early experiences and a way for her to help make sense of her life (problems in middle school). Lisa's literacy narrative proceeds with how she and her mother continued to share reading experiences as she grew older, reinforcing her identity as a reader.

Jonah (#67)
Jonah is one such student whose story, "The Great Escape," reveals how his grandmother shaped him as a reader and thinker. Because both of his parents worked,  Children's values are shaped by the books family sponsors select.

School-Based Sponsors
Experiences with school-based sponsors differ widely from those with familybased sponsors. As children enter school, they must acclimate to new environments and develop new relationships with their school-based sponsors. This can be an unsettling time, particularly for those children who are less prepared for the task of developing their literacies in a classroom environment. Children from households where family-based sponsors may not have been widely available may find themselves developmentally behind their peers, a reality that can leave less prepared children feeling frustrated and isolated (Gee, 2012;Murnane et al., 2012;Wolf, 2008). In The Reading Mind (2017), Willingham describes how as young children enter school they begin to develop self-concepts that are shaped by how they compare to others.
Willingham explains, "They see that other kids finish more books on the classroom reading wall, or that other kids don't trip over words when asked to read aloud" (146).
Negative feedback from other children can impede a child's reading development.
School-based sponsors play an increasingly important role when children are learning to read and, as the stories below will reveal, can cause young readers to either build confidence or develop psychological aversions to reading. Early school-based literacy experiences can be positive, or they can result in negative self-concept, low reading motivation, and poor reading attitudes. Henry continues on to explain how his sponsor from the Boys and Girls Club helped him to understand how books teach you "how the world works within and around you." In particular, books that deal with sociology, psychology, and anthropology interest him because he likes to try to understand the perspectives of people "that no one pays attention to in our society." He also explains how he loves to read with music on because it keeps him in a "zone" where he can focus on reading and nothing else. Music, he says, helps him "get things done." Henry's story is remarkable because he shares how children like him can learn to love to read and locate the value of reading despite growing up in non-reading environments and without strong early literacy sponsors from either home or school.
In his case, a community-based program at the Boys and Girls Club fills his need for literacy sponsorship. As Brandt, Gallagher, and Kozol remind us, despite the ostensible promise of public education as a levelling agent, access to sponsors and literacy development is unevenly distributed, and formal sponsors, whether individuals or institutions, may actually impede access to literacy development. In this case, Henry was able to form a bond with a mentor from the Boys and Girls Club, to make reading relevant for him, motivate him to read, and build his reading identity.
More often than not, students report that their reading experiences with high school sponsors do NOT leave them feeling motivated and engaged as readers. This is true, in particular, for students in grades 9-10 when students report that their literacy sponsors are preparing them for standardized tests. Neuropsychologist Daniel Willingham (2015) believes that "reading motivation declines steadily as children age, reaching its lowest point by about grade 10" (165). Even students who seem to be the most prepared and confident readers often report a decrease in motivation to read that they attribute to negative experiences with high-school reading curriculum which results in a decline in reading engagement and practice. Frustration with lack of reading choices, assignments that require seemingly tedious analysis, and competing interests such as jobs and sports, also contribute to low reading interest during the high school years. Students who are weak readers when they enter high school may find it even harder than strong readers to motivate themselves to read. Sarah describes how as a middle schooler she loved to read and write, and she could always be "caught" with a book in her hand, but she "hated" both the reading and writing assignments in 9 th and 10 th grade high school English. In Sarah's case, teachers don't seem to be the primary problem, rather she blames the discipline of English itself. This negative reaction to stories and assignments in her first two years of high school results in Sarah developing lower motivation and less interest in reading than she had previously, and her confidence in her identity as a reader and writer declines. At the end of her essay, Kaitlyn says that she has a "love/hate" relationship with reading. She is proud of herself for overcoming her disability, but looks forward to being able to return to reading books that "pull her in." In Kaitlyn's case, mandatory reading selections, whether chosen by her teachers or the school's English Department, resulted in a decline in her reading motivation and involvement and a subsequent decrease in her confidence as a reader. Although she had already experienced a major victory with managing her dyslexia, she is dissuaded from reading when her interest in reading selections declines and the books she is asked to read become too complicated for her.

John (#14)
John was an avid early reader who found himself reading and reciting The Hobbit for his third-grade teacher. He says that once his third-grade teacher discovered how advanced his reading level was for his grade, he was given different assignments from the "rest of his friends." At this point, he writes that school-based reading and writing, "…became more work for me than fun." Despite this, he says that he continued enjoying his recreational reading and was the kind of kid who stayed up all night reading with a flashlight so he could finish "the last Harry Potter in two days." However, John's motivation to read recreationally declined when he started high school and other interests became more important. John's school-based sponsorship resulted in several problems for him. From his perspective, he was singled out for being an advanced reader in third grade by being assigned more advanced projects than "his friends." At this point he reports that writing was no longer fun for him. Like so many other students who loved to read and enjoyed recreational reading when they were young, Michael, Sarah, Kaitlyn and John all lost their passion and momentum with reading when they hit high school.
Although their reading ruts are not solely due to "boring" curricula and books, the fact that they were "forced" to read and analyze particular books that were not of their choosing or of interest to them by their teachers certainly did not help motivate them to read.
In this study, students repeatedly complained that their interest in reading waned when they were forced to read books that they were not interested in by their literacy sponsors, particularly in high school. As shown in the findings section and depicted in Figure 7 on the next page, 25 students of the 121 narratives, or 21%, wrote about how they lost and gained interest in reading over the years. Twenty-six of the 121 narratives, or 22%, were written by students who explicitly claim that they either hate reading or hated reading at some point. Twenty-six out of 121 narratives, or another 22% of participants in the total data pool, explicitly articulate that they want more choice in school-related reading materials. Eleven of the narratives overlap the "I Hate Reading" and "I Want Choice" categories, with participants claiming that they both hate reading and want more freedom to choose their school-related reading materials. Dozens of the study's participants claim that they would have been more motivated to read had they been able to select their own readings. These meta themes that are woven within the narratives suggest that large numbers of students in this data pool entered college as reluctant readers.  Many students who were strong and avid readers when younger, like Lisa, reported that their dedication to reading declined once they were required to read texts that did not "spark" their interest.

Summary of School-Based Sponsors
 Early formative years with school sponsors, whether positive or negative, are recalled easily by first-year college students.
 Early ineffective school-based sponsorship can be reversed by positive sponsorship, and the benefits of strong early sponsorship can be degraded by poor subsequent sponsorship, particularly in terms of attitude and interest.
 Students praise school-based sponsors who offer choice in reading selection  Students bemoan school-based curricula that "teaches to the test."  Students report that preparing for quizzes ruins the "flow" of their reading because they are focused on potential quiz questions rather than engaging with the text.
 During high school, negative experiences with school-based curricula often damage students' interest in recreational reading as school-based reading becomes a chore and reading time is more limited because of competing interests.
 Teachers who make reading activities and reading selections relevant to students' interests are considered by students to be good teachers.
 Most high school students feel reading materials are selected for the purposes of testing, and they resent this infringement on their right to read what is of interest to them.
 Students like school-based sponsors who "make reading fun."

Books as Sponsors
In this study, books, genre, and authors were coded as sponsors when they played a central role in a participant's discussion about reading development and interest.
Participants in the study often articulated interest in particular genres of booksgenres that keep them engaged in recreational reading regardless of what was happening with school-based sponsorship. Narratives coded for books as sponsors frequently do not mention other sponsors, as students write primarily about their relationships with particular books.

Adanna (#29)
Adanna grew up in Mushin, Nigeria, a place that she says was filled with violence and chaos. In "How Learning to Read and Write Transformed My Life," she tells of how, from an early age, she attended private schools, and she understood that her future success was dependent upon her ability to read and write in English.
Adanna explains how she spends hours reading and writing on the weekends to improve her English skills-she has been a motivated and avid reader and writer from a young age. To develop her literacy skills, she says she prefers to select her own readings. In her essay, Adanna does not discuss the role her teachers may have played in her literacy development, rather she shares that her development as a reader and writer was driven by her inner desire to master English as a way to succeed in life. She shares that during her junior and senior year in high school she served as ambassador to freshman students to tutor them and encourage them to prioritize their schooling so they might receive a scholarship to college as she did-she wants to share her love of literature with others-in fact, she becomes a sponsor for others. Adanna's relationship with the literature that she chooses herself has allowed her to develop a strong identity and self-concept as both a reader and writer and to see the world in different ways.

Deirdra (#121)
Deirdra remembers learning to read easily and being in an environment where books were readily available. Her parents read to her regularly and once she learned to read herself, developing her reading came easily to her. She explains that reading for school was never her "favorite," but she did "what she had to do." Deirdra had access to books outside of school that continued to motivate her to read, thus books and the bookstore became her sponsor. The idea of a middle schooler combing through the bookshelves at Barnes and Noble is quite remarkable and suggests that Deirdra's access to any books that she was interested in reading played a vital role in her reading development and identity as a reader. Although she doesn't have as much time to read now as she did when she was younger, she still has go-to genres.
When I do have time to read, I enjoy psychological books, true crime and non-fiction books more than anything. I like to read about true events that I am not only interested in but can teach me something.
Despite a decline in recreational reading, Deirdra knows what she likes to read, and she has specific genres in mind for when she feels she has the time to read.

Kevin (#28)
In "Wednesday with Naruto," Kevin explains that he was not much of a reader outside of school until he discovered an anime called Naruto at age 13 and became intrigued "by the premise of the story." Anime lead him to read manga which lead to a broader interest in reading. In Kevin's case, his identity as a reader developed not because of school, but in spite of school. Despite a late start, his interest in the genre of anime and manga opens up a world of reading for him at the age of 13, shaping his identity and self-concept as a reader.

Sophia (#69)
In "Society Is Hell, Reading Is Salvation," Sophia says that she has been an avid reader since her parents started reading to her as a young child when they gave her "an insatiable thirst for knowledge that could only be temporarily quenched through reading." She notes that her taste in reading genres have shifted over the years, but her drive to read has amplified since she was a beginning reader. Her essay discusses three particular books that have played a central role in her identity as a reader: The Giver, For Sophia, reading helps to shape her understanding of the world and her values. As she connects what she reads to the world around her, she builds a strong reading identity and self-concept.

Summary of Books as Sponsors
 Choice and selection of reading materials is central to reading motivation.
 Adolescents and young adults feel passionate about their ability to access and "consume" books that have value for them.
 Students who have books as sponsors usually seek books, authors, and genres that they like and they get pleasure from reading.
 Passionate readers seek out genres and topics of interest to them.
 Teenagers with strong reading identities or self-concepts want a say in what they read.
 Students who have books as sponsors feel empowered by that relationship, they can articulate why they love the books they do, and they have strong identities as readers.

The Reading/Writing Connection
Students frequently connect reading and writing activities in their narratives.
Most participants in this study articulated that in elementary school reading and writing were fun activities and they engaged in writing their own stories using their imaginations, writing to pen pals, shaping their identities as writers by putting words, feelings and thoughts on paper, and experimenting with technology. Later in their literacy development, students reported that they used writing effectively to explore hobbies and activities that were of interest to them. Although most students in high school report not liking their school-based reading/writing projects, particularly in 9 th and 10 th grade, occasionally students were inspired to write and read about topics that they found personally interesting, and those projects were the ones they found most meaningful.
Deidra (#123), the student who loved the young adult section at Barnes and Noble, writes that the books she read in middle school inspired her to write her own stories. At first, Philip models his story after a book he admires. Philip eventually takes a creative writing class and works with a professor to organize his inner thinking and develop a "description of scenes" before he starts to write. Though he has many trials as a creative writer, he concludes his essay by stating that he will always continue to write.
Jared was an avid reader when he was a "pre-teen." He explains that as his reading development increased, "he opened his mind to different forms of expression" such as art and music, ultimately leading him to become a song writer and start a band in which he is the lead composer. In seventh grade, Jared started painting and won many awards in his town's local art shows, and he considered his training as an artist to be both "fun and exciting." While painting, he always listened to music and became particularly interested in the "many different styles of drumming" in jazz, rock, and African music. Jared now spends his free time writing music for his band and attributes much of his creativity to exposure to various genres, whether literary or musical. Perceptions about how reading and writing interconnect with each other are largely dependent on an individual's experiences with both. In general, the first-year college students in this study had much happier and fruitful memories of their reading and writing experiences during their early formative years than they did during their high school experiences. High school experiences that were reported as being positive were usually connected to topics and readings of interest.

Summary of Reading/Writing Connections
 Reading inspires students to imagine and write about fictional characters.
 Reading inspires students to practice writing in a variety of genres and to experiment with digital technologies.
 Students connect reading genres they like to other genres of interestoften in different disciplines.
 Students want to read and write about topics that are of interest to them-in particular many like to choose their own topics.
 Reading helps to build vocabulary, use words in new ways, and develop varied sentence structure.
 A relatively small number of students articulated that reading provides a knowledge base that will be drawn from during future writing projects.

Conclusion
Understanding students' literacy development from their perspectives may complicate the way that literacy sponsors consider students' development, identities or self-concepts as readers and writers. The anecdotes shared by so many professors around the copy machine or in the corridors of schools that students "just don't read any more," doesn't hold the same currency when we take a good hard look at how students' reading development involves emotional, cognitive, social, and cultural conditioning that takes place from the time that they are 2 or 3 years of age until they enter college.
Encouraging students to trace their literacy development can provide them with an opportunity to reflect on how their identities as readers and writers were shaped by various literacy sponsors, and sharing those stories with others can help to liberate them from injustices that they experienced, bond with and learn from others' experiences, and also understand themselves as learners. For many students, sharing their stories offers them the opportunity to re-envision and renew themselves as readers and writers. For literacy sponsors, students' literacy narratives can reveal the formative experiences of students' reading and writing that may inform curricula development and change the way we, as sponsors, think about, discuss, and shape our relationships with, and our curricula for, those we sponsor. As Brandt writes in

Literacy in American Lives (2001):
Tracing the sponsors who develop and deliver curricular materials to their schools can heighten students' awareness of who is interested in their reading and writing skills and why. It also can bring attention to the complicated, fast-moving, and far-ranging interrelationships that bear on contemporary reading and writing and may give students useful ways to understand the reasons that school literacy differs from the kinds they engage in elsewhere. (p. 44) Many students in Brandt's study feel like the students in the exemplars or mini-case studies above-they feel that when they can't read books they are interested in, the joy of reading is stripped away from them, and their motivation to read declines-this is usually because of "forced" reading selections and curricula that disengages them from or diminishes their identities as readers and writers. Literacy sponsors can and should help students select books and other texts, support them with text interpretation, and engage students in analytical writing and reading tasks, but they should also be sensitive to students' attitudes and identities as readers--this requires an awareness on the part of the sponsor that being required to read a book that is of no interest makes reading feel forced, and that forced reading may create resentment and reduces reading engagement. Motivation to read, interest in reading, access to and knowledge about a wide range of genres, and time spent reading are all interconnected. According to the participants in this study, and many reading scholars and cognitive psychologists, these factors are central to a student's reading motivation, engagement and practice (Atwell & Atwell Merkel, 2016;Ladson-Billings, 2012;Smith & Wilhelm, 2000;Willingham, 2017).
There is much to learn about reading and motivation. Motivation and educational specialists Allen Wigfield and John Guthrie (2004) advise that the more students engage cognition, emotion, motivation, and volition during the reading process, the more productive readers they will become. The researchers note that it is crucial for school environments and instructors to offer students opportunities to encourage and engage all of these functions in relation to reading; they espouse an integrated curriculum where reading is fundamental to all activities.
Clearly, sponsors play a key role in students' literacy development. The narratives provide insight into how young people value reading, reading experiences, and reading sponsors-in many cases students praise parents, teachers, books, and projects that inspired them as readers; others articulate being so frustrated with books and curricula that they extricated themselves from reading activities.
Essentially, the study presents overwhelming evidence that an individual's interactions with reading sponsors shapes his or her identity and experiences as a reader.

Social Aspects of Reading Development
This study finds that students' reading identities are largely determined by the sponsors who shape their experiences as developing readers, whether family members, providing evidence from the study's participants, many who clearly articulate their aversion to reading in high school when they report being "forced" to read and analyze books of little interest to them. This aversion to the majority of texts offered in high school is relatively ubiquitous-even students who are avid readers outside of school report not enjoying many of their in-school reading selections. To complicate matters, for many of the participants, high school is a time when little reading is accomplished as digital technologies, social demands, sports, jobs, and other school work takes precedence over reading for both leisure and school. Even strong and avid readers report that their interest declines during high school when they are "forced" to read books they do not select themselves.
The problem of the drop-off in reading during high school is exacerbated by curricula that leave even readers with strong reading identities frustrated. Participants complained that they resented being forced to read books that they weren't interested in by teachers (reading sponsors) who themselves are reluctantly following a curriculum they don't like. Participants complained about having to overanalyze stories and poems they didn't choose as part of a curricula that left them bored and frustrated-assignments they dreaded that took the pleasure or joy out of reading.
Thus, the classroom, a shared space that should encourage the social nature of reading, can become an environment that stultifies reading, resulting in students actually reading less, reading with less enjoyment, or not reading at all.
The participants in this study often report that the lack of choice inherent in pre-determined reading selections results in reading feeling like work, hence what was once a positive experience--the joy of reading a book for pleasure--becomes a struggle and a chore, perceived by students as offering little reward beyond a grade. Lack of reading choice may not be such a problem for some students who will complete required readings whether or not they are interested. But for many students, lack of engagement results in reduced time spent reading, whether for school or personal reasons. Because high school students are immersed in a multitude of other activities, many state that they don't have time to read both for school and pleasure, and as a result their pleasure reading falls off. This compounds the problem as many students in high school actually read less than they did in middle school, resulting in some middle schoolers having stronger reading skills than those graduating from high school (Atwell & Atwell-Merkle 2015, Reardon et al., 2012.
For example, let's review the words the first-year college student-participants used in their narratives to express their feelings about high school reading.
Disengaged readers used the following words: In this study, 22% of the participants reported that they hate to read and 22% reported that they only like to read when they are interested in the reading topic.
Reading specialist John T. Guthrie notes that engaged readers are typically higher achievers than less engaged readers. "Because engaged readers spend 500% more time reading than disengaged students, educators should attempt to increase engaged reading time by 200%-500%" (2004, p.1). Guthrie laments the lack of studies about classroom practices that promote engagement and suggests that re-engaging students in reading may require substantial reconfigurations of curriculum.
According to the participants in this study, there are several factors that encourage positive reading habits. The first three are: Choice! Choice! And Choice!-students want to have a say in what they read. They want to have a say in the topics that they write about. And they want some control over how much time is allotted to specific texts and assignments. Personal relevance increases engagement-students want to read about issues that are of concern to them. Assignments that students perceive as "meaningful" also help them engage in the reading process; students report that they resent reading logs, quizzes on irrelevant details, and assignments requiring deep analysis of texts they feel are irrelevant to their lives. Alternatively, readings and assignments that have meaning for students can promote interest in reading, research, and knowledge acquisition. As one participant said: Although the student above didn't get to choose the topic, this is a perfect example of how the right topic can inspire and motivate both reading and writing engagement.
Sadly, the student who wrote it was a first-year college student and had to reach back to his freshman year in high school to locate an assignment that really mattered to him.

Atwell and Atwell-Merkel (2016) address this problem with curricula in The Reading
Zone when referencing their follow up interviews with high school students who left their school, The Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), nationally recognized for its K-8 reading curriculum. Anne Atwell-Merkel writes: When I talked in depth with CTL graduates, the reasons for their diminished identities as readers becomes clear. The biggest change in these once-voracious consumers of fiction and non-fiction is that they don't read very much, for school or at home. They cite the small number of books they're assigned to read by their English teachers and the time-consuming quizzes, discussions, written paragraphs, group assignments, projects, and essays they have to do in response. The activities replace actual reading. Sophomore Lydia noted that most of the assignments feel like assessments "done for the kids who don't read. And people in my high school really don't like reading." (p. 117) Poorly designed curricula erode reading practices by contributing to the disintegration of one's identity as a reader, especially for the participants who are not strong and avid readers. The participants in my study wrote again and again about how reading "boring" high school books, that were "uninteresting," and the corresponding curriculum diminished their desire to read. The evidence is clear-it is time to rethink our curricular approaches to address reading engagement or we will increasingly become a nation of non-readers.
Brandt's work suggests that sponsorship is unevenly distributed--while one person may benefit immensely from any given sponsor, someone may have a widely different outcome. Because not all American students have the same educational opportunities and outcomes, experts agree that a large number of American students are leaving high school, and perhaps college, underprepared for the types of advanced literacy necessary for professional and personal success and engaged citizenship (Murnane, Sawhill & Snow, 2012;Goldman, 2012;Horning & Kraemer 2013;Sullivan, Tinberg & Blau, 2017). My research also verifies the unevenness of sponsors by providing specific evidence from a range of individual participants.
Studies and common sense suggest that high school students who are not regular readers may have difficulty with college-level reading, especially if reading below proficiency levels (Atwell & Atwell Mirkle, 2016;Kuh, 2007;NAEP, 2015).
The 2015 Nation's Report Card states, "In 2015, twelfth-grade students had an average score of 287 on the NAEP 0-500 reading scale. This was not significantly different from the average score in 2013, but was lower in comparison to the earliest assessment in 1992" (2015, p. 1). In particular: In 2015, thirty-seven percent of twelfth-grade students performed at or above the Proficient achievement level in reading. When viewed by racial/ethnic group, the percentages of students performing at or above Proficient ranged from 17 percent for Black students to 49 percent for Asian students (p. 2).
Thirty-seven percent proficiency leaves 63 percent of all American high school seniors reading below proficiency levels--the proficiency levels for Blacks are even more alarming, with only 17 percent of twelfth grade students scoring at or above reading proficiency levels-that leaves 83 percent of Black high school seniors reading below proficiency levels. Twenty-five percent of Hispanic student were reading at or above proficiency levels in 2015, leaving 75% percent below proficiency levels. These statistics are unacceptable.
In "Patterns of Literacy among U.S. Students," (2012) Reardon, Valentino and Shores determines that "the literacy skills [reading levels] of roughly ten percent of seventeen-year-olds are at the level of the average nine-year-old" (p. 17). Clearly, we need to re-examine the way that literacy development instruction is addressed in high schools.
These low proficiency scores have global consequences. A recent article in the Washington Post (2017) reports that the United States' ranking fell on the "Progress in International Reading Literacy Study," an assessment given to fourth graders around the world every five years. "In 2016, however, the average score in the United States dropped to 549 out of 1,000, compared to 556 in 2011. The country's ranking fell from fifth in the world in 2011 to 13 th , with 12 education systems outscoring the United States by statistically significant margins" (1). The article states that experts are concerned with what is driving the trend, but fails to acknowledge that curriculum may actually be part of the problem.

The Power of the Literacy Narrative
The literacy narrative is a valuable and flexible tool that can help instructors better understand students' development as readers and writers. In essence, the literacy narrative provides a window for others to share in the identity formation of the individual who wrote the narrative, offering those who are interested the opportunity to consider the factors that played a role in that individual's reading identity formation. Literacy narratives have been in use for the past 30 years to better understand the lived experiences of individuals and groups of people, but perhaps not implemented widely enough. As noted earlier in the dissertation, they may be in oral, on the Boundary was also influential. I can't remember when or how I got the idea but I know these sources played an influential role. At first I just assigned literacy narratives, where students basically told stories but didn't really analyze their experience. Then I tried to rewrite the assignments to focus on analyzing literacy events. (Trimbur, 2014) In this study, the genre of literacy narrative proved a highly successful tool for gathering data about how students perceive their development as readers. The data provide insight into the social, affective, and cognitive aspects of each participant's reading identity-each narrative providing important information about that student's experiences as a reader and offering a springboard for further conversations about reading. Many of these narratives focus on elementary, middle, and/or high school reading experiences as well as their reading experiences with non-academic sponsors such as family members and friends, allowing the researcher to gain multiple and varied insights on each student's specific reading experiences.
The literacy narrative offers the opportunity for instructors and students to address reading-related issues early in the semester and is particularly effective as a first writing exercise and vehicle for class discussion and sharing reading experiences.
Literacy narratives make very engaging early-semester class reading, and students readily take to stories by such authors as Malcolm X, Frederick Douglass, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, and Sherman Alexie, which offer compelling discussion on how culture, society, family, teachers, books, and other entities shape our literacy development. Students may be wary at first of their ability to reach back into their memories to access early literacy experiences, but with guidance and gentle prodding from the instructor and time for personal reflection, most can recall learning to read or being read to as far back as three and four years old. The literacy narrative prompt aids students in rekindling relationships built around reading as students recall happy memories spent reading with loved ones. Students with difficult early reading experiences are offered the opportunity to share those experiences with others if they wish, paving the way for future discussions about reading difficulties when they surface. Conversations about frustrations with reading and reading curriculum can benefit the class paving the way for the instructor to discuss and negotiate reading practices and expectations with students. The key point here is that discussions about reading need to be on the table up front as a way of, as Ellen Carillo (2015) says, making reading visible.

Conclusion and Additional Questions for Future Research
This study finds that reading engagement, or lack of it, may be an issue for many college-level students, whether in literature or writing classes, or other classes requiring students to complete significant amounts of reading. Authentic reading engagement requires genuine exchange between sponsors and those they sponsor and an awareness that each learner has his or her own individual reading identity. After sorting data into categories, patterns were found that reveal large numbers of students resent reading, consistently lose interest in reading, and desire more choice with regard to reading selection. According to the students who participated in this study, good reading sponsors offer students access to a wide range of reading materials, and then allow their students the opportunity to select reading materials that appeal to them personally. Positive sponsorship provides a safe environment where students are not afraid to express their feelings related to reading. As is evidenced from my study, students bring a range of reading habits, attitudes, and practices to the college classroom-the social nature of reading development suggests that college classrooms should be a place where authentic conversations about reading can take place and/or continue.
As stated in the preface, one prevailing myth among teachers regarding students as readers is that students "just don't read any more." Rather than adopting simple explanations for complex issues, we should be asking, "Who are my students as readers, and what can I do to foster reading engagement?" If we do not begin to address this question, we may be contributing to the creation of a culture of nonreaders. This study opens up opportunities for much further research. Questions for further study may include:  What does engaging reading/writing curriculum look like and how can it best be implemented and assessed?
 What is the relationship between reading engagement and reading proficiency?
 How can we measure the relationship between reading sponsorship and a student's reading identity?
First-year composition instructors are called upon by the discipline to be literacy sponsors; they do their students a great disservice if they assume their students have already mastered the complex set of skills and strategies--a full repertoire of reading tools-by the time they enter college. First-year composition is a good place to address the cognitive, affective, and social conditions that shape one's reading identity, but instructors must first realize that when it comes to reading, one size does not fit all. Instructors can use the literacy narrative genre to gather information about each student's reading identity and interests, creating banks of reading in various genres, and offering choice whenever possible with regard to texts and assignments.
Approaches to build engagement can, with care and deliberation, be integrated into the curriculum. Dr. Willingham (2015) notes that, "Teachers who motivate readers are skilled in setting classroom activities that students find engaging and require reading if they are to be completed…It takes an inventive teacher to create lesson plans that account for this interest, and are rigorous, and meet school or district requirements" (173). Additionally, engaging students in meaningful discussions about reading can offer students and instructors the opportunity to share and reflect upon affective issues related to reading. We can better understand the needs of our students with regard to their reading development by asking them to share their prior learning experiences, and we can learn a lot by listening.
First-year writing instructors should be mindful of their important role as college-level reading sponsors