ABSTRACT
In recent years, there has been, perhaps, more interest among literacy educators in supporting the reading development of diverse learners than any other area of reading research. Stemming from the politics of high-stakes assessment and the awareness that we have failed to provide students of color with the literacy skills society demands, literacy researchers have increasingly aimed their efforts at understanding the relationships between cultural diversity and literacy acquisition and the implications for literacy education. This work, begun more than 25 years ago, has been connected in more recent times to the understanding that students will learn to understand their reading better in classrooms that offer them culturally relevant and responsive instruction. It is the connection between these two-reading comprehension and culturally relevant/ responsive-pedagogy that we take up in this chapter. We begin by defi ning culturally relevant and responsive pedagogy, making a somewhat artifi cial but useful distinction between the two. Then we examine studies that have been signifi cant in clarifying both how enculturation and reading comprehension are intertwined and what we can do to ensure that the diverse students in the classroom learn to read effectively and critically.
