Hyoju Ahn has a new plaque for the office wall: the 2024 J. Estill Alexander Future Leaders in Literacy Dissertation Award from the Association for Literacy Educators and Researchers.
Yet the career-boosting honor is providing her more than a decoration.
“It honestly reduces my anxiety, or the feeling of questioning myself,” says Ahn, who joined the Department of Curriculum and Instruction in 2023.
“Am I a good researcher? Is my work worth it? Will other educators or researchers think that my research is valuable?” she says. “This feels like a confirmation that, ‘OK, your research is worthy. You should pursue this.’ I feel more confident.”
The Association for Literacy Educators and Researchers (ALER) recognized the assistant professor Nov. 8 as part of its annual conference in Orlando, Florida.
Completed as the culmination of Ahn’s Ph.D. work at the University of Maryland, College Park, her “Competent Readers’ Online Multimodal Reading Strategies Use” is based on results obtained from 10 of her fellow doctoral students (the study took place during COVID-19).
She wanted to know how readers derive meaning from typed words, images and audio on the web, and how that modern method of comprehension aligns with the decidedly pre-internet Constructively Responsive Reading model.
Published in 1995 by Michael Pressley and Peter Afflerbach, “Verbal Protocols of Reading: The Nature of Constructively Responsive Reading” posits that “good readers are always changing their processing in response to the text they are reading.”
“Research in reading has proven that strategies can be taught, and that direct instruction, explicit instruction or modeling really helps students to build and equip different strategies as they read content area literacy of texts,” Ahn says, “and I think it also applies to online spaces, so finding those different online, multimodal reading strategies can equip students with some useful tools they can use and choose from whenever they want to read more strategically on the internet.”
English teachers at all levels can enhance or improve their instruction if they include those tools in their classroom lessons and assessment, says Ahn, who now hopes to expand her investigation with younger participants and newer digital devices.
Other questions for future studies could ask educators for their perceptions of online multimodal reading strategies and how – or if – they are teaching those to students.
Michael Manderino, Ahn’s colleague at NIU and the current vice president of ALER, encouraged Ahn to submit her manuscript for Alexander Award consideration.
“I actually first saw Dr. Ahn present at a conference when she was a doctoral student and found her work on online multimodal reading to be compelling and impactful for science learning,” says Manderino, who won the Alexander in 2012.
“When we became colleagues, my first suggestion was for her to submit her work for dissertation awards because of her strong methodological approach and her theoretical contributions of her study,” he adds. “Dr. Ahn will continue to make a big impact in the field of literacy. She is a wonderful colleague, professor and scholar.”
Born and raised in South Korea, Ahn became interested in the topic of online multimodal reading strategies while teaching elementary school in her home country.
“We covered all different subjects, but I got interested in how students read and write in Korean language education,” she says. “I especially was fascinated because they are always online, playing games and communicating through smartphones but surprisingly not competent in comprehending online materials – and because most of the content area reading and writing is happening online, they need more instruction and assessment in online reading.”
That brought her to the United States, where she studied under none other than Peter Afflerbach, co-author of that 1995 book.
Now, thanks to her Alexander Award and its one-year paid membership in ALER, Ahn is eager to become involved in the organization by attending conferences and sharing research.
She is aware of the College of Education’s long relationship with ALER and appreciated her recent opportunity to get to know her colleagues better, including Manderino, David Paige and even Professor Emeritus Norm Stahl, all of whom were at the Orlando gathering.
“All of them came to my award presentation, and I felt so supported,” Ahn says. “I really felt that I belong. I belong at NIU.”
