How Reading Performance Is Related to Cultural Capital

Plenty of researches have pointed out the relevance of reading abilities to all the learning areas in school. Specifically put, reading performance affects the academic achievement of students not only through all grade levels, from elementary school to secondary school and all the way up to high school, but also across various disciplines, with mathematics and science included. However, with a closer look, the findings seem to collide and to make sense of the contradictory results, more nuanced researches are needed. In addition, there have been other studies on what factors impact reading performance of the students, and among those that are most frequently referred to is ‘cultural capital’ coined by Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu classified cultural capitals into three categories, embodied, objectified and institutional, and the classification is especially meaningful when it comes to how some students excel in reading and others don’t. Of course, more factors remained to be found, but cultural capital is admittedly one of the leading factors. To avoid input-output kind of mechanical explanation, researchers have to figure out how different cultural capitals students inherited from family are mobilized and interplay so that they influence students’ reading performance and further affect their academic achievements, if not educational outcomes. Hence, this session calls for papers that elaborate on the relation between cultural capitals and reading performance of students from various educational contexts. We invite contributors that set out to explore questions like how these three cultural capitals intertwine to influence students’ reading performance.