ABSTRACT
What factors, challenges, and contexts contribute to and constrain literacy achievement among at-risk adolescent learners with culturally diverse backgrounds? This book describes the results of a four-year project that attempted to answer this question from a variety of complementary research perspectives. The project produced-and this book providescertain answers, insights, and recommendations for educational policies and practices. Like most inquiry, however, the questions raised about the conceptual, pragmatic, and methodological issues we addressed may be as important as are the fi ndings from the research. This opening chapter introduces these issues and the research methods we used to investigate them, providing a preliminary basis for the analyses and fi ndings presented in the nine subsequent chapters and appendices. We called the project Adolescent Literacy in Three Urban Regions: Toronto (ALTUR) because (as explained in the Preface) we conducted it in parallel with colleagues in two other urban regions, Amsterdam and Geneva, although the present book presents results only for Toronto: The international, comparative dimensions from the research remain to be synthesized in future publications.
