Review of Carnegie study

Carnegie “Reading in the Disciplines: The Challenges of Adolescent Literacy”

Carol D. Lee and Anika Spratley, Northwestern University

Adolescents may struggle with text for a number of reasons, including problems with vocabulary knowledge, general knowledge of topics and text structures, not knowing what to do when comprehension break down, or proficiency in monitoring their own reading comprehension.

In this study we go from concern of students learning to read to students reading to learn and the special problems with reading in each of the traditional middle and high school content areas.

This study does not suggest do away with general remedial reading courses but to include specialized content areas reading instruction, which can also be a challenge to students who are otherwise good readers.

Science

Requires mathematical literacy, visual literacy, using diagrams, drawings, photographs, and maps to convey meanings. The use of scientific registers in terms of technical vocabulary and syntax must be taught to students.  Often words that have one meaning in everyday discourse have different and highly specialized meanings in science.

The technical vocabulary of science often has Latin or Greek roots which again must be taught to students.

   History/Social Science

Here the problem is largely the textbooks that are used in the schools. Reading difficulty presented by traditional textbooks is based on extensive research about how readers go about making sense of texts. As is evident in these studies, research on text processing indicates any of the common patterns found in social studies and science textbooks can make comprehension challenging (Beck, 1991).

·         Failure to make logical connections between propositions explicit

·         Use of references that are ambiguous, distant, or indirect.

·         The inclusion of information that is irrelevant to the main ideas

·         Density of ideas within individual sentences

Literature

Demonstrating what is entailed in interpreting literature, teacher try to illustrate what readers struggling and competent need to know in order to become good and hopefully life- long readers of literature.

As with other content areas prior knowledge is necessary for students to understand what they are reading.  Prior knowledge needs to include

·         Text structures

·         Prototypical human practices and internal states

·         A range interpretive problems author embed in their work

·         The ability to make inter-textual links

Mathematics

Here I would like to stop and say forget it. Nothing will help anyone understand math.  However the authors of this study would strongly disagree with me.

Again textbooks prove to more of a barrier than a help. As a result, students do not learn to become independent learners capable of acquiring mathematics outside of school when the need arises.

Key mathematics terms need to be explained and real world examples used. Examples that students and take into the real world and use when needed with the classroom teacher present.

Review of "Dyslexia" by Sally E. Shaywitz

This article answered several important questions for me. Most important what is dyslexia, I mean really through the years I read or heard many very different defiintions. It is neuro-biological.  "It is a deficiency in the processing of the distinctive linguistic units, called phonemes that make up all spoken and written words." The smallest meaningful unit segment of language. In the hierarchical modules of language system it is at the bottom. Amazing such a small thing as make my life hell.

Compensated dyslexics, that's Gregory and me. Compensation is better somes days than others. Actually some times of day better than others. I can hold my own if it is earlier in the day and I am not tired.

Truth be told I feel better after reading this article. I had put off as it long as I dared. It was short and to the point. It was enlightening.

Now how do we fix us old folks?

Application Phonemic Awareness Activity in the Classroom

Onomatopoeia Comic Book

(Phonemic Awareness Activity)

·        Gifted seventh grade English/Language Arts Class (two ELL students)

·        Students are finishing a unit on narrative writing

·        Students have two writings for this unit a personal narrative, which they wrote first and now a fictional narrative

·        Students were given the task of individually creating a super hero, villain, and a conflict

·        In class students used a plot outline to develop their stories

·        Stories were peer edited and then revised

·        Students were taken to the school computer lab to type their stories

·        Each student printed two copies of his/her story. One copy of the story was given to the teacher for grading the other for the students to use in creating a comic book.

·        To begin this portion of the project the teacher gives a definition of onomatopoeia (defined by Webster’s as “the naming of a thing or action by a vocal imitation of the sound associated with it – as buzz, hiss”) and how it is used in comic books

·        Students brain stormed onomatopoeia words that might be useful in their stories. The words were then written on the white board. This quickly became wild and crazy with students trying to outdo one another with unusual  sounds and spelling(s) of sounds. Of the two ELL students only the boy became very involved in calling out sounds of various actions, he was not as vocal with the spellings. The girl, who is always quiet, did seem to work well in her small group but not in the larger group.   

·        After creating an extensive list of onomatopoeia words

·        The teacher then copied the list of onomatopoeia words on to index cards

·        Each student picked two of the face down index cards and finds a place in his/her that the words will fit

·        We added students swapping cards when the word was also needed by someone else.

·        Because students had been peer editors on several different papers they felt obliged to suggest onomatopoeia words to others. Gifted kids, you gotta lov’em.

Response to The Cultural Divide of Discourse: Understanding HOw English-Language Learners' Primare Discourse Influences Acquisition of Literacy

Discourses are ways of combining and coordinating words, deeds, thoughts, values, bodies, objects, tools, and technologiew, and other people (at the appropriate tiimes and places) so as to enact and recognize the specific socially situated identities and activities. (Gee, 2001, p. 721)

Non English speaking students are coming into school an due to language issues been labeled developmentally delayed or learning impaired. I don't disagree that this sometimes happens. I would add that it also happens to students whose first language is Ennglish.

This article states that curriculums are teacher Discourses are white, middle-class. Teachers need to be aware of this and alter their speach Disourse with ELL students. Teachers would do this by familarizing themselves with the language and culture of the ELL students. This sounds reasonable until the expert who wrote this article (I don't think she would know a regular classroom if she was droped in) I do not have another teacher in the room to aid in helping students, I have 35 students, and there are at least four different lanuages represented.

The other recommendations as not uding rote learning, not telling a child in front of the class that his/her answer is wrong, and open ended questioning are standard issue teacher knows.

wb sites with videos

I have found two new sites with videos for teachers to use in their classrooms

ehow.com   even has smartboard activities, which really makes me wish the smartboard that is taking up 2/3 of my dryboard space worked

teachingchannel.org    has videos by subject area and grade level

also try
cooltoolsforschools.wikispaces.com

Picture Book Activity

Picture Book Activity

Marcia C. Humphreys

Seventh Grade Gifted ELA

I Have a Dream (an illustrated edition) by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Foreword by Coretta Scott King

·         Unit I for seventh grade English/Language Arts is narrative writing. I used the oral reading by the teacher of this book as a model for a personal narrative essay, which was the first form of narrative writing we addressed.

·         They will later in the year read Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor. My thinking was that this would add to their background knowledge when they began reading the novel.

·         We reviewed the definitions of:  narrative, essay, first person point of view, ideas, organizing, word choice, and sentence fluency.

·         We also discussed that even though this was a speech it was written in the same style as an essay.

·         As I read students were to write words they found unusual or interesting.

·         As I read students wrote notes of how certain pictures complimented the words or how they didn’t. This activity did not go as I expected due to the students lack of knowledge of why Dr. King needed to make this speech or the time period in general.   

·         When quizzed over what elements they heard in the speech we had to review the terms again and spend time I didn’t plan on with me explaining the historical background of the speech.

• I am afraid that most of the learning was done by me.

Interesting information

I read It, but I Don't Get It by Cris Tovani sounds just what I need to read to help my seventh graders

ABC's of the Writing Process is a great site for graphic organizers and links to other sites with graphic organizers for writing or reading.

Web Site

I found this in an article about ELL students it has a list of multicultural books www.nea.org/readacross/resources/50mulitibooks.html

Response to "Revisiting Reading-Aloud: Instructional Strategies That Encourage Students' Engagement With Test

Study by Vanessa Morrison and Lisa Wlodarczyk

A read aloud is an instructional practice where teachers, parents, and caregivers read tests aloud to students. I would add students may also read aloud to other students.

Although, I teach seventh grade and this study was done with a first grade classroom I found many strategies I hve been using for years. That is not to say I'm not planning on stealing a few new ideas from this study.

Students need to engagee with texts by being motivaed, using content knowlidge, literacy strategie,s and social collaboration before, during, and after reading.

According to Almasi, 1996 "The transactional theory maintains that the reader must transact with the text to make  meaning. According to the tranactional view, meaning does not reside in the text itself nor can meaning be found just with the reader, in fact, it is when the two transact that meaning occurs. Also, the transactional view further indicates that meaning is derived from the context of a given social interaction."

Stephenie used the Alphaboxes in her picture book lesson plan. Is used in this study also. I will easily alter this and use it with my seventh graders. I will also alter and use the graphic organizer "Text-to-Self, Text-Text, and Text-t-World." The discussion  web is something I have done as a large group activity, but I can see the value of using it in pairs or small groups.

I enjoyed this study because I can take from it and use what I have taken in myown classroom. Don't you love twofers.

Judy found a site for Alliance for Excellent Education which published a book in 2003 called Adolescents and Literacy: Reading for the 21st Century by Michael L Kamil. Does anyone have a copy I could borrow?

Thursday's Class

It is important that those of us who teach middle and high school children know and understand what is going on in the elementary schools. I admit I had no idea how students are taught reading or how they are monitored. I had no idea of the materials used or the time involved. I am looking forward to being able to do a more effective job in middle school of picking up where the elementary teachers left off.

Response to "Assessing Adolescents' Motivation to Read"

The Motivatin to Read Profile (MRP) was developed to aid elementary teacher in assessing the motivation of their students. The MRP has two parts a reading survey and a conversational interview. To aid the teachers of adolescnt students the Adolescent Motivation to Read Profile (AMRP) was developed. It is based on the MRP with questions revised for older students and the number of questions increased.

Of the 384 student who took part in the AMRP 54% were female and 46% were male. 22% were African American, 37% were Causasian, 30% were stuents Afro/Indo-Trini (from Trinidad and Tobago), 10% were clasdsified as other, 1%Hispanic. 43,8% were in graded 6-8, 35.2% were in grades 9-10, and 21% were in grades 11-12.

Females scored higher than males and this increased with age. Males scored higher in their early teens and decreased with age. Females said they valued reading more than males.The students from Trinidad and Tobago valued reading more than Causasians.

The discrepanies between what students said on the reading survey and the interview answers is important to those of us who teach this age group. Especially those of us who teach boys in this age group. Boys often said they did not like to read and did not read, yet when interviewed they spoke of reading magazines about hunting and fishing or other hobbies. They like to read stories written by friends, the Internet, emails. They even read novels that appealed to them. They just don't seem to want to read the textbooks and other "shool reading we try to push down their collect throats. This is an important message to those of us who teach these guys reading, if we don't give reading materials to them that appeals to their interests we are never going to be able to help them to become better reader. The blame and the shame will be on us.