Matching the Author to the Reader

In this weeks reading, I really enjoyed learning about how we make connections to text. Buehl raises some interesting points about how much our prior knowledge and general interest on a topic affect our satisfaction in comprehension when reading texts. When students read a text, they might know the meaning of certain  vocabulary words, where some places are located, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they'll understand what the text is talking about. They can read and re-read a passage and still not comprehend it because they don't have any prior knowledge on the subject. According to Buehl, we bring three types of knowledge to a text:
Text to Self Knowlege- Direct knowledge occured from ones personal lives and experiences.
Text to Text knowledge- Indirect knowledge resulting from ones reading and study.
Text to world knowledge- Vicarious based on our impressions  of how things are, often obtain secondhand.

I think this is certainly true, if the author of a text doesn't necessarily speak to me I am so quick to blank out and my mind will start to wonder. However, if I identify with the authors stance and I have a good amount of prior knowledge on the topic, then I'm all in. To quote Buehl "When a reader is well matched with an author, it seems that the reader is exactly whom the author had in mind when writing the text." To add to that, when authors and readers are matched comprehensions seems like it occurs naturally. However, when we don't know much about the text, and were not interested in the topic, we're saying "BYE FELICIA"

For those of you who haven't seen Friday, "Bye Felicia" means I don't care about your existence or purpose.

Anyways, how do we apply this to our history students? Well Buehl has a few pointers. In order for our students to make sense of the text we give them, they need to have a general knowledge on the topic. We cant give them a text and expect them to make sense of it right away. We need to teach them what's going on, what time period we're talking about etc. After we spend some time talking about the context then, they can read the text with the knowledge they have built up and hopefully come to a better understating of the meaning of the text.

So much of what students know about history is through what they've seen in movies, and as teacher I think we need capitalize on that. We can use that to our advantage to build knowledge. However, we also need to let our students know and remind them that the representation of historical events that movies offer do not necessarily tell the whole story accurately (e.g dramatization, over-acting) 

Frontloading

When reading and learning from an academic text, it requires the reader to have a certain background knowledge. Every lesson plan will have the students to acquire an assumed knowledge or vocabulary. Such as learning geometry requires you to know the soh cah toa or what a trapezoid is. The revolution war would require students to know about colonies. As for physics, most students are expected to understand how to solve an algebraic equation.

The fact is, there will be students who lack the background knowledge for the lesson plan. Students that lack a background for a reading assignment will become much more difficult for them to understand the text.

Teachers will compensate for this in two way. The first is when student don't do the reading or don't understand it, teachers will then usually present the key material. The second is when teachers avoid readings all together and teach with what is on the board. These two methods will eventually teach students that careful listening will help them gather all the information that they need.

This brings on an evolution, lesson plans should revolve around building academic background so that when a student read an academic text that they will learn new information. This method is presumed to be Frontloading.

There are three situations when Frontloading and they are:

• With much knowledge
• With Diverse knowledge
• With insufficient knowledge 

Having much knowledge usually fall in the scenario of changing a lesson plan and students forgetting the previous material. Teacher will have to refresh the students memory with an activity that quickly helps students recall information such as a quick writing prompt or a knowledge latter.

Diverse knowledge is when students come with a partial knowledge on the subject that may or may not be correct. Providing key words or vocabulary and having them make a connection based of their knowledge is one method that help.

Students with insufficient knowledge will usually need frontloading in the form of relatable or simple text such as that of a video or sections in a book rather than a whole chapter.

Along with this you will need students to actively learn outside of academic texts,  one suggestion from the text book is that have your students write what the know and what they don't and have them look it up on google or however they wish to (Buehl 157). This can bring them into another discipline and have them learning more than the subject matter.

Writing Next

The Writing Next article basically addresses eleven elements that help adolescent students become better writers. These elements are:
1) Writing Strategies                7) Prewriting
2) Summarization                     8) Inquiry Activities
3)Collaborative Writing            9) Process Writing Approach
4)Specific Product goals         10) Study of Models
5) Word processing                11) Writing for Content Learning
6) Sentence Combining

Each element has a specific purpose and goal for aiding students in the writing process. It's important to remember that these elements are not in a particular order nor do they constitute a curriculum. Meaning that, students don't have to fallow every element one after the other. However, the more elements the student includes in their writing process the better the result will be. According Graham, "The elements should not be seen as isolated but rather as interlinked...A mixture of these elements is likely to generate the biggest return." This reiterates the idea that the elements correlate and intertwine with each other and the more elements students use the better their results will be.

 But what do these elements tell us? Franky, it tell us that our students need a lot of help when it comes to writing. According to Writing Next the percentages of students who need writing assistance are cause for concern. These are just some of the statistics.

Seventy percent of                                             

students in grades 4–12

are low-achieving writers

Every school day, more

than 7,000 students drop out

of high school

Only

70% of high school

students graduate on time

with a regular diploma,

and fewer than 60% of

African-American and

Latino students do so

The numbers don't lie, many students are low achieving writers. Many of the student who fall somewhere in these percentages enter college not writing at basic college level and therefore, have a difficult first year. As teachers we need to prepare our students as much as we can so that when they do enter college they wont fall behind or feel daunted by the work load.

I really liked Graham and Perin's strategies for supporting students in writing. For me personally, writing has always been an intimidating process. To this day, I sometimes still struggle to put my thought into a cohesive well-written essay however, I have used some of the elements mentions above and they actually do work.  The thing that I will mentions is that writing takes time, hard work, patience,  focus, and discipline, which adolescents sometimes don't care about. 

Along with that, it's important to remember not to procrastinate; I know I'm guilty of it a lot. The first thirty seconds of the video describe exactly how I feel when I'm writing a paper that I'm procrastinating on or that I'm just not that interested in doing. 

The lesson here is to plan your writing a head of time. Meaning that, students should write outlines and plan accordingly to avoiding cramming and  procrastination and meet deadline

Writing Next

Writing Next

In regards to education, all we hear today is how the education system in the United States is horrible and how education needs to be reformed, especially in regards to adolescent reading and writing skills. Yes, the education system in the United States is absolutely horrible with seventy percent of students in fourth through twelfth grade being labeled as low-achieving writers, with more than seven thousand students dropping out of high school, and with almost one-third of of high school graduates not being "ready" for college-level English composition. As statistics continue to show that low number of students rank on standardized exams as proficient, a question may arise to ask why. Why are reading and writing scores so low? Why in an information-rich world are the majority of students not scoring as "proficient"? And, what can be done to improve this?

In Writing Next, Steve Graham and Dolores Perin come up with eleven, researched strategies that fall under the theory of meta-analysis. Meta-analysis is defined as, "a particularly powerful way of synthesizing and permits the calculation of effect sizes", and these effect sizes help determine how much a strategy using meta-analysis has impacted someone or a group's learning. By using the meta-analysis, researchers developed the eleven elements of current writing instruction that help adolescents with learning and writing. The eleven elements include: 

 







After reading the research on these eleven elements, I realized that these eleven elements are just various strategies that one could use in the classroom to help students in being proficient writers. As stated multiple times in the research, these eleven elements are not a curriculum for teachers, but rather are different strategies teachers can incorporate in their classroom to help students that are not "proficient" in writing so that by the standardized exams' scores these students will show that they are "proficient" in writing. However, as I was reading about these wonderful eleven elements that have shown to help students improve on their writing skills, I could not help but notice how these elements (strategies) revolve around the idea of universal design in that they can help different learners with their writing abilities. Although it is impossible to include all these methods of writing in one writing assignment, it is possible to offer students all of these elements and having them maybe use a few as they are doing a writing assignment for class to help them meet the "proficiency" level.

Although the statistics show that the majority of students in the country are not proficient writers or even readers, that does not go to say that students today are not reading and writing. A statement that I had a problem with in the article was, "it is obvious that if today's youngsters cannot read with understanding, think about and analyze what they've read, and then write clearly and effectively about what they've learned and what they think, then they may never be able to do justice to their talents and their potential". Students today are reading and writing more than they have ever done in the past, but they are not (in this case writing) expressing their thoughts in an academic way because they are so use to writing non-academically, such as text messages and comments on Facebook. Nonetheless, the thoughts are there, and if teachers could focus on transitioning those thoughts from the non-academic writings to the academic writings, then perhaps the number of students that are "proficient" in writing will increase as well.

By using the eleven elements in the classroom, I think that the transition from writing non-academically to academically can be done with the various learners present in the classroom. Statistically speaking, these eleven elements are golden and have shown to help "non-proficient" students increase their writing skills. However, not all elements are going to relate to how a student learns best, and instead of trying to use all of these elements at once for all reading assignments, I think that they should be present for students to pick a couple to help guide them in their writing. Although I disagree with having to teach students specifically on how to pass standardized exams, I do agree that students should be able to be proficient in writing academically, and if students can feel more comfortable with knowing how to practice this in the classroom with being able to choose which strategy helps them the best, then perhaps our future students can help raise the "proficiency" numbers in writing.

Complex Texts

 Reading is an activity that envelops almost every facet of our lives. It is a skill that we use not just to interpret written text in to language, but to analyze many different forms of information that we are receiving while working with texts. Whether the text is in the form of an image, a film clip, a song or speech, or written words, students need to be able to draw upon their literacy skills to take a deeper look into the possible meanings and information buried in it. A large step in students developing these skills is the transition from, as Buehl puts it, “learning to read, to reading to learn” as they enter into middle and high school. The reason middle and high school are important times for this transition is because that is the time period where most students start to receive more complex texts.

What I mean by a complex text is, a text that requires the reader to become more active and also challenges their literacy skills because of the skills required to accurately interpret it. A complex text also has six key characteristics outlined by The American College Testing Program. According to these characteristics a texts relationships between ideas should become less obvious, the richness if details in the text should increase, such as, the introduction of visual text integrated with written text, text structure that does not directly express the argument or ideas of the text to the reader, the style of the text is written in a more mature style, the vocabulary becomes increasingly more difficult, and lastly the reader must be made to interpret the author's purpose. Some examples of complex text that might appear in the classes a typical high school student attends could be a journal article in his or her science class, a primary source document in his or her history class, or a classic novel in his or her english class. Each of the texts would definitely cover each of the six key characteristics of a complex text and require that the student to participate more actively in the process of reading; however each of these text would also present their own set of potential problems for the student because each text has its own discourse. 

A discourse is an accepted use of language that typically employs a prescribed pool of vocabulary. (Gee 1996) To put it more plainly, each area of study has a certain set of vocabulary words that are specific to it, and the meaning of words may differ from one subject area to another. For example the word kingdom means two completely different things depending on whether you are looking at it through the lense of a historian or a scientist.Students are outsiders to many of these discourses which tends to hinder the students ability to interpret complex texts, and each discourse contains its own specific set of challenges. I'll use science and history as examples.

While reading science texts students may encounter problems with an over flow of new vocabulary words and previously mentioned terms that they are expected to make connections with, a lack of assumed prior knowledge, the use of academic language which may feel uninviting or complex, and the inability to successfully transition between and combine written language and visual representations, such as graphs, to see the big picture. Many science teachers may avoid the challenge of teaching students to engage with text because they may not understand how to teach it, and the end up just relaying information from the text to their students which makes the student dependent on their teacher for scientific information, instead of the student actively participating in their learning experience. (Buehl 2011) In the video below Shelia Banks demonstrates how teachers can help students can develop their literacy skill in science class.

In a history class, students face similar problems that a student in a science class would, in terms of vocab and prior knowledge, but the main problem with complex texts in a history class room is how students analyze the text and information they are given compared to how a historian analyzes texts and information. When a historian reads a historical text they are looking for how and why a historical event took place, which forces them to read into the material more deeply, and helps them develop their own understanding of an event. When students read a historical text they are usually looking for the who, what, and when of an event. This leads the students to only read historical documents at a surface level and it leads them to see history as a set of facts that need to be memorized instead of a series of arguments and debates. The solution to this problem is to teach student s to read text through the lense of a historian. The video below gives an overview of how teachers can help students achieve this goal.

Reading in The Disciplines: The Challenges of Adolescent Literacy engages with the overwhelming issue of reading and comprehension. As I read this article I could not help but feel that we have covered most this material prior to this reading. Early in the document it is evident that reading strategies used in our CI 414 are demonstrated, such as asking questions, predicting, and summarizing while reading (Lee 3). However, these are characteristics of general strategies that are applicable to various types of literature, and not the disciplinary literacy that must be emphasized in our classrooms. As an aspiring history teacher I found Buehl's analysis and Lee's to be analogous in their perspectives of how students must read historical documents. This emphasis on disciplinary literacy and how students view and analyze texts is reoccurring as history, "necessitates that readers shift into a particular disciplinary lens, in this case, reading like a historian" (Buehl 59). This aspect of reading like a historian is imperative when confronting dense textual evidence and formulating arguments and opinions. But how do we as educators properly teach students how to approach texts, no matter what their discipline may be? I reference history consistently because I have almost no prior knowledge of any science or mathematics courses, but it is evident that in order to succeed in a discipline an individual must possess skills and tactics that are not only demonstrated in detail, and evaluated by educators. This applies to all aspects of education, in order to become a master in your discipline, you must master the general strategies of reading and comprehension which, according to these texts is failing in our school system.

This video demonstrates the key strategies used by educators when attempting to provide students with the skills and tools to analyze history. This breaking away from the textbook and the use of primary and secondary sources is a strategy that is embedded continuously in our minds throughout our courses at UIC. It is evident that these educators are attempting to have their students question every detail, and formulate arguments and opinions as a historian would. 

Unfortunately, this is how most students feel when stuck in history class because they're lecture based courses that bore students to death. This experience is something that most of us are familiar with in any course though. There is an issue when it comes to how educators formulate lesson plans in any class, and this video as vulgar as it is perfectly describes how education desperately needs reform. 

The development of reading and comprehension skills is a complex and difficult process that I do not believe has an efficient and effective guideline. As demonstrated with this article, students who are performing lower than their colleagues are often placed in courses that offer easier alternatives to reading and comprehending material. Rosa, the 9th grade student offers insight into her classroom as, "you didn't have to read. It was something that you could like slide by without them knowing. I don't know if they cared or not, but that's the way everybody did it" (Lee 17). This excerpt proves that there is an issue in our school system, and I couldn't agree more. Aside from reading for a specific discipline, it is without a doubt more important to demonstrate general strategies for reading and writing, as well as to challenge those that need the most help. Following the Lee and Sprately article, I felt hopeful because the issue was at least being raised, and the article provided evidence of school reform. However, can every student achieve success through the use of Content Enhancement Routines? Is the Disciplinary Literacy Project at LRDC as successful as this article portrays it? Just by questioning the article, I've proved I can at least apply one characteristic of a general reading strategy demonstrated in this article and our class. This gives me hope that maybe I can one day demonstrate these skills to students, and then hopefully teach them how to analyze texts as a historian...but I'm a pessimist.

Literacy and Identity

In Effective Literacy Instruction for Adolescents, the main idea of designing literacy instruction for adolescents, is that it should be engaging and inclusive to the needs of the students. The curriculum should allow for their background knowledge to be used yet it should spark their interests as well. By maintaining their curiosity flowing, they will become engaged in the material thus building their confidence as readers and writers. As adolescents, their self-perception may affect how they feel as competent readers and writers. As future educators we should keep in mind how our students self-efficacy in certain subject areas can influence their capacity to complete an assignment. Motivation and feedback can greatly help students who are struggling with literacy. Fostering student motivation, strategy use, growth in conceptual knowledge, and social interaction are essential for effective literacy instruction.

      

From reading this article and the Buehl chapter, I could not help but think of the movie Freedom Writers. (I know that's cheesy!) Mrs. Gruwell, an English teacher, accomplishes to create effective readers as well as writers. Her students were very difficult to deal with because many were in involved in gangs and they all had different reading levels. They were even known as the "unteachables." Mrs. Gruwell did not waiver or give up on her students. She related what her students were going through (i.g.  violence, poverty) to the Holocaust and The Diary of Anne Frank. She then starts to gradually earn the trust and buys them composition books to record their daily struggles. Her students were soon captivated and submerged by the Holocaust and of Anne Frank's riveting story. Mrs. Gruwell starts to compile their journal entries in a book format, which makes the students feel accomplished and proud. (If you have never seen this movie, you should! It's really good!)

Mrs. Gruwell's example of how she managed to teach literacy to a group of students who were uninterested and unmotivated proves that it can be done. As Alvermann (2002) points out, building on students' cultural knowledge and personal experiences, fosters an intellectual community in the classroom that sustains interest in reading and discussion. As Buehl (2011) notes, we should explore ways to factor in the "reader profiles of our students, based on their out-of-school identities." 

We should encourage and help our students to think "outside of the bubble" and try to relate something in the material to their own experiences.

Freedom Writers!

Using new technologies have enormous implications on how we communicate as well as how we learn to use them.

Literacy, Culture, and Identity

This week's reading of "Effective Literacy Instruction for Adolescents" by Donna Alvermann discusses  the topic of literacy, culture, and identity. The main focus of this blog entry is on the article that was assigned. One interesting idea that the instruction of adolescent literacy is effective when it revolves around self-efficacy and creating a diverse learning environment that encourages the involvement of students. I feel that this is an important method to understand when it comes to instruction practices in the future in that literacy is not blindly the ability for an individual to know how to read and write but instead is an idea much more than that. In addition the article brought up that "literacy and reading, though related are neither synonymous nor unambiguous terms."It was explained that in order to instruct adolescents in becoming literate individuals they need not focus on one aspect of literacy but "acknowledge that uses of written language occur in specific places and times as part of broader societal practices."

In addition, an interesting topic within the reading was that the perceptions of adolescents effect how well they read and write, as well as their motivation to do so. And it was explained that "if academic literacy instruction is to be effective it must address issues of self-efficacy and engagement."

Some questions that came to mind as I watched the following Ted Talk were about education and that he discusses that education should in the future be about opportunity. Does education mean literacy to us? To us as teachers? This Tedtalk argues that literacy is not enough, and that we should be questioning the way we perceive literacy and the way that education is taught.

These two related Ted Talks discusses literacy in an interesting way and discusses the issues that have developed with the rise of the e-book and how we experience reading in a different way as a result of reading on a screen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_Z5HNRC_Ic

This last Ted Talk I believe to be extremely important in a relation to how to explain literacy now and in the future. This video exemplifies how literacy is defined again as not just reading, but that media and technology are especially important when it comes to being a literate individual currently.

Culture, Fairness, and Technology: Complications In Literacy Instruction

One piece of evidence that Alvermann uses in her article that raises many questions on page 192 when she cites the two types of instruction found by Patrick Finn in 1992. He says there are two types of instruction, empowering and domesticating, that develop two different types of literacy skills, empowering and domesticating, respectively. Moving forward this observation should stay with us. We all desire equality and fairness for all in the classroom. We also know that students come to class with a variety of different skills and abilities, not to mention different experiential backgrounds against which their education must placed. Knowing all this, we still do not have the time to completely focus on each area that every individual student may need help with. One needs help wrestling with print, another is not quite efficacious when writing, another gets confused when looking at graphic organizers. It's a time management problem and I think we need to think about what kind of content to include in our lessons that will challenge and address the issues of each student fairly. Unfortunately, we know that we cannot succeed completely in this. What do you think about these two types of literacy that Finn discovered? Does everybody deserve to be taught "empowering literacy?" Can everybody learn to be empowered by literacy given the time and material constraints under which the typical classroom is placed? This is not only an issue of the practice of education but of the democracy of education as well.

I think Alvermann is wary of propounding the importance of vocabulary in comprehension, so I will do it for her. Understanding vocabulary and jargon and their particular meaning to disciplinary texts is of paramount importance. We established it as one of the first things to do when you read a text. It is impossible to productively analyze a text if the appropriate meanings of its most basic building blocks are not grasped.

Alvernmann's asserts that NRP's findings on how vocabulary contributes to comprehension is narrow because it "risks disenfranchising students who may learn better in socially interactive settings or whose literacies (e.g., visual and computer) span a broader range than those typically emphasized in school literacy." The fact that school's instruction of literacy is narrow is not only self-evident, but sometimes, I argue, necessary. By now we all understand that today's students have developed more than one set of literacy skills due to the ever expanding melange of technological mediums through which information can be transmitted. This is obvious. The problem is not so much that these technological literacies aren't being employed in the classroom as much as the ubiquity of these technologies is undermining students's ability to comprehend print. Although literacy skills do not end with print, we cannot ignore the development of traditional reading skills by bringing in all sorts of tablets and graphic charts. Reading print is probably the literacy area in which most students still struggle. It is more difficult to grapple with than a flow chart. It requires more active thinking than a video which is shot into the eyeballs of a passive viewer. And because reading and writing remain the most difficult areas of literacy, they cannot be ignored. My concern actually gets addressed later in the article on page 200, when it is noted that two girls using instant messaging demonstrated "little critical awareness how the chat/IM technology might be manipulating them and their literacy practices." My suspicion is that focusing on literacy practices that are not usually academic like computer and video can invite students to turn off their critical thinking. Call me a technophobe, but sometimes I think the best thing we can do for our capacity for thought is to throw out out everything that has a screen. For more on this party-ruining conversation, here is a critique of the internet, from the internet:

Culturally responsive instruction could be the first step in bridging the gap between home and community, home and school. The example given is a study where teachers went to the homes of Latino students to develop a greater sensitivity to their students's culture and how it could make reading practices in class more relevant. I think this may be a solution to the clash of public education with non-dominant cultures. Whether we're conscious of it or not, American public education is inherently White, Anglo-Saxon, English oriented. It clicked with me because it was made for me. If teachers can get a glimpse at the cultures of the students they teach, perhaps the assignments and class materials can be aligned with these newly discovered cultural norms. The problem here is how can you invite all students to incorporate their culture into the classroom and have time for the state prescribed curriculum?