Online June 2012
| Volume 69 | Number 9
Strong Readers All
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Nancy Padak, Karen Bromley, Tim Rasinski and Evangeline Newton
Word knowledge is a key component of reading comprehension, write the authors, yet most traditional vocabulary instruction is schools is limited by five misconceptions: (1) definitions do the trick; (2) weekly vocabulary lists are effective; (3) teachers should teach all hard words in the textbook; (4) the study of Latin and Greek roots is too hard for young learners; and (5) Word learning can't be fun. The authors challenge each of these misconceptions and advocate an approach to word learning that stresses fun and exploration. The provide online sources of word games and puzzles, as well as a list of selected online vocabulary resources.
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Kim Gutchewsky and Joanne Curran
The way students wield technology has changed how they approach reading, especially how students approach analyzing complex texts. In response, secondary-level teachers must now explicitly teach literacy strategies in addition to content. The authors—one, a high school English teacher and the other a reading specialist—describe how their district met this challenge by creating a "best-practices reading cadre" of 28 teachers from different content areas. The group met throughout the school year to support one another in implementing six reading instruction strategies in their classes: (1) direct instruction in vocabulary; (2) note-taking; (3) interactive lecture techniques; (4) compare/contrast methods; (5) formative and summative assessments; and (6) inductive reasoning/inferential skills. Gutchewsky and Curran show how the cadre tried out three strategies—vocabulary instruction, note-taking, and inductive reasoning—and how teachers creatively assessed the effects of these strategies on students' skills.
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John Collins
Frequent written summaries of complex texts are a great way to develop students' reading comprehension and argument-writing skills, while minimizing the time the teacher spends correcting. Summarizing complex texts requires students to actively read, builds their background knowledge, and shows them how to craft an argument. Plus, summaries are easy for the teacher to grade. The author recommends the 10 percent summary, a summary that is approximately 10 percent the length of the original article and which requires students to write in complete sentences and in paragraph form.
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Kimberly B. Pyne
The Elon Academy at Elon University in North Carolina is a college-readiness program for high schools students who have significant financial need and no family history of college. Students are recruited into the program in their 9th grade year, attend a residential program at the university during the summer, and meet monthly during the school year. Realizing that many of the students in the program were reluctant readers and that students often struggle with reading assignments when they first go to college, academy organizers developed the "Book Jam" to encourage students to read more outside class. Students formed small groups each month to discuss a book of their choice with the help of a college student volunteer. The conversations showed that students were thinking critically about their reading, and students reported more confidence with their school-based reading.
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Carol E. Canady and Robert Lynn Canady
For students who enter school with below-average language development, a one-year gain in reading achievement for each year in school is simply not enough to catch up. Schools can accelerate the reading achievement of kindergartners and 1st graders by scheduling two blocks of intensive small-group literacy instruction daily. Sample schedules are included.
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Anne Upczak-Garcia
As a teacher in a bilingual school where most content is taught in English, Upczak-Garcia needs to help her Spanish-speaking students transfer knowledge from their home language to English and to feel safe expressing what they know in English within academic settings. Her English language learners also need to gain content knowledge in their second language. Upczak-Garcia finds that integrated thematic units—which teach core content centered on a theme throughout all disciplines and throughout the school day—are an ideal tool for this mission. She describes a thematic unit she taught focused on essential questions about scientific inquiry and the solar system. Upczak-Garcia tells how she identified enduring understandings and essential questions for the unit, then used language instruction to help students engage in complex literacy tasks (called oracy) into daily lessons focused on the solar system.
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Twyla Miranda, Kary A. Johnson and Dara Rossi-Williams
The authors describe a study that took place in a middle school, where low-reading-ability students were given the opportunity to use e-readers during their sustained silent reading time. Pre- and post-assessments found that student motivation to read increased significantly. In addition to this increase in student engagement, the authors describe other potential benefits of using e-readers, including allowing students to record their responses to text, providing extra support for struggling readers and English language learners, and giving students experience with technology.
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Valerie Bang-Jensen
Gardens connected to students' learning are a trend, Valerie Bang-Jensen writes. She asks readers to think of the energizing role that garden exploration might play in strengthening students' literacy. The author created a "teaching garden" at St. Michael's University in Vermont, featuring (among other offerings) an area devoted to plants connected to children's literature and a programmed tour of the different tree species around the university with hands-on, exploratory activities linked to each species. She draws from her experiences helping pre-service teachers and K-12 students creatively use such gardens and proposes three ways that activity in gardens can enrich literacy: (1) creating text sets of exemplary children's books that feature plants and gardening; (2) teaching students to recognize standard features in nonfiction books (such as the table of contents) and to use these in their writing; and (3) helping students create signs for their gardens, thus learning about how to reach an audience.
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What At-Risk Readers Need
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership/mar11/vol68/num06/What_At-Risk_Readers_Need.aspx
Richard L. Allington
Despite the fact that two of every three students in U.S. schools have reading proficiencies below the level needed to adequately do grade-level work, schools don't make a point of offering either high-quality professional development for kindergarten teachers nor expert tutorial instruction for at-risk kindergartners. This means that most schools will deliberately create a pool of students who will become their struggling readers. Schools typically focus on three approaches that don't work: using paraprofessionals to help struggling readers, using computer-based instructional programs, and using core reading programs. To effectively support young struggling readers, schools need to screen kindergarteners on day one and provide additional high-quality reading instruction to those in need of it, continue to offer supports in 1st grade, and engage students in high-success reading.
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The Power of Purposeful Reading
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/oct05/vol63/num02/The-Power-of-Purposeful-Reading.aspx
Cris Tovani
Confusion about what part of a text to focus on is a stumbling block to many students laboring to comprehend unfamiliar text. Drawing on observations of her own struggles reading text out of her comfort zone, Tovani shares the importance of giving students a purpose for assigned readings. Asking students to search and record historical facts, to form an opinion and cite reasons for it, or to connect new information to their past experience are all possibilities for focusing reading tasks. The more explicit directions teachers give students in what to seek in a text and how the information will be used, the better, according to Tovani. She shares strategies for setting a purpose for readers and guiding students to develop their own "fake purpose" for vaguely explained assignments.
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Naomi Thiers
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Copyright © 2012 by ASCD