As I was thinking of my top ten, it occurred to me that I'd had 10+ instructors this summer. So, I thought I'd use a little wisdom from each one to review what I've learned about literacy.
#10 (Make a YouTube video in your mind as you read this):
If you ever feel like you're drowning, look for the lead fish and follow him to new ideas. Remember, the teacher is not always the lead fish!
#9 (Pun intended)
Gee, teaching doesn't have to be difficult! Immersing students in a Discourse makes the process natural and the mastery easy. Create an identity kit for students to become scientists, historians, writers, readers, artists, etc.
#8 (Choral reading by Jeremy and Rachel)
"Show us how to shift genres between reading texts and oral presentations so we don't end up lost in an assignment. Help us understand that literacy is not an isolated skill focused on surface knowledge."
#7 (Read with a British accent)
Provide a framework for students to access the curriculum by building upon their strengths rather than their weaknesses using the academic literacies model.
#6 (Assume an aesthetic stance)
The heart of reading is going beyond the text to find meaning in the exchange between the author and the reader. (How did that make you feel?)
#5 (Written with the audience in mind)
Give students an opportunity to work within all three writing genres: transactional, expressive, and poetic. Don't let the demands of testing restrict students to transactional writing only.
#4 (Imagine this one set to music, with an artsy layout)
Blogging with a class of art teachers is addicting!
#3 (Spoken by a squid with a French accent)
Never let a child's potential go unnoticed. Reading is a miraculous journey to a perfect island, a parallel universe.
#2 (The voice of "The Moderator")
Invite students to come into the Discourse and play in it together. Be "liberatory pedagogues". Keep exploring and keep reading.
And the #1 thing I learned this summer . . .
(From my family, between 9 - 10 on Wednesdays with no breakfast in sight)
If I ever decide to quit my day job, I look pretty good in a headset.
Thank you each and everyone!
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Friday, July 9, 2010
What is the difference between writing to communicate and writing to learn?
The difference between writing to communicate and writing to learn has everything to do with the intended audience. In writing to communicate, a writer takes a public stance. On the other hand, writing to learn is a more reflective process in which the writer engages in an inner dialogue as he or she chooses the words that best express meaning.
The story of how young Sumerians learned to read provides a fitting illustration. Sumerian students were assigned to copy lists of written words on the back side of their teacher's tablet. Time was on their side. (Did you catch my play on words?) As they wrote, they began to develop an awareness of the power of words in the process of deliberation. They documented their feelings, thoughts, trials, and joys, in writing that is still preserved today.
The cultural historian Walter Ong wrote "Writing is consciousness-raising." When a writer expresses the thoughts of a character, he is learning from the consciousness of another human being, whether real or imagined. As Wolf says, ". . . the ability to see another's thoughts makes us doubly aware."
I've kept a journal since I was a senior in high school. The things I've learned about myself are invaluable. The beauty of it all is that no one will ever misunderstand what I've written because I'm not trying to communicate to an audience, this writing is just for me.
And so I close with this quote, "Every child, scrawling his first letters on his slate and attempting to read for the first time, in so doing, enters an artificial and most complicated world; to know the laws and rules of this world completely and to practice them perfectly, no single human life is long enough. Without words, without writing, and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity." -- Hermann Hesse
The story of how young Sumerians learned to read provides a fitting illustration. Sumerian students were assigned to copy lists of written words on the back side of their teacher's tablet. Time was on their side. (Did you catch my play on words?) As they wrote, they began to develop an awareness of the power of words in the process of deliberation. They documented their feelings, thoughts, trials, and joys, in writing that is still preserved today.
The cultural historian Walter Ong wrote "Writing is consciousness-raising." When a writer expresses the thoughts of a character, he is learning from the consciousness of another human being, whether real or imagined. As Wolf says, ". . . the ability to see another's thoughts makes us doubly aware."
I've kept a journal since I was a senior in high school. The things I've learned about myself are invaluable. The beauty of it all is that no one will ever misunderstand what I've written because I'm not trying to communicate to an audience, this writing is just for me.
And so I close with this quote, "Every child, scrawling his first letters on his slate and attempting to read for the first time, in so doing, enters an artificial and most complicated world; to know the laws and rules of this world completely and to practice them perfectly, no single human life is long enough. Without words, without writing, and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity." -- Hermann Hesse
How do we know that a reader is struggling?
Author Maryanne Wolf believes that struggling readers can be identified in kindergarten and first grade. She recommends using letter-sound correspondence and decoding measures to find those who have difficulty with phonology (hearing, segmenting, and understanding that small units of sounds make up words). To diagnose those with naming-speed deficits, she suggests tasks in which the child names rows of repeated letters, numbers, colors, or objects as fast as possible. Of course there are those who have vocabulary challenges due to literate-poor environments, and those who have second-language or dialect issues who can also be diagnosed in these early school years.
Teachers "with a toolbox of principles that can be applied to different types of children" are needed to help struggling readers know as much about a word as possible, while having as much fun as possible! Our most important job is to make sure we don't miss the potential of any child.
Let's consider the gifts dyslexics have given to our society. What would our world be like without Thomas Edison, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Charles Schwab, Andy Warhol, Picasso, Danny Glover, Whoopi Goldberg, and Patrick Dempsey? Would we have enjoyed, "Pirates of the Caribbean", without Keira Knightly and Johnny Depp? Notice the amount of creativity and "thinking outside the box" this list entails.
Which begs the $64,000 question: (Similar to, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?") "Is the brain of a person with dyslexia forced to use the right hemisphere because of problems in the left hemisphere, thereby strengthening all the right-hemispheric connections and developing sometimes unique strategies for doing all kinds of things? Or are the right-hemisphere connections more dominant and creative from the start, therefore taking over activities such as reading?" (p. 200) One of the best theories from the book is that when structures in the right hemisphere are put in charge of precise, time-based functions for reading that are normally found in the left hemisphere, it inevitably leads to difficulties . . . in a literate society.
I'll end with one of my favorite characters from this year's read aloud -- Percy Jackson. He was a struggling reader who hated school. Yet when the author, Rick Riordan, takes him out of the academic setting, every deficit becomes a strength.
This is how Annabeth explains it:
"The letters float off the page when you read, right? That's because your mind is hard-wired for ancient Greek . . . . And the A.D.H.D. -- you're impulsive, can't sit still in the classroom. That's your battlefield reflexes. In a real fight, they'd keep you alive. As for the attention problems, that's because you see too much, Percy, not too little. Your senses are better than a regular mortal's . . . . Face it. You're a half-blood." -- Rick Riordan
Teachers "with a toolbox of principles that can be applied to different types of children" are needed to help struggling readers know as much about a word as possible, while having as much fun as possible! Our most important job is to make sure we don't miss the potential of any child.
Let's consider the gifts dyslexics have given to our society. What would our world be like without Thomas Edison, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Charles Schwab, Andy Warhol, Picasso, Danny Glover, Whoopi Goldberg, and Patrick Dempsey? Would we have enjoyed, "Pirates of the Caribbean", without Keira Knightly and Johnny Depp? Notice the amount of creativity and "thinking outside the box" this list entails.
Which begs the $64,000 question: (Similar to, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?") "Is the brain of a person with dyslexia forced to use the right hemisphere because of problems in the left hemisphere, thereby strengthening all the right-hemispheric connections and developing sometimes unique strategies for doing all kinds of things? Or are the right-hemisphere connections more dominant and creative from the start, therefore taking over activities such as reading?" (p. 200) One of the best theories from the book is that when structures in the right hemisphere are put in charge of precise, time-based functions for reading that are normally found in the left hemisphere, it inevitably leads to difficulties . . . in a literate society.
I'll end with one of my favorite characters from this year's read aloud -- Percy Jackson. He was a struggling reader who hated school. Yet when the author, Rick Riordan, takes him out of the academic setting, every deficit becomes a strength.
This is how Annabeth explains it:
"The letters float off the page when you read, right? That's because your mind is hard-wired for ancient Greek . . . . And the A.D.H.D. -- you're impulsive, can't sit still in the classroom. That's your battlefield reflexes. In a real fight, they'd keep you alive. As for the attention problems, that's because you see too much, Percy, not too little. Your senses are better than a regular mortal's . . . . Face it. You're a half-blood." -- Rick Riordan
Thursday, July 8, 2010
How do new technologies influence reading and writing in our subject area classrooms?
Any of you who have read Chapter 7 of Maryanne Wolf's, Proust and the Squid, may wonder why I used this question from our literacy framework for a chapter titled, "Dyslexia's Puzzle and the Brain's Design". Let me explain:
After 120 years of research on dyslexia, new technology called magnetoencephalography, (How'd you like decoding that?) has provided a view of the reading regions of the brain. What researchers have found so far, is that children with dyslexia use a different reading circuitry. Wolf summarizes by saying she has a hunch that this new form of research will show that the brain has learned to compensate for its struggles by rearranging itself.
To illustrate the forward strides this new imaging has created, let's look at a major breakthrough that came in the 1870's. A French businessman and amateur musician, aka Monsieur X, woke up one morning unable to read words, musical notes, or name colors. Amazingly enough, he could still see perfectly. When he died several years later, his researcher found that he had suffered a stroke, causing damage to areas that could now be identified as necessary parts of the reading brain. It was through an autopsy that this was discovered. Notice the difference in accessibility to the brain between an autopsy and magnetic imaging. We've come a long ways . . .
Wolf covers 4 different principles involved in dyslexia: 1) a flaw in the older structures of the brain; 2) failure of the brain to achieve automaticity; 3) an impediment in the circuit connections among the brain structures; 4) a different circuit for reading (which correlates with the research provided by our latest technology). By turning away from the causes of dyslexia to the types, Wolf provides a helpful study for every one of us who work with struggling readers in our classrooms.
Approximately 25% of the children Wolf studied had only phonological deficits. 20% had only fluency deficits. The most common group had both. 10% couldn't be classified in either of the above ways; but another study showed severely impaired children not only had the combined deficits, but also struggled with short-term memory.
As we intervene with these children, our work should include orthography (features of letters, common letter patterns, and "sight" words), phonology (hearing, segmenting, and understanding small units of sounds), vocabulary, and morphology (the conventions surrounding how words are formed from smaller, meaningful roots, and units of meaning), all the while connecting and integrating these to form comprehension and fluency.
Most importantly, we must remember that dyslexia is not spelled, "dumb", "stubborn", or "not working to potential". I recommend reading, Thank You, Mr. Falker, by Patricia Polacco. This book is one of those that made a lasting influence in my life in regards to working with children who have reading challenges. The main character is a little girl who understood the sweetness of reading and wanted it more than anything in the world! What she got instead was labeling and teasing. . . until one day a teacher who cared entered her life. I don't know which part of the "happily ever after" I like the most: the girl's first sweet taste of reading, or the gratitude she forever feels for her teacher, or the books that she, Patricia Polacco, has written because she now can read. She is my inspiration.
Thanks to the latest technology, maybe someday we can diagnose and intervene before a child carries emotional scars from the battle with dyslexia.
After 120 years of research on dyslexia, new technology called magnetoencephalography, (How'd you like decoding that?) has provided a view of the reading regions of the brain. What researchers have found so far, is that children with dyslexia use a different reading circuitry. Wolf summarizes by saying she has a hunch that this new form of research will show that the brain has learned to compensate for its struggles by rearranging itself.
To illustrate the forward strides this new imaging has created, let's look at a major breakthrough that came in the 1870's. A French businessman and amateur musician, aka Monsieur X, woke up one morning unable to read words, musical notes, or name colors. Amazingly enough, he could still see perfectly. When he died several years later, his researcher found that he had suffered a stroke, causing damage to areas that could now be identified as necessary parts of the reading brain. It was through an autopsy that this was discovered. Notice the difference in accessibility to the brain between an autopsy and magnetic imaging. We've come a long ways . . .
Wolf covers 4 different principles involved in dyslexia: 1) a flaw in the older structures of the brain; 2) failure of the brain to achieve automaticity; 3) an impediment in the circuit connections among the brain structures; 4) a different circuit for reading (which correlates with the research provided by our latest technology). By turning away from the causes of dyslexia to the types, Wolf provides a helpful study for every one of us who work with struggling readers in our classrooms.
Approximately 25% of the children Wolf studied had only phonological deficits. 20% had only fluency deficits. The most common group had both. 10% couldn't be classified in either of the above ways; but another study showed severely impaired children not only had the combined deficits, but also struggled with short-term memory.
As we intervene with these children, our work should include orthography (features of letters, common letter patterns, and "sight" words), phonology (hearing, segmenting, and understanding small units of sounds), vocabulary, and morphology (the conventions surrounding how words are formed from smaller, meaningful roots, and units of meaning), all the while connecting and integrating these to form comprehension and fluency.
Most importantly, we must remember that dyslexia is not spelled, "dumb", "stubborn", or "not working to potential". I recommend reading, Thank You, Mr. Falker, by Patricia Polacco. This book is one of those that made a lasting influence in my life in regards to working with children who have reading challenges. The main character is a little girl who understood the sweetness of reading and wanted it more than anything in the world! What she got instead was labeling and teasing. . . until one day a teacher who cared entered her life. I don't know which part of the "happily ever after" I like the most: the girl's first sweet taste of reading, or the gratitude she forever feels for her teacher, or the books that she, Patricia Polacco, has written because she now can read. She is my inspiration.
Thanks to the latest technology, maybe someday we can diagnose and intervene before a child carries emotional scars from the battle with dyslexia.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
What are the most important things students need to learn to become more literate in our disciplines?
My fourth grade students need to learn how to be fully fluent readers with adequate comprehension. Why? I'm sure you've all heard this: By fourth grade everyone, including textbook authors, are going off the assumption that a fourth grader is no longer learning to read, but reading to learn. As I mentioned in my last blog, when students are fluent, comprehending readers, they have time to think and learn.
So how are we doing? In 2000, the National Reading Panel's report card found that 30 to 40 percent of our nation's fourth graders can't read fluently with comprehension. To make this even more challenging, most fourth grade teachers have never taken a course in reading intervention.
How do we intervene? Wolf states that the two aids to increased reading fluency and comprehension are 1) explicit instruction in major content areas; and 2) the child's own desire to read. She maintains that explicit instruction should be a variation on Socrates' dialogue. (Socrates was right after all?!) Teachers should teach students to " . . . question what they don't understand, summarize the content, identify key issues, clarify, and predict and infer what happens next" (p. 139). The result would be students who can find meaning in the more difficult texts they'll encounter throughout their lives.
In order to encourage a child's desire to read they must be immersed in the reading process in a way that parallels the academic literacies model. Wolf gave a wonderful analogy from Ruiz Zafon's Shadow of the Wind in which the main character, Daniel, is introduced by his father to his first experience with books:
'Welcome to the Cemetery of Dead Books, Daniel. . . . Every book, every volume . . . has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens' (p. 139).
Much like Louise Rosenblatt's transactional theory, this passage speaks of how we bring a stance to our reading. Wolf states that each time we read a book, we come away with a completely different understanding, depending on the quality of attention and life experiences we bring to the reading.
My favorite part of this chapter was Wolf's explanation of the importance of fantasy in developing fluent, comprehending readers. She states that, " . . . the world of fantasy presents a conceptually perfect holding environment for children who are just leaving the more concrete stage of cognitive processing" (p. 138). As hard as I tried to get into different genres with my read-alouds this past year, I ended up reading only fantasy books: Fablehaven, Leven Thumps, and The Lightning Thief, just to name a few. Now I understand why that genre is so important. In an imaginary world, children are stepped into reading beyond the text. In Narnia, Hogwarts, and Fablehaven we find " . . . fertile ground for developing skills of metaphor, inference, and analogy" because nothing is ever as it seems!
So how are we doing? In 2000, the National Reading Panel's report card found that 30 to 40 percent of our nation's fourth graders can't read fluently with comprehension. To make this even more challenging, most fourth grade teachers have never taken a course in reading intervention.
How do we intervene? Wolf states that the two aids to increased reading fluency and comprehension are 1) explicit instruction in major content areas; and 2) the child's own desire to read. She maintains that explicit instruction should be a variation on Socrates' dialogue. (Socrates was right after all?!) Teachers should teach students to " . . . question what they don't understand, summarize the content, identify key issues, clarify, and predict and infer what happens next" (p. 139). The result would be students who can find meaning in the more difficult texts they'll encounter throughout their lives.
In order to encourage a child's desire to read they must be immersed in the reading process in a way that parallels the academic literacies model. Wolf gave a wonderful analogy from Ruiz Zafon's Shadow of the Wind in which the main character, Daniel, is introduced by his father to his first experience with books:
'Welcome to the Cemetery of Dead Books, Daniel. . . . Every book, every volume . . . has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens' (p. 139).
Much like Louise Rosenblatt's transactional theory, this passage speaks of how we bring a stance to our reading. Wolf states that each time we read a book, we come away with a completely different understanding, depending on the quality of attention and life experiences we bring to the reading.
My favorite part of this chapter was Wolf's explanation of the importance of fantasy in developing fluent, comprehending readers. She states that, " . . . the world of fantasy presents a conceptually perfect holding environment for children who are just leaving the more concrete stage of cognitive processing" (p. 138). As hard as I tried to get into different genres with my read-alouds this past year, I ended up reading only fantasy books: Fablehaven, Leven Thumps, and The Lightning Thief, just to name a few. Now I understand why that genre is so important. In an imaginary world, children are stepped into reading beyond the text. In Narnia, Hogwarts, and Fablehaven we find " . . . fertile ground for developing skills of metaphor, inference, and analogy" because nothing is ever as it seems!
Friday, July 2, 2010
What is the difference between learning to read and reading to learn?
Try reading these terms out loud:
periventricular nodular heterotopia
pedagogy
fiduciary
micron spectroscopy
If you're like me, you probably had to revert back to strategies of decoding and meaning-making you developed as a child.
Now that you've had an experience in learning to read again, what is the difference between that and reading to learn? According to Wolf, it's the difference between working through each step of the reading process and the point at which the reader fluently comprehends what is read. This is the stage where a reader can learn because he or she has time to think.
So what are the steps and how do we know where a child is at in the process?
The first step is an emerging pre-reader. This child is aware of the literate world surrounding him or her. I remember this stage. What I remember most is that people couldn't understand me. It wasn't until a professor at Michigan State taught me nonsense words that I could finally reproduce those sounds into real words and speak the language.
The novice reader is the stage at which a child first learns that words have individual sounds. For instance, "cat" has 3: /k/ /a/ /t/. (Wolf jokes that none of these are "meow".) It's also where we learn multiple meanings like, ". . . bugs can crawl, pester, drive, and spy on people." (Wolf, p. 124) How important is this stage? First-graders who can't decode well end up being eighty-eight percent of my poor readers in fourth grade. Emphasizing the first sound (onset) of a syllable, and the vowel + consonant pattern (rhime), helps the child learn more easily. He or she also has to know that five vowels (plus y) have to double and triple to make up more than a dozen vowel sounds.
A decoding reader can play with "ea" to correctly read this:
"There once was a beautiful bear who sat on a seat near to breaking and read by the hearth about how the earth was created. She smiled beatifically, full of ideas for the realm of her winter dreams." (Wolf, p. 128) Did you understand the importance of "what's in a word"? A decoding reader does. He or she realizes that "sign" can be morphed into "signer", "signed", "signing", and "signature".
The fluent comprehending reader understands that there is a lot to the text that is not said. Wolf gives the example from "Charlotte's Web", where a child is able to understand the reasoning behind Charlotte's intervention in Wilbur's behalf, even though it's not stated. At this stage a child is switching strategies to monitor comprehension. In other words, he or she is reading to learn.
An expert reader not only reads to learn, but reads to feel. He or she knows what it's like to live another life: to think like a scientist, or princess, or detective, or artist. An expert reader lives in a "parallel universe", a "perfect island", a place that lies "beyond the path" of home.
periventricular nodular heterotopia
pedagogy
fiduciary
micron spectroscopy
If you're like me, you probably had to revert back to strategies of decoding and meaning-making you developed as a child.
Now that you've had an experience in learning to read again, what is the difference between that and reading to learn? According to Wolf, it's the difference between working through each step of the reading process and the point at which the reader fluently comprehends what is read. This is the stage where a reader can learn because he or she has time to think.
So what are the steps and how do we know where a child is at in the process?
The first step is an emerging pre-reader. This child is aware of the literate world surrounding him or her. I remember this stage. What I remember most is that people couldn't understand me. It wasn't until a professor at Michigan State taught me nonsense words that I could finally reproduce those sounds into real words and speak the language.
The novice reader is the stage at which a child first learns that words have individual sounds. For instance, "cat" has 3: /k/ /a/ /t/. (Wolf jokes that none of these are "meow".) It's also where we learn multiple meanings like, ". . . bugs can crawl, pester, drive, and spy on people." (Wolf, p. 124) How important is this stage? First-graders who can't decode well end up being eighty-eight percent of my poor readers in fourth grade. Emphasizing the first sound (onset) of a syllable, and the vowel + consonant pattern (rhime), helps the child learn more easily. He or she also has to know that five vowels (plus y) have to double and triple to make up more than a dozen vowel sounds.
A decoding reader can play with "ea" to correctly read this:
"There once was a beautiful bear who sat on a seat near to breaking and read by the hearth about how the earth was created. She smiled beatifically, full of ideas for the realm of her winter dreams." (Wolf, p. 128) Did you understand the importance of "what's in a word"? A decoding reader does. He or she realizes that "sign" can be morphed into "signer", "signed", "signing", and "signature".
The fluent comprehending reader understands that there is a lot to the text that is not said. Wolf gives the example from "Charlotte's Web", where a child is able to understand the reasoning behind Charlotte's intervention in Wilbur's behalf, even though it's not stated. At this stage a child is switching strategies to monitor comprehension. In other words, he or she is reading to learn.
An expert reader not only reads to learn, but reads to feel. He or she knows what it's like to live another life: to think like a scientist, or princess, or detective, or artist. An expert reader lives in a "parallel universe", a "perfect island", a place that lies "beyond the path" of home.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
What is the relationship between literacy and reading discipline?
This is "The Tale of Two Childhoods"
For Child A, it was the best of times:
Every night, he sat on his parent's lap and learned that . . .
Goodnight Moon teaches the names of familiar items, thanks to a mother rabbit.
Mother Goose teaches the poetry of sound awareness through alliteration, assonance, rhyme, and repetition.
Winnie the Pooh has sound relationships between words, like, "funny", "bunny", and "honey".
Curious George presents figurative language when George flies into the sky with balloons and finds that the, " . . . houses looked like toy houses and the people like dolls."
Frog and Toad teaches that empathy means friends help each other out.
George and Martha show that a good friend understands feelings.
"Once upon a time" is a clue to a genre with dragons, castles, and royalty.
These equations apply:
The more he is spoken to < understanding of oral language
The more he is read to < understanding of all language around & the more developed his vocabulary
By the time he is 18 months, his visual, attention, and conceptual systems have developed to where he knows that things have names.
Between 2-5 years old, he is learning an average of 2-4 new words every day.
By the time he is 3 1/2, he has experienced the reciprocal relationship between emotional development and reading. Marcel Proust has said that taking on someone else's perspective lies at the heart of communication through written language, which is now developing for Child A.
He draws a picture of himself playing soccer and labels it "YN".
When he is 5, he will have a 10,000-word repertoire. Best of all, he has associated the act of reading with a sense of being loved. According to Wolf (2007), he has spent 5 years " . . . developing highly complex cognitive, linguistic, perceptual, social, and affective abilities which flourish best in rich environmental interactions". Gee would agree that he is learning to perceive words analytically in the most effortless way. Child A is now ready for the reading discipline.
Now it's time for the second story:
It was the worst of times for Child B
He lives in poverty . . . word poverty. There are no books in his home. He has missed being talked to, read to, and listened to; all the important aspects of early language development. According to a study by Risley and Hart, when he enters Kindergarten he has heard 32 million less words than Child A. He will be in the lower quartile for vocabulary development and will remain behind. By 6th grade, he and Child A will be separated by 3 grade-levels in reading.
An impassioned plea:
Instead of a war zone for Child B, we can make his preschool years rich with language development by something as simple as educating parents about "dinner talk" and providing free developmentally-appropriate books for him before he enters Kindergarten. My 13-yr-old nephew is rounding up as many books as he can for children on the Navajo reservation just outside of Chinle, Arizona and parts of northwestern New Mexico. His dream is to provide every home with books. If you want to help him, please let me know. Leveling the playing field isn't really that hard.
For Child A, it was the best of times:
Every night, he sat on his parent's lap and learned that . . .
Goodnight Moon teaches the names of familiar items, thanks to a mother rabbit.
Mother Goose teaches the poetry of sound awareness through alliteration, assonance, rhyme, and repetition.
Winnie the Pooh has sound relationships between words, like, "funny", "bunny", and "honey".
Curious George presents figurative language when George flies into the sky with balloons and finds that the, " . . . houses looked like toy houses and the people like dolls."
Frog and Toad teaches that empathy means friends help each other out.
George and Martha show that a good friend understands feelings.
"Once upon a time" is a clue to a genre with dragons, castles, and royalty.
These equations apply:
The more he is spoken to < understanding of oral language
The more he is read to < understanding of all language around & the more developed his vocabulary
By the time he is 18 months, his visual, attention, and conceptual systems have developed to where he knows that things have names.
Between 2-5 years old, he is learning an average of 2-4 new words every day.
By the time he is 3 1/2, he has experienced the reciprocal relationship between emotional development and reading. Marcel Proust has said that taking on someone else's perspective lies at the heart of communication through written language, which is now developing for Child A.
He draws a picture of himself playing soccer and labels it "YN".
When he is 5, he will have a 10,000-word repertoire. Best of all, he has associated the act of reading with a sense of being loved. According to Wolf (2007), he has spent 5 years " . . . developing highly complex cognitive, linguistic, perceptual, social, and affective abilities which flourish best in rich environmental interactions". Gee would agree that he is learning to perceive words analytically in the most effortless way. Child A is now ready for the reading discipline.
Now it's time for the second story:
It was the worst of times for Child B
He lives in poverty . . . word poverty. There are no books in his home. He has missed being talked to, read to, and listened to; all the important aspects of early language development. According to a study by Risley and Hart, when he enters Kindergarten he has heard 32 million less words than Child A. He will be in the lower quartile for vocabulary development and will remain behind. By 6th grade, he and Child A will be separated by 3 grade-levels in reading.
An impassioned plea:
Instead of a war zone for Child B, we can make his preschool years rich with language development by something as simple as educating parents about "dinner talk" and providing free developmentally-appropriate books for him before he enters Kindergarten. My 13-yr-old nephew is rounding up as many books as he can for children on the Navajo reservation just outside of Chinle, Arizona and parts of northwestern New Mexico. His dream is to provide every home with books. If you want to help him, please let me know. Leveling the playing field isn't really that hard.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
What conditions promote literacy?
Have you ever thought about how many words you speak in a minute? Speech scientist Grace Yeni-Komshian found it to be 125-180 continuous words per minute. Unlike reading, there are no cues to show we're beginning or ending a word when we're speaking. It makes sense when you think about the first time you heard a foreign language, an incomprehensible stream of sound that happened too quickly for you to even begin to make sense of it!
Maryanne Wolf (2007), maintains that the flow of language promotes literacy. Chapter Three of her book, Proust and the Squid, speaks of the efficiency of an alphabet. She suggests that the alphabet, with its limited number of signs (20-30), orderly presentation, and comprehensive sound representation, allows letter-recognition to happen at almost automatic speeds, giving the brain more time to think.
Ancient Greek civilization is a powerful example of how the alphabet promotes literacy. The most prolific period in Greek history, a time when there were huge gains in mankind's powers of thought, accompanied the establishment of the Greek alphabet in 750 BC. Because the alphabet did away with memorization and other constraints posed by the previous oral tradition, it became more possible for more people.
Which brings me to the Sneetches. Remember Dr. Suess's book where some Sneetches have stars on their bellies and some don't? Even in the literacy debate, we find Sneetches claiming superiority. Socrates himself believed the oral culture was superior to the written one.
Socrates' Objections:
1. Inflexibility of the Written Word
He saw the generative relationship between words and thoughts to be at the heart of education and maintained that this could only happen within a dialogue. Calling written language a "dead discourse", he related it to looking at a painting, a mute object that can't respond. Centuries later, we can agree with Vygotsky that the very process of writing requires an inner dialogue as the writer carefully chooses words that best capture his or her ideas.
2. Memory's Destruction
Socrates was right about the written word minimizing our need for memorization. Wolf (2007), asks her undergraduate students each year how many poems they can recite from memory. Ten years ago, it was between five and ten poems; but now it's one to three. Let's think about those multiplication tables . . . . Listen to this quote by Nicholas Ostler, "[In] modern Guatemala . . . Mayans remark that outsiders note things down not in order to remember them, but rather so as not to remember them."
3. The Loss of Control over Language
Socrates worried about a superficial understanding of the written word. Like Pandora's box, he felt that the process of unsupervised reading would lead to a loss of control over knowledge. Dave Marvit's speech on YouTube, promotes distributed knowledge as a positive outcome of our civilization's expanded knowledge system.
As you were reading this blog, how many of you thought of how Socrates would feel about the dawning of the digital age of literacy? Do we have our own Sneetches who still feel that "book learning" is superior to a computer screen? Will "continuous partial attention" to an endless flood of information encourage a superficial understanding or will it promote literacy? I believe only time will tell.
Maryanne Wolf (2007), maintains that the flow of language promotes literacy. Chapter Three of her book, Proust and the Squid, speaks of the efficiency of an alphabet. She suggests that the alphabet, with its limited number of signs (20-30), orderly presentation, and comprehensive sound representation, allows letter-recognition to happen at almost automatic speeds, giving the brain more time to think.
Ancient Greek civilization is a powerful example of how the alphabet promotes literacy. The most prolific period in Greek history, a time when there were huge gains in mankind's powers of thought, accompanied the establishment of the Greek alphabet in 750 BC. Because the alphabet did away with memorization and other constraints posed by the previous oral tradition, it became more possible for more people.
Which brings me to the Sneetches. Remember Dr. Suess's book where some Sneetches have stars on their bellies and some don't? Even in the literacy debate, we find Sneetches claiming superiority. Socrates himself believed the oral culture was superior to the written one.
Socrates' Objections:
1. Inflexibility of the Written Word
He saw the generative relationship between words and thoughts to be at the heart of education and maintained that this could only happen within a dialogue. Calling written language a "dead discourse", he related it to looking at a painting, a mute object that can't respond. Centuries later, we can agree with Vygotsky that the very process of writing requires an inner dialogue as the writer carefully chooses words that best capture his or her ideas.
2. Memory's Destruction
Socrates was right about the written word minimizing our need for memorization. Wolf (2007), asks her undergraduate students each year how many poems they can recite from memory. Ten years ago, it was between five and ten poems; but now it's one to three. Let's think about those multiplication tables . . . . Listen to this quote by Nicholas Ostler, "[In] modern Guatemala . . . Mayans remark that outsiders note things down not in order to remember them, but rather so as not to remember them."
3. The Loss of Control over Language
Socrates worried about a superficial understanding of the written word. Like Pandora's box, he felt that the process of unsupervised reading would lead to a loss of control over knowledge. Dave Marvit's speech on YouTube, promotes distributed knowledge as a positive outcome of our civilization's expanded knowledge system.
As you were reading this blog, how many of you thought of how Socrates would feel about the dawning of the digital age of literacy? Do we have our own Sneetches who still feel that "book learning" is superior to a computer screen? Will "continuous partial attention" to an endless flood of information encourage a superficial understanding or will it promote literacy? I believe only time will tell.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
How do people become literate?
The Egyptian king Psamtik I (664-610 BC) asked this same question. He believed the answer could be found in raising babies in isolation to see how they began to communicate. He commanded two infants to be placed in a shepherd's hut with only a shepherd bringing milk and food to them daily. Because one baby eventually yelled, "bekos", the Phrygian word for "bread", people began to believe that Phrygian was the original language of all humankind, but we have no evidence to support this theory.
It's not as difficult to trace the first written language as it is the first spoken one. We have samples of clay "tokens" dating as far back as 8,000 - 4,000 BC, some in clay envelopes with markings that signified what was inside. This first symbolic representation was probably used to quantify cattle, sheep, etc. As Wolf states (2007), ". . . the world of letters may have begun as an envelope for the world of numbers" (p. 27).
The second breakthrough came when a system of symbols was created that could preserve a person's thoughts over time and space. This Cuneiform writing used pictographs in a rebus-type way that showed a symbol representing its sound. (Do you remember reading rebus stories with pictures of eyes and cans to represent "I can"?) As new civilizations emerged, much was added until the writing system became so complicated that by the time the Akkadian writing system evolved, it took 6 - 7 years to master. (Sound familiar?) The power of reading was restricted to a small, exclusive group of people in the temple and the court.
A final breakthrough came when the hieroglyphic system of the Egyptians evolved into an efficient two-cursive form of writing and they discovered the idea of phonemes by creating a partial alphabet for consonants based on an internal, sound-based structure of words.
History proves that most writing systems hung on to languages of previous cultures. The English language is no exception. It includes Greek, Latin, French, Old English, and many other roots. According to Wolf (2007), it's " . . . a historical mishmash of homage and pragmatism . . at a cost known to every first- and second-grader" (p. 42).
To read a word, a person must identify the letters in the visual association areas of the brain, then use the frontal, temporal, and parietal areas to provide information about the smallest sounds in words (phonemes), and lastly process its meaning, function, and connections to other words in the temporal and parietal lobes. Of course the processing of the reading brain is just one piece of a literate person, although an important one.
So how do people become literate? It's simple . . . right?
It's not as difficult to trace the first written language as it is the first spoken one. We have samples of clay "tokens" dating as far back as 8,000 - 4,000 BC, some in clay envelopes with markings that signified what was inside. This first symbolic representation was probably used to quantify cattle, sheep, etc. As Wolf states (2007), ". . . the world of letters may have begun as an envelope for the world of numbers" (p. 27).
The second breakthrough came when a system of symbols was created that could preserve a person's thoughts over time and space. This Cuneiform writing used pictographs in a rebus-type way that showed a symbol representing its sound. (Do you remember reading rebus stories with pictures of eyes and cans to represent "I can"?) As new civilizations emerged, much was added until the writing system became so complicated that by the time the Akkadian writing system evolved, it took 6 - 7 years to master. (Sound familiar?) The power of reading was restricted to a small, exclusive group of people in the temple and the court.
A final breakthrough came when the hieroglyphic system of the Egyptians evolved into an efficient two-cursive form of writing and they discovered the idea of phonemes by creating a partial alphabet for consonants based on an internal, sound-based structure of words.
History proves that most writing systems hung on to languages of previous cultures. The English language is no exception. It includes Greek, Latin, French, Old English, and many other roots. According to Wolf (2007), it's " . . . a historical mishmash of homage and pragmatism . . at a cost known to every first- and second-grader" (p. 42).
To read a word, a person must identify the letters in the visual association areas of the brain, then use the frontal, temporal, and parietal areas to provide information about the smallest sounds in words (phonemes), and lastly process its meaning, function, and connections to other words in the temporal and parietal lobes. Of course the processing of the reading brain is just one piece of a literate person, although an important one.
So how do people become literate? It's simple . . . right?
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Proust and the Squid
Introduction
I was introduced to blogging about a year and a half ago when my brother started a family blog. I love adding photos and writing about what I'm up to as well as seeing what my brothers, sisters, nieces, and nephews are doing. I think of it as an interactive family story.
Last Fall, I began my own blog as part of a class on reading and writing digital texts. I had a funny experience early one morning when I posted an entry and realized I was in my family's blog. Fortunately I fixed it right away. There's definitely something about writing to an audience. I imagine my family would have wondered who I was trying to impress with my textbook entry!
Besides my family blog, two of my nieces have blogs that I really enjoy. One niece is a photographer who digitally scrapbooks and her posts are visually amazing. The other one is a very talented interior designer who posts a new, original idea, along with how-to instructions daily.
As I was searching different blogs, I found First Lady, Michelle Obama's, and was impressed that she would use this forum for public access. Of course the tone or voice she uses is much more formal than the personal ones I enjoy. I also followed a few news blogs in the interest of reading what others had to say about news-worthy events.
Two of my friends at school have set up class blogs. One teaches second graders and the other fifth. The fifth grade teacher has had to set clear expectations, which happens to be my main concern about blogging with students. She found that some were using it just to catch up on what their friends were doing after school hours, instead of staying focused on the book discussion and science experiments. Because of this, she's had to be more involved as a monitor than she had originally planned. All in all, it's been a good experience for both teachers. This is the year I plan to start one with my class.
So now . . . Welcome to my book blog on Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf. I chose this book for two reasons. First of all, I really like the author's name. Secondly, I'm interested in what French novelist Marcel Proust and an ordinary squid have to do with "The Story and Science of the Reading Brain", subtitle of the book.
A year ago I took a class on the nature of the reading brain. I was introduced to ideas I had never considered before about how the brain functions. As a cognitive neuroscientist and reading scholar, the author of this book is well-versed in presenting both the nature and nurture aspects of reading.
The book jacket begins with, "The act of reading is a miracle. Every new reader's brain possesses the extraordinary capacity to rearrange itself beyond its original abilities in order to understand written symbols. But how does the brain learn to read?" That's a good enough hook for me. I hope it is for you, too.
The graduate class I'm enrolled in this summer is examining the definition of literacy in a world where the written word is literally at our fingertips. Wolf's introduction shows that this book will attempt to redefine the reading brain in regards to the wealth of digital knowledge available today.
Happy Reading!
I was introduced to blogging about a year and a half ago when my brother started a family blog. I love adding photos and writing about what I'm up to as well as seeing what my brothers, sisters, nieces, and nephews are doing. I think of it as an interactive family story.
Last Fall, I began my own blog as part of a class on reading and writing digital texts. I had a funny experience early one morning when I posted an entry and realized I was in my family's blog. Fortunately I fixed it right away. There's definitely something about writing to an audience. I imagine my family would have wondered who I was trying to impress with my textbook entry!
Besides my family blog, two of my nieces have blogs that I really enjoy. One niece is a photographer who digitally scrapbooks and her posts are visually amazing. The other one is a very talented interior designer who posts a new, original idea, along with how-to instructions daily.
As I was searching different blogs, I found First Lady, Michelle Obama's, and was impressed that she would use this forum for public access. Of course the tone or voice she uses is much more formal than the personal ones I enjoy. I also followed a few news blogs in the interest of reading what others had to say about news-worthy events.
Two of my friends at school have set up class blogs. One teaches second graders and the other fifth. The fifth grade teacher has had to set clear expectations, which happens to be my main concern about blogging with students. She found that some were using it just to catch up on what their friends were doing after school hours, instead of staying focused on the book discussion and science experiments. Because of this, she's had to be more involved as a monitor than she had originally planned. All in all, it's been a good experience for both teachers. This is the year I plan to start one with my class.
So now . . . Welcome to my book blog on Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf. I chose this book for two reasons. First of all, I really like the author's name. Secondly, I'm interested in what French novelist Marcel Proust and an ordinary squid have to do with "The Story and Science of the Reading Brain", subtitle of the book.
A year ago I took a class on the nature of the reading brain. I was introduced to ideas I had never considered before about how the brain functions. As a cognitive neuroscientist and reading scholar, the author of this book is well-versed in presenting both the nature and nurture aspects of reading.
The book jacket begins with, "The act of reading is a miracle. Every new reader's brain possesses the extraordinary capacity to rearrange itself beyond its original abilities in order to understand written symbols. But how does the brain learn to read?" That's a good enough hook for me. I hope it is for you, too.
The graduate class I'm enrolled in this summer is examining the definition of literacy in a world where the written word is literally at our fingertips. Wolf's introduction shows that this book will attempt to redefine the reading brain in regards to the wealth of digital knowledge available today.
Happy Reading!
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