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!