Chapter 21: Schema Activation and Schema Acquisition: Comments on Richard C. Anderson's Remarks
John D. Bransford
· In this chapter, Bransford (1984) provides commentary, elaboration, questions, and constructive criticism on the work of Richard C. Anderson in Chapter 20.
· First, Bransford validates Anderson’s hypothesis about the six functions of schemata, and summarizes them as follows.
Schemata provide a basis for:
1) Absorbing and understanding text information
2) Filling in gaps in messages by making inferential elaborations
3) Allotting attention to important elements in text
4) Searching memory in an orderly fashion
5) Composing and arranging a summary of information
6) Making inferences in order to reconstruct information even if certain details have been forgotten
· Bransford acknowledges Anderson’s “powerful argument for the pervasive effects of students’ preexisting knowledge” on their performance.
· He reasserts Anderson’s contention that the activation of background knowledge is fundamental to comprehension.
· He claims that many children fail to comprehend not because of some internal “deficit” in memory or comprehension, but because they lack or fail to activate background knowledge.
· There are several ways in which children may lack the background knowledge to efficiently and competently comprehend text. (Therefore, the question of a child’s “familiarity” with words used in a story is more complex than it might at first appear.)
1) The child may have little or no information about a concept
2) The child may have some knowledge about the concept, yet still not possess sufficient knowledge to comprehend it.
3) The child’s individual interpretation of a statement or concept may have implications for comprehension.
· Subtle differences in an individual’s schemata may have important effects on her comprehension.
· Bransford and colleagues are concerned about the subtle “mismatches” between an individual child’s initial interpretations and a teacher’s or text author’s questions. If a child’s schemata have provided one interpretation and the question(s) follow(s) another line of interpretation, the teacher may erroneously assume the child did not learn.
· These “mismatches” can cause decreases in memory performance, provoke confusion, and also affect students’ assumptions about their own abilities as learners.
· Bransford and Johnson (1973) conducted a study in which college students were given a story to read.
· One interpretation of the events in the story seemed more obvious to the students. The students became confused when the researchers then posed questions from another perspective.
·The students concluded they had completely misinterpreted the story and apologized for their misinterpretation.
· However, their interpretation was not “wrong”; it was simply a mismatch between their initial interpretations and the researchers’ questions about the story.
· Bransford poses questions and addresses some possible shortcomings regarding schema theory.
·Mismatches are less likely to occur when materials are “simplified” to align more congruently with children’s existing knowledge bases.
· However, the question arises, to what degree should texts be simplified and should they be simplified at all?
· Texts can contain information composed of simpler words and syntax that still seem random, unrelated and difficult for novice learners to remember.
· In addition, children want to read stories about novel situations, not stories that are dull and overfamiliar.
· Therefore, how does schema theory account for the fact that it is possible to understand stories about novel situations for which there are no preexisting schema?
· Bransford notes that up to that point, schema theorists had not adequately addressed how novel events unrelated to preexisting schema are understood and how new schema are built (construction) and incorporated into preexisting schema.
· Bransford notes that Anderson’s experiments dealt mostly with schema activation.
· Bransford is more concerned with schema acquisition, since it is the role of educators to enable students to learn new information and to develop new skills.The issue of schema construction or acquisition is extremely important, as is the issue of helping students to refine or reassemble schemata they already possess.
·Bransford notes this is consistent with Ausubel’s Theory of Meaningful Learning (1963, 1968) which advocates the use of advance organizers.
· These organizers, however, can be vague or general. They are adequate when students have already gained the knowledge they need to understand a text
The general statements in these organizers can “prime concepts learners might fail to activate spontaneously”.
·They are not adequate when the learner is confronted with certain facts and information whose relationships seem arbitrary, and therefore, not easy to remember.
· These facts and information will not be easily remembered or learned if they are not “precisely elaborated.”
· Ex. “The tall man bought the crackers” is not easy to remember. Neither is “The tall man bought crackers from the clerk”, although both make sense semantically.
· But “The tall man bought crackers lying on the highest shelf” is an elaboration enabling the reader to link the subject to the reason for the activity.
· In other words, new facts should be related to background knowledge in a way that shows the significance of the new information and its relationship to the old.
· Ex. Facts such as “Camels can close their nose passages” and “Camels have thick air around their ear openings” may seem arbitrary to a student who either does not have or does not access schema about desert sandstorms.
·Acquiring schema about desert climate and living conditions and animals’
survival mechanisms would enable the same student to infer why desert dwellers or travelers wear scarves over their faces even when weather is very hot.
· Simplifying texts per se may be a self-defeating process if writers omit the precise elaborations crucial to understanding the significance of the information. Many texts are written simply but still seem arbitrary because relationships between facts and ideas and/or structure and function are not precisely elaborated.
· Bransford makes one final important point, in seeming contrast to earlier ideas.
· He believes children’s materials must not always be elaborated explicitly.
· Children themselves must be taught to identify situations where they need more information in order to comprehend more precisely. They must learn to supply their own elaborations and to learn about themselves as learners (metacognitive strategies)
· Less able learners have :
1) little insight into what makes things easy or difficult to understand and
2) seldom if ever use available facts to understand or to integrate new information into existing schema
· Bransford and colleagues purposefully created "arbitrary" learning materials and then led students through a process of evaluation to help them learn to make the materials relevant to their own background knowledge and therefore significant and comprehensible.
· This process was important to enabling children to become independent learners.
· In closing, Bransford reemphasizes that the process of merely simplifying textbooks will not necessarily assist children in acquiring schema or facilitate their quests to become independent, proficient learners.
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Chapter 28
Chapter 28
“Self-Regulated Comprehension During Normal Reading”
Douglas J. Hacker writes about the importance of readers using metacognition skills for reading comprehension. The purpose of reading is to construct meaning. When the construction of meaning fails to fit the reader’s interpretation, comprehension fails. The purpose of Hacker’s research is to propose a standardization in terminology, describe a cognitive-metacognitive model of self-regulated comprehension, and explore the possibility of limits to how much readers can monitor and control their own comprehension and overcoming this limit through dialogue with other readers.
• Hacker begins by defining terms used in discussing comprehension. Cognitive psychologist - metamemory for text or metacomprehension. This concept refers to reader’s predictions of comprehension with actual performance on comprehension question. Readers with highly correlated predictions and performance have good calibration of comprehension; those with poor correlation have poor metacomprehension. Educational psychologists- comprehension monitoring. Readers detect and resolve textual errors through the use of the error-detection paradigm. If they resolve all or most of the errors, they have good comprehension, if not, poor comprehension results.
• Hacker describes Flavell’s 1979 model of cognitive monitoring in which monitoring occurs through four classes of phenomena: metacognitive knowledge- person’s stored world knowledge; metacognitive experiences- awareness of cognitive or affective processes and is progress being made toward the goal (to abandon or make new ones); goals, and strategies. Flavell’s model has declarative (strategic demands of tasks and one’s limits and strengths as a problem solver) and procedural (monitoring and regulating ongoing cognition). Hacker continues discussing Nelson and Narens 1990 model that integrates the declarative aspects of Flavell’s model. Their model contains three principles of splitting the processes into two levels. But they do make a distinction between cognition and metacognition in which cognition is knowledge of world and strategies for using that knowledge and metacognition as monitoring, controlling, and understanding knowledge and strategies.
• Hacker continues by describing theoretical mechanisms of comprehensive monitoring. Comprehension is the process through which understanding is a consequence of the construction of an internal representing of text.
o Verbal representation of words and syntactical units (phrases, sentences, paragraphs)
o Verbal representation in semantic units (text propositions)
o Representation of the overall gist of the text (used to modify all previously constructed levels or levels yet to be constructed)
When reading, readers set certain goals. If the readers fail to meet their goal, they have to be prepared to failure at all levels of text representation. Why did it happen? Readers then select strategies when there are excessive demands on comprehension. Strategies help lessen demands on working memory. Examples of monitoring strategies are: rereading, looking back to prior text, predicting, comparing two or more propositions. Examples of control strategies are: summarizing text information, clarifying information by using reference sources, correcting incomplete or inaccurate text information. The external text base element of the model is represented internally within the comprehension process through processing of the external text. This base serves as linguistic input to comprehension; the reader can then modify the external text base if necessary. Hacker then points out that failure to comprehend is due to a failure to monitor comprehension or a failure to control comprehension.
• Hacker goes on to describe self-regulation in operation. Metacognitive models include prior knowledge, their reading goals, understanding the author’s intent, understanding text propositions, and understanding the ways knowledge from the text integrate with their own knowledge, Kintsch’s situation model of the text. Readers monitor the similarities and differences between what their cognitive representation is and their metacognitive models by applying standards of evaluation. Similarities serve as indicators that comprehension is happening. Differences are indicators that comprehension has fail. But if readers are unaware of these indicators, monitoring of comprehension does not occur. If differences were monitored, the reader would have a sense of confusion and correct the source.
• As Hacker continues his discussion of comprehension, he reiterates that reading is a process that involves a mental representation in memory with the goal of understanding the text. And because each reader builds and different representation of what has been read, goals and meaning may differ yet there will be n agreement on the major features of the constructed representations of text. Authors work to accomplish this by writing for a specific audience. Readers then constrain their constructions by using key propositions or ‘macropropositions’ that are contained within the topic sentences of each paragraph. This has been identified as a strategic process that is typical of what good comprehenders do. But if readers hold too strongly to prior knowledge, it can cause the readers to ignore textual information that contradicts the readers’ beliefs. This causes a failure to detect textual contradictions in their monitoring and results in an imbalance between what readers believe and what they actually read. Readers with small working memory will have constraints on comprehension. And when text can have multiple interpretations, the demands on working memory may limit the resources necessary to construct those alternative interpretations.
• Normal comprehension problems that leave reader with ‘illusions of knowing’:
o Failure to amend current understanding in light of new information
o Skimming over unfamiliar words
o Incorrect inferences
o Failure to compare information with prior with prior knowledge
o Failure to encode key information
o Forgetting key information
o Failure to identify main propositions
o Failure to understand but continues reading hoping that understanding will eventually occur
• Reading comprehension is the link between meaning and interpretation. Problems occur with ambiguity of words and their meanings. Interpretations are strongly influenced by the reader’s knowledge. The text itself may contain information however, that may amend the reader’s knowledge thereby providing feedback for further constructions. Therefore, reading is interactive.
• To increase interaction, encouragement of questioning and focusing attention on meanings at the inference level which can provide a broader spectrum; think-alouds elicit metacognitive monitoring; engagement in dialogue with other readers. This dialogue allows readers’ understandings to merging with other readers and their understandings.
“Self-Regulated Comprehension During Normal Reading”
Douglas J. Hacker writes about the importance of readers using metacognition skills for reading comprehension. The purpose of reading is to construct meaning. When the construction of meaning fails to fit the reader’s interpretation, comprehension fails. The purpose of Hacker’s research is to propose a standardization in terminology, describe a cognitive-metacognitive model of self-regulated comprehension, and explore the possibility of limits to how much readers can monitor and control their own comprehension and overcoming this limit through dialogue with other readers.
• Hacker begins by defining terms used in discussing comprehension. Cognitive psychologist - metamemory for text or metacomprehension. This concept refers to reader’s predictions of comprehension with actual performance on comprehension question. Readers with highly correlated predictions and performance have good calibration of comprehension; those with poor correlation have poor metacomprehension. Educational psychologists- comprehension monitoring. Readers detect and resolve textual errors through the use of the error-detection paradigm. If they resolve all or most of the errors, they have good comprehension, if not, poor comprehension results.
• Hacker describes Flavell’s 1979 model of cognitive monitoring in which monitoring occurs through four classes of phenomena: metacognitive knowledge- person’s stored world knowledge; metacognitive experiences- awareness of cognitive or affective processes and is progress being made toward the goal (to abandon or make new ones); goals, and strategies. Flavell’s model has declarative (strategic demands of tasks and one’s limits and strengths as a problem solver) and procedural (monitoring and regulating ongoing cognition). Hacker continues discussing Nelson and Narens 1990 model that integrates the declarative aspects of Flavell’s model. Their model contains three principles of splitting the processes into two levels. But they do make a distinction between cognition and metacognition in which cognition is knowledge of world and strategies for using that knowledge and metacognition as monitoring, controlling, and understanding knowledge and strategies.
• Hacker continues by describing theoretical mechanisms of comprehensive monitoring. Comprehension is the process through which understanding is a consequence of the construction of an internal representing of text.
o Verbal representation of words and syntactical units (phrases, sentences, paragraphs)
o Verbal representation in semantic units (text propositions)
o Representation of the overall gist of the text (used to modify all previously constructed levels or levels yet to be constructed)
When reading, readers set certain goals. If the readers fail to meet their goal, they have to be prepared to failure at all levels of text representation. Why did it happen? Readers then select strategies when there are excessive demands on comprehension. Strategies help lessen demands on working memory. Examples of monitoring strategies are: rereading, looking back to prior text, predicting, comparing two or more propositions. Examples of control strategies are: summarizing text information, clarifying information by using reference sources, correcting incomplete or inaccurate text information. The external text base element of the model is represented internally within the comprehension process through processing of the external text. This base serves as linguistic input to comprehension; the reader can then modify the external text base if necessary. Hacker then points out that failure to comprehend is due to a failure to monitor comprehension or a failure to control comprehension.
• Hacker goes on to describe self-regulation in operation. Metacognitive models include prior knowledge, their reading goals, understanding the author’s intent, understanding text propositions, and understanding the ways knowledge from the text integrate with their own knowledge, Kintsch’s situation model of the text. Readers monitor the similarities and differences between what their cognitive representation is and their metacognitive models by applying standards of evaluation. Similarities serve as indicators that comprehension is happening. Differences are indicators that comprehension has fail. But if readers are unaware of these indicators, monitoring of comprehension does not occur. If differences were monitored, the reader would have a sense of confusion and correct the source.
• As Hacker continues his discussion of comprehension, he reiterates that reading is a process that involves a mental representation in memory with the goal of understanding the text. And because each reader builds and different representation of what has been read, goals and meaning may differ yet there will be n agreement on the major features of the constructed representations of text. Authors work to accomplish this by writing for a specific audience. Readers then constrain their constructions by using key propositions or ‘macropropositions’ that are contained within the topic sentences of each paragraph. This has been identified as a strategic process that is typical of what good comprehenders do. But if readers hold too strongly to prior knowledge, it can cause the readers to ignore textual information that contradicts the readers’ beliefs. This causes a failure to detect textual contradictions in their monitoring and results in an imbalance between what readers believe and what they actually read. Readers with small working memory will have constraints on comprehension. And when text can have multiple interpretations, the demands on working memory may limit the resources necessary to construct those alternative interpretations.
• Normal comprehension problems that leave reader with ‘illusions of knowing’:
o Failure to amend current understanding in light of new information
o Skimming over unfamiliar words
o Incorrect inferences
o Failure to compare information with prior with prior knowledge
o Failure to encode key information
o Forgetting key information
o Failure to identify main propositions
o Failure to understand but continues reading hoping that understanding will eventually occur
• Reading comprehension is the link between meaning and interpretation. Problems occur with ambiguity of words and their meanings. Interpretations are strongly influenced by the reader’s knowledge. The text itself may contain information however, that may amend the reader’s knowledge thereby providing feedback for further constructions. Therefore, reading is interactive.
• To increase interaction, encouragement of questioning and focusing attention on meanings at the inference level which can provide a broader spectrum; think-alouds elicit metacognitive monitoring; engagement in dialogue with other readers. This dialogue allows readers’ understandings to merging with other readers and their understandings.
Chapter 25 Building Representation of Informational Text: Evidence From Children's Think-Aloud Protocols
Submitted by: Debbie Shanks
In this article, Nathalie Cole and Susan R. Goldman investigate the think-aloud processes and the strategies students use when faced with expository text that has an unfamiliar subject. Think-alouds assist with understanding the processes that students use when presented with text that is not easily understood or involves a topic that is unfamiliar. Through think-alouds, researchers are provided with a better picture of the processing and steps readers engage in while reading.
Cole and Goldman looked at 16 sixth-grade elementary students ages 11 - 13. Students in the study read four passages; two mid-year and two at the end of the year. Two of the passages were somewhat familiar topics and two were less familiar topics. For each session, children were trained in the think-aloud procedure via short passages. Children were asked to verbalize what they were thinking as they read the passages, what they found hard in the passages and if they found the text hard, what they did to assist with the problem. Two of the less familiar text structures involved factors that affect metabolism and metabolic rate and hybrids and how they are helpful.
Cole and Coleman looked at the coding and analysis of five comprehension and reasoning strategies and processes that individuals use when coming across difficult text. The five categories are self-explanation, monitoring, paraphrasing, predicting, and associations.
*Self-explanation- when students worked at making sense out of what was being read not only through their prior knowledge, but also by using contextual information found within the text.
*Monitoring-when students were linking their understanding of the text they were reading and monitoring when sentences they encountered did not make sense with statements like “I get it” or “I didn’t know that.” . A subtest is also formed when students monitoring statements include things like “That sentence goes up there” , “That‘s strange“ or “They should put in _____.”
*Paraphrasing-when students not only strengthened their memory by repeating the words or phrases in the text in their own words, but also connected the new information to their prior knowledge.
*Predictions-when students made forward inferences or implications of what they expected would happen next in the text.
*Associations-when students made statements that had little to do with the text, like “I like carrots” when coming across the word within the text. Although these statements do not necessarily add to the understanding of the focal sentence, they may provide a link to the student’s prior knowledge.
Cole and Goldman found that self-explanation and monitoring/evaluation were most often used by students during their study. When dealing with expository text, Cole and Goldman found that students are often not accurate with predicting the information that will come next.
Cole and Goldman completed a second analysis of the think-alouds, and this time looked at the degree in which students were making connections among elements in the text and between text elements and prior knowledge. The researchers used the student’s verbalizations and the computer record of patterns of sentence accessing to categorized reinstatements into three types.
*Physical Reinstatements- through computer presentation, there was a record of the order in which students accessed and read the sentences in the passage. This provided researchers to distinguish between prior text that was physically reinstated as compared with mental reinstatement from memory without exposing the text information. The reading traces showed that many of the students spontaneously and selectively reinstated previously read sentences by exposing them physically.
*Mental Reinstatements-two types of mental reinstatement were identified through think-alouds.
*Mental-Text-when students reinstatements mentioned information previously presented in the text without physically uncovering the sentence.
*Mental-Student Generated-when prior knowledge of concepts and ideas related to the text information that the reader had verbalized on earlier focal sentences is linked to the physical reinstatements provided in the text.
The most frequent type of reinstatement was of information previously provided in the text. It is speculated that the data gleaned reflected that students were aware of the variations between the semantic and structural differences between the texts presented in this study.
Cole and Goldman then looked at the relationships between protocol event and reinstatements. Correlations of prior knowledge reinstatement and self-explanations suggests that students were making sense of new information with respect to known information and were creating representations integrated with prior knowledge (pg 668).
A look at individual protocols were then completed to investigate the correlations between various processing activities and students’ attempts to create logical representations. Four categories were established for this process. They are successful knowledge-building, less-successful knowledge building, text-focused processing, and minimalists.
*Successful Knowledge-Building- these students put a lot of effort into trying to make sense of the text. They used things like cause and effect explanations, elaborating, and cross-text integrative inferences that identified the macrostructure of the text.
*Less-Successful Knowledge-Building-these students also put forth a lot of effort to make sense of the text; however, their comments revealed that they were less successful in gaining coherent representations of what was read. These students were searching for a greater understanding of the text, but did not appear to receive it with the textual information provided.
*Text-Focused Processing-these students displayed various degrees of effort through paraphrasing, interpreting, questioning, bringing in examples, making affective evaluative comments, or monitoring, but they appeared to focus on individual sentences instead of the text as a whole to get the gist of what was being read.
*Minimalists-these students verbalized through half of the text, but didn’t really provide the information needed to truly understand what processes or strategies they were using to assist with understanding. Lack of motivation may have be present for this type of student.
The authors gleaned that the more likely a student was in attempting to find meaning of the text via many reinstatements and self-explanation, the more motivated they were as readers. Highly motivated students tended to use cognitive activities such as cause and effect reasoning, using personal experience of prior knowledge to elaborate, making and testing hypotheses, asking for more information, and interpreting sentences. Looking at individual protocols allowed the researchers to analyze the strategies each type of reader displayed when using the think-aloud processes.
Cole and Goldman conclude that elementary students use a wide range of approaches when reading difficult expository text. Students often use the same approaches to read expository text as they do to read story text. Due to this, when reading expository text, young readers are not able to glean as much relevant information to assist with truly understanding the various underlying relationships among the concepts of expository texts. Although self-monitoring is important to the understanding of expository text, unless readers actively apply strategies to resolve the problems they identify when reading, they are likely to end up with fragmented representation of what has been read. Think-alouds provide researchers with relevant information to assist with understanding the various processes that students take when presented with various text structure. In doing so, researchers are provided with a better picture of the processing and steps readers engage in while reading.
In this article, Nathalie Cole and Susan R. Goldman investigate the think-aloud processes and the strategies students use when faced with expository text that has an unfamiliar subject. Think-alouds assist with understanding the processes that students use when presented with text that is not easily understood or involves a topic that is unfamiliar. Through think-alouds, researchers are provided with a better picture of the processing and steps readers engage in while reading.
Cole and Goldman looked at 16 sixth-grade elementary students ages 11 - 13. Students in the study read four passages; two mid-year and two at the end of the year. Two of the passages were somewhat familiar topics and two were less familiar topics. For each session, children were trained in the think-aloud procedure via short passages. Children were asked to verbalize what they were thinking as they read the passages, what they found hard in the passages and if they found the text hard, what they did to assist with the problem. Two of the less familiar text structures involved factors that affect metabolism and metabolic rate and hybrids and how they are helpful.
Cole and Coleman looked at the coding and analysis of five comprehension and reasoning strategies and processes that individuals use when coming across difficult text. The five categories are self-explanation, monitoring, paraphrasing, predicting, and associations.
*Self-explanation- when students worked at making sense out of what was being read not only through their prior knowledge, but also by using contextual information found within the text.
*Monitoring-when students were linking their understanding of the text they were reading and monitoring when sentences they encountered did not make sense with statements like “I get it” or “I didn’t know that.” . A subtest is also formed when students monitoring statements include things like “That sentence goes up there” , “That‘s strange“ or “They should put in _____.”
*Paraphrasing-when students not only strengthened their memory by repeating the words or phrases in the text in their own words, but also connected the new information to their prior knowledge.
*Predictions-when students made forward inferences or implications of what they expected would happen next in the text.
*Associations-when students made statements that had little to do with the text, like “I like carrots” when coming across the word within the text. Although these statements do not necessarily add to the understanding of the focal sentence, they may provide a link to the student’s prior knowledge.
Cole and Goldman found that self-explanation and monitoring/evaluation were most often used by students during their study. When dealing with expository text, Cole and Goldman found that students are often not accurate with predicting the information that will come next.
Cole and Goldman completed a second analysis of the think-alouds, and this time looked at the degree in which students were making connections among elements in the text and between text elements and prior knowledge. The researchers used the student’s verbalizations and the computer record of patterns of sentence accessing to categorized reinstatements into three types.
*Physical Reinstatements- through computer presentation, there was a record of the order in which students accessed and read the sentences in the passage. This provided researchers to distinguish between prior text that was physically reinstated as compared with mental reinstatement from memory without exposing the text information. The reading traces showed that many of the students spontaneously and selectively reinstated previously read sentences by exposing them physically.
*Mental Reinstatements-two types of mental reinstatement were identified through think-alouds.
*Mental-Text-when students reinstatements mentioned information previously presented in the text without physically uncovering the sentence.
*Mental-Student Generated-when prior knowledge of concepts and ideas related to the text information that the reader had verbalized on earlier focal sentences is linked to the physical reinstatements provided in the text.
The most frequent type of reinstatement was of information previously provided in the text. It is speculated that the data gleaned reflected that students were aware of the variations between the semantic and structural differences between the texts presented in this study.
Cole and Goldman then looked at the relationships between protocol event and reinstatements. Correlations of prior knowledge reinstatement and self-explanations suggests that students were making sense of new information with respect to known information and were creating representations integrated with prior knowledge (pg 668).
A look at individual protocols were then completed to investigate the correlations between various processing activities and students’ attempts to create logical representations. Four categories were established for this process. They are successful knowledge-building, less-successful knowledge building, text-focused processing, and minimalists.
*Successful Knowledge-Building- these students put a lot of effort into trying to make sense of the text. They used things like cause and effect explanations, elaborating, and cross-text integrative inferences that identified the macrostructure of the text.
*Less-Successful Knowledge-Building-these students also put forth a lot of effort to make sense of the text; however, their comments revealed that they were less successful in gaining coherent representations of what was read. These students were searching for a greater understanding of the text, but did not appear to receive it with the textual information provided.
*Text-Focused Processing-these students displayed various degrees of effort through paraphrasing, interpreting, questioning, bringing in examples, making affective evaluative comments, or monitoring, but they appeared to focus on individual sentences instead of the text as a whole to get the gist of what was being read.
*Minimalists-these students verbalized through half of the text, but didn’t really provide the information needed to truly understand what processes or strategies they were using to assist with understanding. Lack of motivation may have be present for this type of student.
The authors gleaned that the more likely a student was in attempting to find meaning of the text via many reinstatements and self-explanation, the more motivated they were as readers. Highly motivated students tended to use cognitive activities such as cause and effect reasoning, using personal experience of prior knowledge to elaborate, making and testing hypotheses, asking for more information, and interpreting sentences. Looking at individual protocols allowed the researchers to analyze the strategies each type of reader displayed when using the think-aloud processes.
Cole and Goldman conclude that elementary students use a wide range of approaches when reading difficult expository text. Students often use the same approaches to read expository text as they do to read story text. Due to this, when reading expository text, young readers are not able to glean as much relevant information to assist with truly understanding the various underlying relationships among the concepts of expository texts. Although self-monitoring is important to the understanding of expository text, unless readers actively apply strategies to resolve the problems they identify when reading, they are likely to end up with fragmented representation of what has been read. Think-alouds provide researchers with relevant information to assist with understanding the various processes that students take when presented with various text structure. In doing so, researchers are provided with a better picture of the processing and steps readers engage in while reading.
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Chapter 20:Role of the Reader's Schema in Comprehension, Learning and Memory
Chapter 20: Role of the Reader’s Schema in Comprehension, Memory and Learning
Richard C. Anderson
Anderson divides the chapter into four main headings:
1) A Schema-Theoretic Interpretation of Comprehension
2) Schema-Based Processes in Learning and Remembering
3) Evidence for Schema Theory
4) Implications of Schema Theory for design of materials and classroom instruction.
Introduction
· Anderson reports (1984) that schema theory has already been accepted by a majority of scholars in the field.
· “Schema” are defined as organized bodies of knowledge about the world.
· Schema provide bases for comprehending, learning and remembering ideas in stories and texts
· A Schema-Theoretic Interpretation of Comprehension
· Readers comprehend when they are able activate schema that satisfactorily explain and interpret the relationships among events and objects portrayed in a given sentence or passage.
· Certain sentences may contain straightforward syntax and familiar words. Yet those sentences may not make sense to the reader because the reader lacks the ability to interpret the interrelationships among the objects or events depicted in the sentence.
· Ex. “The notes were sour because the seam was split” would appear to be a
non-sequitur until the additional clue of “bagpipe” is provided.
· For comprehension to occur, It is not enough for the elements in a given sentence or passage to be “concrete and imageable”.
· What is critical for comprehension is a schema accounting for the relationships among these elements.
· When a reader is unable to discover a fitting schema, the sentence or passage is rendered incomprehensible.
· Schema applied to a given text depend on a reader’s culture: their age, sex, race, religion, nationality and occupation. Examples are given of persons in different occupations interpreting a given passage differently.
· The schema theory of comprehension posits that comprehension involves “activating or constructing a schema that provides a coherent explanation of objects and events mentioned in discourse.”
· The author sharply contrasts this theory with the “insufficiency” of the established view: that comprehension can be accounted for by simply “adding up” words in sentences, sentences in paragraphs, and paragraphs in narrative or expository prose.
· Comprehension occurs only when the reader has developed a schema that can satisfactorily explain the whole message.
· Schema-Based Processes in Learning and Remembering
· Schema theory posits that reading is an interactive process involving simultaneous analysis on many levels.
· The levels are: Graphophonemic, Morphemic, Semantic, Syntactic, Pragmatic, and Interpretive.
· “Bottom-up” (data-driven) processes are those that flow from the print.
· “Top-down” (hypothesis-driven) processes are those that come from the hypothesis the reader formulates.
· A reader’s schema affects learning and remembering of information and ideas.
· In 1978 Anderson and colleagues proposed six functions of schemata. They reported that precise models of schema-based systems were being tested by researchers through experimentation to determine their validity and viability. They suspected that some might not turn out to be reasonable or realistic.
· The six proposed functions of schemata are:
· 1) Schemata promote understanding by providing “niches” or “slots” for incoming textual information. Information that fits into these “slots” is learned more quickly.
· 2) Schemata enable the reader to determine important features of text. Once a reader knows what is important, (s)he can more readily decide where to focus attention.
· 3) Schemata allow the reader to make inferences, since no text is completely explicit.
· 4) Schemata allow the reader to systematically search and access memory for information learned in a text
· 5) Schemata contain important criteria, thereby allowing the reader to edit and summarize significant areas of text and to minimize insignificant information.
· 6) Schemata aid memory by allowing the reader to more easily reconstruct missing or forgotten pieces of textual information.
· Evidence for Schema Theory (Three Experiments)
· Anderson reports results of several experiments conducted to determine if there were evidence to support the claims of schema theory.
· One experiment was conducted on subjects of different ethnic or racial backgrounds, one involved subjects’ reading of closely comparable passages and a third involved assigning readers different roles or perspectives as they read a story or passage.
· The author explains that many of the claims of schema theory were borne out when Experiment #1 was conducted:
· Natives of India and Americans read letters about an Indian and an American wedding. Both cultures have extensive and well-developed marriage schema.
· Subjects spent less time reading their own native passage. (Expected because familiar schema expedite processing)
· Subjects recalled far more of their native texts verbatim and in paraphrase (Expected because culturally appropriate schema provide “slots” into which to fit new information, or because new information stored in memory is more accessible as schema facilitate searching memory)
· Far more “elaborations” (culturally appropriate extensions of text) were made as predicted by schema theory by each culture about its own customs.
· More “distortions” (inappropriate modifications of text) were made about the customs of the other culture as was expected by schema theory.
· Americans and Indians were more likely to regard different propositions as more important or significant (Americans with ritual and ceremony, and Indians with financial and social status) and would more easily recall those propositions more important to the schema developed in their cultural backgrounds.
· This was also confirmed (text more important to schema are more likely to be learned and remembered)
· A critical issue: can cultural variation within the US be a factor in reading comprehension?
· Minority children could suffer if stories, texts and test items assume a shared cultural perspective. When written material has an identifiable “cultural loading” there is a marked effect on comprehension.
· Example: “Sounding” (an exchange of friendly insults) is an activity found in the African-American community.
· In one study, A-A teenagers found a “sounding” episode to be friendly, while white peers perceived it as a potentially dangerous confrontation.
· In Experiment #2, Anderson, Spiro and Anderson (1978) conducted a study investigating three different schema theoretic hypotheses.
· Two groups of subjects were assigned closely comparable passages to read. (One passage concerned fine dining in a fancy restaurant; the other passage detailed a trip to a supermarket. The same 18 food and drink items were mentioned in both.)
· The group that read the passage containing the more constrained, structured, sequenced and cross-connected passage (the fine dining piece) were more easily able to recall the items (food and drink) mentioned in the passage in order.
· In addition, their more orderly search of memory enabled them to assign the items to the correct characters than did those readers of the more haphazard supermarket passage.
· This relates to schema function #1: “provision of ideational scaffolding”, and #3: “by tracing through the schema used to structure the text, the reader is helped to gain access to the particular information learned when the text was read.”
· In Experiment #3, Pichert and Anderson (1977) sought to prove that readers’ differing perspectives have independent effects on learning and recall.
· They manipulated reader schemata by assigning readers a story in which the readers assumed different perspectives: those of home buyers or those of burglars.
· Readers learned more of the information related to their assigned perspective.
· Readers who then switched perspectives recalled more previously unrecalled information important to their new perspective.
· Subjects reported that the previously unrecalled information now related to the new perspective simply “popped” into their heads.
· A related experiment conducted by the author used two measures of attention. Results confirmed that those readers assigned to be “burglars”, paid closer attention to “burglar-related” sentences.
· This bears out Schema function #2 which hypothesized that readers “use importance as one basis for allocating cognitive resources – that is, for deciding where to pay close attention.”
· Implications of Schema Theory for Design of Materials and Classroom Intervention
· The author offers five related suggestions for textbook publishers and curriculum designers:
· 1) Teaching manuals should include suggestions for helping children activate relevant background knowledge. Children do not automatically incorporate new material with what they may already know.
· 2) Teaching manuals should include suggestions for building children’s background knowledge when that background knowledge cannot be securely presumed.
· 3) Lesson activities should be featured in which children are given opportunities to integrate what they know with new material being presented. In this study, strong benefits are related to the use of prediction techniques. Children who used prediction as a strategy for recall remembered 72% of sentences, while control groups achieved only an average of 43% recall.
· 4) Publishers should use advance organizers or structured overviews to help students organize and “bridge the gap” between what they know and what they need to know.
· 5) Publishers and society need to be aware of and to address the potentially harmful effects of assuming that minority students’ schema match that of the majority culture. Since culture has such a strong effect on reading comprehension, it is not realistic to simply assume that every child will experience or comprehend text in the same way. This must be taken into account when texts are written.
Richard C. Anderson
Anderson divides the chapter into four main headings:
1) A Schema-Theoretic Interpretation of Comprehension
2) Schema-Based Processes in Learning and Remembering
3) Evidence for Schema Theory
4) Implications of Schema Theory for design of materials and classroom instruction.
Introduction
· Anderson reports (1984) that schema theory has already been accepted by a majority of scholars in the field.
· “Schema” are defined as organized bodies of knowledge about the world.
· Schema provide bases for comprehending, learning and remembering ideas in stories and texts
· A Schema-Theoretic Interpretation of Comprehension
· Readers comprehend when they are able activate schema that satisfactorily explain and interpret the relationships among events and objects portrayed in a given sentence or passage.
· Certain sentences may contain straightforward syntax and familiar words. Yet those sentences may not make sense to the reader because the reader lacks the ability to interpret the interrelationships among the objects or events depicted in the sentence.
· Ex. “The notes were sour because the seam was split” would appear to be a
non-sequitur until the additional clue of “bagpipe” is provided.
· For comprehension to occur, It is not enough for the elements in a given sentence or passage to be “concrete and imageable”.
· What is critical for comprehension is a schema accounting for the relationships among these elements.
· When a reader is unable to discover a fitting schema, the sentence or passage is rendered incomprehensible.
· Schema applied to a given text depend on a reader’s culture: their age, sex, race, religion, nationality and occupation. Examples are given of persons in different occupations interpreting a given passage differently.
· The schema theory of comprehension posits that comprehension involves “activating or constructing a schema that provides a coherent explanation of objects and events mentioned in discourse.”
· The author sharply contrasts this theory with the “insufficiency” of the established view: that comprehension can be accounted for by simply “adding up” words in sentences, sentences in paragraphs, and paragraphs in narrative or expository prose.
· Comprehension occurs only when the reader has developed a schema that can satisfactorily explain the whole message.
· Schema-Based Processes in Learning and Remembering
· Schema theory posits that reading is an interactive process involving simultaneous analysis on many levels.
· The levels are: Graphophonemic, Morphemic, Semantic, Syntactic, Pragmatic, and Interpretive.
· “Bottom-up” (data-driven) processes are those that flow from the print.
· “Top-down” (hypothesis-driven) processes are those that come from the hypothesis the reader formulates.
· A reader’s schema affects learning and remembering of information and ideas.
· In 1978 Anderson and colleagues proposed six functions of schemata. They reported that precise models of schema-based systems were being tested by researchers through experimentation to determine their validity and viability. They suspected that some might not turn out to be reasonable or realistic.
· The six proposed functions of schemata are:
· 1) Schemata promote understanding by providing “niches” or “slots” for incoming textual information. Information that fits into these “slots” is learned more quickly.
· 2) Schemata enable the reader to determine important features of text. Once a reader knows what is important, (s)he can more readily decide where to focus attention.
· 3) Schemata allow the reader to make inferences, since no text is completely explicit.
· 4) Schemata allow the reader to systematically search and access memory for information learned in a text
· 5) Schemata contain important criteria, thereby allowing the reader to edit and summarize significant areas of text and to minimize insignificant information.
· 6) Schemata aid memory by allowing the reader to more easily reconstruct missing or forgotten pieces of textual information.
· Evidence for Schema Theory (Three Experiments)
· Anderson reports results of several experiments conducted to determine if there were evidence to support the claims of schema theory.
· One experiment was conducted on subjects of different ethnic or racial backgrounds, one involved subjects’ reading of closely comparable passages and a third involved assigning readers different roles or perspectives as they read a story or passage.
· The author explains that many of the claims of schema theory were borne out when Experiment #1 was conducted:
· Natives of India and Americans read letters about an Indian and an American wedding. Both cultures have extensive and well-developed marriage schema.
· Subjects spent less time reading their own native passage. (Expected because familiar schema expedite processing)
· Subjects recalled far more of their native texts verbatim and in paraphrase (Expected because culturally appropriate schema provide “slots” into which to fit new information, or because new information stored in memory is more accessible as schema facilitate searching memory)
· Far more “elaborations” (culturally appropriate extensions of text) were made as predicted by schema theory by each culture about its own customs.
· More “distortions” (inappropriate modifications of text) were made about the customs of the other culture as was expected by schema theory.
· Americans and Indians were more likely to regard different propositions as more important or significant (Americans with ritual and ceremony, and Indians with financial and social status) and would more easily recall those propositions more important to the schema developed in their cultural backgrounds.
· This was also confirmed (text more important to schema are more likely to be learned and remembered)
· A critical issue: can cultural variation within the US be a factor in reading comprehension?
· Minority children could suffer if stories, texts and test items assume a shared cultural perspective. When written material has an identifiable “cultural loading” there is a marked effect on comprehension.
· Example: “Sounding” (an exchange of friendly insults) is an activity found in the African-American community.
· In one study, A-A teenagers found a “sounding” episode to be friendly, while white peers perceived it as a potentially dangerous confrontation.
· In Experiment #2, Anderson, Spiro and Anderson (1978) conducted a study investigating three different schema theoretic hypotheses.
· Two groups of subjects were assigned closely comparable passages to read. (One passage concerned fine dining in a fancy restaurant; the other passage detailed a trip to a supermarket. The same 18 food and drink items were mentioned in both.)
· The group that read the passage containing the more constrained, structured, sequenced and cross-connected passage (the fine dining piece) were more easily able to recall the items (food and drink) mentioned in the passage in order.
· In addition, their more orderly search of memory enabled them to assign the items to the correct characters than did those readers of the more haphazard supermarket passage.
· This relates to schema function #1: “provision of ideational scaffolding”, and #3: “by tracing through the schema used to structure the text, the reader is helped to gain access to the particular information learned when the text was read.”
· In Experiment #3, Pichert and Anderson (1977) sought to prove that readers’ differing perspectives have independent effects on learning and recall.
· They manipulated reader schemata by assigning readers a story in which the readers assumed different perspectives: those of home buyers or those of burglars.
· Readers learned more of the information related to their assigned perspective.
· Readers who then switched perspectives recalled more previously unrecalled information important to their new perspective.
· Subjects reported that the previously unrecalled information now related to the new perspective simply “popped” into their heads.
· A related experiment conducted by the author used two measures of attention. Results confirmed that those readers assigned to be “burglars”, paid closer attention to “burglar-related” sentences.
· This bears out Schema function #2 which hypothesized that readers “use importance as one basis for allocating cognitive resources – that is, for deciding where to pay close attention.”
· Implications of Schema Theory for Design of Materials and Classroom Intervention
· The author offers five related suggestions for textbook publishers and curriculum designers:
· 1) Teaching manuals should include suggestions for helping children activate relevant background knowledge. Children do not automatically incorporate new material with what they may already know.
· 2) Teaching manuals should include suggestions for building children’s background knowledge when that background knowledge cannot be securely presumed.
· 3) Lesson activities should be featured in which children are given opportunities to integrate what they know with new material being presented. In this study, strong benefits are related to the use of prediction techniques. Children who used prediction as a strategy for recall remembered 72% of sentences, while control groups achieved only an average of 43% recall.
· 4) Publishers should use advance organizers or structured overviews to help students organize and “bridge the gap” between what they know and what they need to know.
· 5) Publishers and society need to be aware of and to address the potentially harmful effects of assuming that minority students’ schema match that of the majority culture. Since culture has such a strong effect on reading comprehension, it is not realistic to simply assume that every child will experience or comprehend text in the same way. This must be taken into account when texts are written.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Chapter 22
Chapter 22
“To Err is Human: Learning About Language Processes by Analyzing Miscues”
Yetta M. Goodman and Kenneth S. Goodman discuss the relevance of readers’ miscues. Goodman and Goodman analyze miscues as a way to examine a reader’s processing.
• Authors redefine ‘miscue’ as the unexpected responses by readers’ linguistic or conceptual cognitive responses. The actual analysis requires several conditions; material must be new to reader and the text must be long enough to produce enough miscues to determine if there is a ‘pattern’.
• The authors analyze an oral reading from ‘Betsy’. To summarize, she draws on her own background knowledge of language to make her reading ‘fit’ and make sense. Most of her miscues are calculated and not random. She predicts what she feels are appropriate structures and monitors to make sure her reading is making sense.
• Betsy reads not what her eyes see, but what makes sense to her brain. The authors explain it as text is what the brain responds to and the oral reading reflects the competence and psycho-sociolinguistic processes that have generated it. As Betsy reads, she sometimes predicts what the next sentence might say and may use substitution miscues that will fit with the meaning of the rest of the story. “The more proficient the reader, the greater the proportion of semantically acceptable miscues or miscues acceptable with the prior portion of the text that are self-corrected” (623) Many miscues that Betsy made were semantically correct. When a prediction did not fit, she would self-correct. An interesting phenomenon is when an author uses a pronoun to refer to a previously stated noun, a reader may revert to original noun and the reverse is true. If an author uses a noun for the referent that has been used, the reader may still use that pronoun. These kinds of miscues indicate that the reader is an active language user.
• The authors make a distinction between a reader comprehending, which is done during reading, and comprehension, which is the understanding after reading. They use open-ended retellings that provide an ‘insight’ of comprehension from the organization used, if they use their own words or the author’s words, and from the understandings or misunderstands they may gain from the reading. Schema plays a big part in the reader’s ability to make corrections or substitutions for the reading to make sense as in Betsy substituting ‘bread’ for ‘butter’. It is more common for people today to make ‘bread’ than to make their own ‘butter’. So her miscues are conceptually based and not an arbitrary confusion of the words.
• Teachers may also believe that reading is word recognition, so how can readers know a word in one context but not in another. The authors write that words that are in different syntactic and semantic contexts are different for readers. Betsy is confused with the phrase ‘keep(ing) house’ and struggles with it. As she works her way through, she reads ‘home’ and ‘house’ correctly, but struggles with ‘staying home’ and ‘keeping house’. She continues to work on it until she finally handles the structures by self-correcting or by reading a semantically acceptable sentence. As she interacts with the text, Betsy develops as a reader and is in the ‘zone of proximal development’ as she tries to make sense of the text.
• The authors continue in their discussion of reading as the processing of language and constructing meaning. A reader can manipulate language to understand a text that they cannot comprehend. They demonstrate this ‘Chomskyism’ by having readers read text with made-up or ‘non’ words and then answer questions. By knowing the structure of language, they can manipulate the text to correctly answer the questions or be able to give a sequenced retelling. A reader’s use of intonation is another indicator of being able to read non-word and text word.
• Grammatically, nouns are typically substituted for nouns, noun modifiers for noun modifiers, and function words substituted for function words. Readers will sometimes read past periods. They sometimes do this when they are trying to predict. Better readers self-correct and shift their intonation pattern whereas less-proficient readers do not correct.
• The authors continue with a discussion of schemata- linguistic schemata (rules of language); conceptual schemata (knowledge of the world); overarching schemata (creating new schemata and modifying old ones, schema for schema formation). The last schema is what allows us to create new sentences that have never been heard before and the ability of the listener to understand it. All the schemata must work in harmony and if there is an issue, a miscue occurs. Miscues can be viewed from two schema processes: schema-forming miscues reflect the developmental process of building the rule systems of language and concepts, and application of the rules (I’ll come and get you in a few whiles) and schema-driven miscues are the result from the use of existing schemata to produce or comprehend language (car headlamps being automatically read as car headlights). Piagetian concepts are discussed in regards to accommodation and assimilation. The processing may result in a ‘disequilibrium’ that may result in a self-correction.
• Finally, miscues should be viewed as positive. They explain or at least provide a view of:
o If a language user loses meaning…
o If a reader or listener interprets different from meaning intended by the speaker or author…
o If the language user chooses a syntactic schema different from the author’s…
o A reflection of readers’ ability to focus not on print but predict meaning
o Use linguistic and conceptual schemata to reverse, substitute, omit, paraphrase, etc.
o Reflect schemata and their level of confidence
“To Err is Human: Learning About Language Processes by Analyzing Miscues”
Yetta M. Goodman and Kenneth S. Goodman discuss the relevance of readers’ miscues. Goodman and Goodman analyze miscues as a way to examine a reader’s processing.
• Authors redefine ‘miscue’ as the unexpected responses by readers’ linguistic or conceptual cognitive responses. The actual analysis requires several conditions; material must be new to reader and the text must be long enough to produce enough miscues to determine if there is a ‘pattern’.
• The authors analyze an oral reading from ‘Betsy’. To summarize, she draws on her own background knowledge of language to make her reading ‘fit’ and make sense. Most of her miscues are calculated and not random. She predicts what she feels are appropriate structures and monitors to make sure her reading is making sense.
• Betsy reads not what her eyes see, but what makes sense to her brain. The authors explain it as text is what the brain responds to and the oral reading reflects the competence and psycho-sociolinguistic processes that have generated it. As Betsy reads, she sometimes predicts what the next sentence might say and may use substitution miscues that will fit with the meaning of the rest of the story. “The more proficient the reader, the greater the proportion of semantically acceptable miscues or miscues acceptable with the prior portion of the text that are self-corrected” (623) Many miscues that Betsy made were semantically correct. When a prediction did not fit, she would self-correct. An interesting phenomenon is when an author uses a pronoun to refer to a previously stated noun, a reader may revert to original noun and the reverse is true. If an author uses a noun for the referent that has been used, the reader may still use that pronoun. These kinds of miscues indicate that the reader is an active language user.
• The authors make a distinction between a reader comprehending, which is done during reading, and comprehension, which is the understanding after reading. They use open-ended retellings that provide an ‘insight’ of comprehension from the organization used, if they use their own words or the author’s words, and from the understandings or misunderstands they may gain from the reading. Schema plays a big part in the reader’s ability to make corrections or substitutions for the reading to make sense as in Betsy substituting ‘bread’ for ‘butter’. It is more common for people today to make ‘bread’ than to make their own ‘butter’. So her miscues are conceptually based and not an arbitrary confusion of the words.
• Teachers may also believe that reading is word recognition, so how can readers know a word in one context but not in another. The authors write that words that are in different syntactic and semantic contexts are different for readers. Betsy is confused with the phrase ‘keep(ing) house’ and struggles with it. As she works her way through, she reads ‘home’ and ‘house’ correctly, but struggles with ‘staying home’ and ‘keeping house’. She continues to work on it until she finally handles the structures by self-correcting or by reading a semantically acceptable sentence. As she interacts with the text, Betsy develops as a reader and is in the ‘zone of proximal development’ as she tries to make sense of the text.
• The authors continue in their discussion of reading as the processing of language and constructing meaning. A reader can manipulate language to understand a text that they cannot comprehend. They demonstrate this ‘Chomskyism’ by having readers read text with made-up or ‘non’ words and then answer questions. By knowing the structure of language, they can manipulate the text to correctly answer the questions or be able to give a sequenced retelling. A reader’s use of intonation is another indicator of being able to read non-word and text word.
• Grammatically, nouns are typically substituted for nouns, noun modifiers for noun modifiers, and function words substituted for function words. Readers will sometimes read past periods. They sometimes do this when they are trying to predict. Better readers self-correct and shift their intonation pattern whereas less-proficient readers do not correct.
• The authors continue with a discussion of schemata- linguistic schemata (rules of language); conceptual schemata (knowledge of the world); overarching schemata (creating new schemata and modifying old ones, schema for schema formation). The last schema is what allows us to create new sentences that have never been heard before and the ability of the listener to understand it. All the schemata must work in harmony and if there is an issue, a miscue occurs. Miscues can be viewed from two schema processes: schema-forming miscues reflect the developmental process of building the rule systems of language and concepts, and application of the rules (I’ll come and get you in a few whiles) and schema-driven miscues are the result from the use of existing schemata to produce or comprehend language (car headlamps being automatically read as car headlights). Piagetian concepts are discussed in regards to accommodation and assimilation. The processing may result in a ‘disequilibrium’ that may result in a self-correction.
• Finally, miscues should be viewed as positive. They explain or at least provide a view of:
o If a language user loses meaning…
o If a reader or listener interprets different from meaning intended by the speaker or author…
o If the language user chooses a syntactic schema different from the author’s…
o A reflection of readers’ ability to focus not on print but predict meaning
o Use linguistic and conceptual schemata to reverse, substitute, omit, paraphrase, etc.
o Reflect schemata and their level of confidence
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Chapter 24: Principled Pluralism for Adaptive Flexibility in Teaching and Learning to Read
Author: Rand J. Spiro
Rand J. Spiro’s article is written from the perspective of Cognitive Flexibility Theory (CFT). CFT followed schema theories and investigates the most effective way of basing individual student instruction regardless of the domain that is being taught. CFT feels that a single approach to teaching is limiting-sometimes one approach is successful and sometimes it is not. CFT supports the use of teacher flexibility and the expertise of the teacher when guiding and developing instruction for individuals.
CFT is best described as an idea of principled pluralism. Cognitive flexibility theorists feel that when a teacher encounters a student, they must assess the prior knowledge the student brings to the table. After this assessment of prior knowledge; or assessments of strengths and weaknesses of the student, the teacher then designs individual instruction to meet the student’s needs via the multiple methodologies and expertise the teacher brings to the table. The instruction of each student needs to be tailored to meet their individual needs not through one approach or program, but through the integration of many approaches or programs. Instruction is not presented in random order. Instruction should be presented in such a way as to hit the desired elements, but instruction should also weave in elements that are related to each other for greater effect.
One of the key questions for those following CFT addresses which approach, theories, methods, and content schemas are most appropriate for the new situation, and then how is the teacher to combine, coordinate and align the various methodologies to fit the student’s needs. CFT theorists feel that a skilled teacher will have a rich repertoire of instructional practices to draw from. The skilled teacher will also look at each teaching situation critically to determine which instructional approaches will best be utilized to meet the instructional objective of the lessons to be taught. The skilled teacher may rely on one approach initially, and then weave in another approach as needed. For instance, the skilled teacher may begin explicitly teaching phonics, and then weave in the whole-word approach, followed by utilizing the student’s prior knowledge to assist with the objective of the lesson. Strategies may be combined during instruction rather than being taught in isolation, again the skilled teacher assess what approach best suits the individual student’s needs and the teaching objective at hand.
Spiro would like future researchers to address two questions when looking at the manner of operation of principled pluralisms. One is how situation-adaptive assembly of knowledge and experience occur; the second is how should assembly of knowledge and experience be fostered by both the teacher and the student to be most effective? The use of new technologies to assist students with assembly of knowledge in situation-adaptive ways is one avenue that Spiro feels future researchers should investigate. Another avenue future researchers need to investigate is the role of changing students’ and teachers’ habits of mind. To assist with changing habits of mind, colleges and universities need to provide future teachers with the expertise in multiple methodologies and practices so that future teachers can apply principled pluralism when guiding and developing instructional objectives once they have their own classrooms. Overall, CFT supports the use of teacher flexibility and the expertise of the teacher when guiding and developing instruction for individuals.
Submitted by: Debbie Shanks
Rand J. Spiro’s article is written from the perspective of Cognitive Flexibility Theory (CFT). CFT followed schema theories and investigates the most effective way of basing individual student instruction regardless of the domain that is being taught. CFT feels that a single approach to teaching is limiting-sometimes one approach is successful and sometimes it is not. CFT supports the use of teacher flexibility and the expertise of the teacher when guiding and developing instruction for individuals.
CFT is best described as an idea of principled pluralism. Cognitive flexibility theorists feel that when a teacher encounters a student, they must assess the prior knowledge the student brings to the table. After this assessment of prior knowledge; or assessments of strengths and weaknesses of the student, the teacher then designs individual instruction to meet the student’s needs via the multiple methodologies and expertise the teacher brings to the table. The instruction of each student needs to be tailored to meet their individual needs not through one approach or program, but through the integration of many approaches or programs. Instruction is not presented in random order. Instruction should be presented in such a way as to hit the desired elements, but instruction should also weave in elements that are related to each other for greater effect.
One of the key questions for those following CFT addresses which approach, theories, methods, and content schemas are most appropriate for the new situation, and then how is the teacher to combine, coordinate and align the various methodologies to fit the student’s needs. CFT theorists feel that a skilled teacher will have a rich repertoire of instructional practices to draw from. The skilled teacher will also look at each teaching situation critically to determine which instructional approaches will best be utilized to meet the instructional objective of the lessons to be taught. The skilled teacher may rely on one approach initially, and then weave in another approach as needed. For instance, the skilled teacher may begin explicitly teaching phonics, and then weave in the whole-word approach, followed by utilizing the student’s prior knowledge to assist with the objective of the lesson. Strategies may be combined during instruction rather than being taught in isolation, again the skilled teacher assess what approach best suits the individual student’s needs and the teaching objective at hand.
Spiro would like future researchers to address two questions when looking at the manner of operation of principled pluralisms. One is how situation-adaptive assembly of knowledge and experience occur; the second is how should assembly of knowledge and experience be fostered by both the teacher and the student to be most effective? The use of new technologies to assist students with assembly of knowledge in situation-adaptive ways is one avenue that Spiro feels future researchers should investigate. Another avenue future researchers need to investigate is the role of changing students’ and teachers’ habits of mind. To assist with changing habits of mind, colleges and universities need to provide future teachers with the expertise in multiple methodologies and practices so that future teachers can apply principled pluralism when guiding and developing instructional objectives once they have their own classrooms. Overall, CFT supports the use of teacher flexibility and the expertise of the teacher when guiding and developing instruction for individuals.
Submitted by: Debbie Shanks
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Chapter 35: The Role of Responsive Teaching in Focusing Reader Intention and Developing Reader Motivation
“The Role of Responsive Teaching in Focusing Reader Intention and Developing Reader Motivation,” by Robert B, Ruddell and Norman J. Unrau is an article that looks at the exploration of the characteristics that responsive, reflective teachers bring to teaching. From studying influential teachers, their behavior in the classroom, and their impact on students a person can acquire insights into responsive teachers and ways they promote literacy engagement. Former students sometimes identify with an influential teacher because that teacher has had a significant influence on the student’s academic or personal success in school.
Influential teachers share characteristics in several areas. These teachers:
*Show that they care about their students.
*Assist their students in understanding and solving their personal and academic problems.
*Show an excitement and enthusiasm for what they teach.
*Adapt instruction to meet individual needs, motives, interests, and aptitudes of their students as well as having high expectations for them.
*Use motivating and effective strategies when they teach, that are clear, consist of concrete examples, analyze abstract concepts, and apply concepts to new contexts.
*Engage students in a process of intellectual discovery.
*Are twice as likely to be identified as an influential teacher by high achieving students than by low achieving students.
The bases for these findings are brought forth in this article through Ms. Hawthorne’s dilemma. Ms. Hawthorne, an influential teacher who is striving to redesign her instructional program to promote her students’ literacy and learning through an integrated language arts and history curriculum. Psychological and instructional factors are critical to the development of both reader and teacher intention and motivation and are the focus of investigation that will bring clarity to the dilemma and its’ resolution. They are the developing self, instructional orientation and task-engagement resources.
In order to understand these critical factors better, a look a Ms. Hawthorne’s dilemma is necessary. While working at Taft Junior High School in central Los Angeles, She was discontented with the language arts and history program. Some of her seventh-grade students read books and completed the assigned tasks but all too many only did so unenthusiastically, rarely, or not at all. Knowing her students could do better, she decided, with the encouragement of others, to examine what she would need to do to redesign the program to engage more students.
To start her action research, she collected as much information about her students to discover who they are- not only as readers but also as people. To gain better knowledge of her students, Ms. Hawthorne conducted a few tutorial sessions with individual students, which allowed her to understand their motivation and reading strategies.
While several students responded, one student, Cynthia, jumped at the opportunity. At first meeting, Ms. Hawthorne got the feeling that Cynthia was slightly hyperactive and a bit social. At subsequent meetings, Ms. Hawthorne realizes Cynthia to be a bit more complex. Cynthia is a good student, likes school. And has many friends to whom she socializes with. She was thinking about being a nurse, like her mother, but she also sees herself being a storywriter, a travel agent, a model, and a fashion designer. This shows Ms. Hawthorne that Cynthia is exploring the possibilities for herself.
She told Ms. Hawthorn about her two goals for the year were to improve her reading and to reduce the number of mistakes she made in her writing. To gain a sense of Cynthia’s reading level, Ms. Hawthorne gave her an individual reading inventory. The results showed that Cynthia’s independent reading level was that of fourth grad, her instructional level was that of fifth grad and her frustration level was that of sixth grade. While Cynthia says she understands what she had read, she was unable to answer many literal and interpretive questions about the text. In addition to struggling to comprehend the material she read, Ms. Hawthorne also saw Cynthia struggle to connect concepts to make meaning thus causing Cynthia to give up easily.
Ms. Hawthorne was impressed to see Cynthia’s enthusiasm for writing. She could complete concept maps and finish five paragraph essays in one period. In analyzing her writing, Ms. Hawthorne saw that Cynthia’s writing was rudimentary in context and structure. In addition to containing simple sentences, there were often many grammar and spelling errors.
As their meetings continued, Ms. Hawthorne noticed that Cynthia’s self-projected image of an enthusiastic learner did not always match her behavior. While it appeared to Ms. Hawthorne that Cynthia was seeking help for her literacy needs, it became clear to Ms. Hawthorne that she may actually be trying to avoid regular class work. This inconsistency and irresponsibility marked her performance showing issues with self-regulation in her schoolwork. This portrait of Cynthia is similar to that of many middle school students.
While the outcomes of a reader’s reading and a teacher’s instructional design are quite different, they have some of the same characteristics. They are developing self, instructional orientation, and task-engagement resources.
-Developing Self consists of the following aspects that shape the reader’s or teacher’s life‘s meaning and purpose. They are:
*Identity and self-schema- who am I vs. who will I become?
*Self-efficacy and self-worth,- the more efficacious I am, the more I will try but only if it does not make me look unintelligent.
*Expectations- personal expectations influence their level of aspiration and how teachers communicate different expectation messages to students whom the teacher considers to have high or low expectations.
*Experiential self- processes imagery, narratives, and metaphors to give us a sense of our experience’s meaning.
*Self knowledge- connections between students’ own emerging identities and the lives of fictional through classroom dialogue and reflective writing allows students to gain a deeper knowledge of themselves.
-Instructional Orientation consists of the alignment of teacher or student with a teaching or learning task, affects intention and motivation. It is made up of the following critical factors:
achievement goals- engagement of the learner in selecting, structuring, and making sense of achievement experience
T*wo kinds of goals-
Mastery- task oriented
Performance- ego oriented
*task values- finding the balance between challenge and boredom. Areas to consider are:
*attainment value
*intrinsic-interest value
*utility value
*cost of success
sociocultural values and beliefs- students are vulnerable to breakdowns in communication if their sociocultural values and beliefs are not the same as those of the teacher or if the teacher is not responsive to cultural differences
stance- perspective and orientation that a reader adopts toward the reading of a particular text.
Task-Engagement Resources consists of information structures that enable a teacher or a reader to undertake a learning task. Task-engagement resources provide the following:
· Reader text-processing resources include knowledge of language, word analysis, text-processing strategies, metacognitive strategies, knowledge of classroom and social interaction, and world knowledge not only focuses attention but also allows construct meaning to be negotiated through classroom discussions.
· teacher instructional design resources include knowledge of students and their meaning-construction process, knowledge of literature and content areas, teaching strategies, world knowledge, and metacognitive knowledge which allows teachers to create learning environments that nourish the developing self and activate students’ instructional orientation
This all relates to focus of intention in the central point of
the mind’s intent (e.g. of its direction, purpose, and
intensity when interacting with a learning environment).
To have readers engage with reading, interact in the classroom community, and participate in the meaning-negotiation process, they need motivation to read and to learn, if prior knowledge is activated, if tasks are personally relevant, and if they are encouraged to actively construct meanings. There is an interactive nature that occurs between the meaning-negotiation process teachers, readers, and the classroom community encounter in the classroom. This occurs through the teacher and reader bringing their interpretation of the text to the classroom and through discussion engaging in meaning. This is not a linear event and thus circles through the discussion about the text. This in addition to the psychological and instructional factors that are critical to the development of both reader and teacher intention and motivation can be used to foster an ideal learning environment.
Taking all this into consideration, Ms. Hawthorne decided to redesign her curriculum to a student-centered environment from a teacher directed environment. This she felt would help to build intrinsic motivation in her students.
Influential teachers share characteristics in several areas. These teachers:
*Show that they care about their students.
*Assist their students in understanding and solving their personal and academic problems.
*Show an excitement and enthusiasm for what they teach.
*Adapt instruction to meet individual needs, motives, interests, and aptitudes of their students as well as having high expectations for them.
*Use motivating and effective strategies when they teach, that are clear, consist of concrete examples, analyze abstract concepts, and apply concepts to new contexts.
*Engage students in a process of intellectual discovery.
*Are twice as likely to be identified as an influential teacher by high achieving students than by low achieving students.
The bases for these findings are brought forth in this article through Ms. Hawthorne’s dilemma. Ms. Hawthorne, an influential teacher who is striving to redesign her instructional program to promote her students’ literacy and learning through an integrated language arts and history curriculum. Psychological and instructional factors are critical to the development of both reader and teacher intention and motivation and are the focus of investigation that will bring clarity to the dilemma and its’ resolution. They are the developing self, instructional orientation and task-engagement resources.
In order to understand these critical factors better, a look a Ms. Hawthorne’s dilemma is necessary. While working at Taft Junior High School in central Los Angeles, She was discontented with the language arts and history program. Some of her seventh-grade students read books and completed the assigned tasks but all too many only did so unenthusiastically, rarely, or not at all. Knowing her students could do better, she decided, with the encouragement of others, to examine what she would need to do to redesign the program to engage more students.
To start her action research, she collected as much information about her students to discover who they are- not only as readers but also as people. To gain better knowledge of her students, Ms. Hawthorne conducted a few tutorial sessions with individual students, which allowed her to understand their motivation and reading strategies.
While several students responded, one student, Cynthia, jumped at the opportunity. At first meeting, Ms. Hawthorne got the feeling that Cynthia was slightly hyperactive and a bit social. At subsequent meetings, Ms. Hawthorne realizes Cynthia to be a bit more complex. Cynthia is a good student, likes school. And has many friends to whom she socializes with. She was thinking about being a nurse, like her mother, but she also sees herself being a storywriter, a travel agent, a model, and a fashion designer. This shows Ms. Hawthorne that Cynthia is exploring the possibilities for herself.
She told Ms. Hawthorn about her two goals for the year were to improve her reading and to reduce the number of mistakes she made in her writing. To gain a sense of Cynthia’s reading level, Ms. Hawthorne gave her an individual reading inventory. The results showed that Cynthia’s independent reading level was that of fourth grad, her instructional level was that of fifth grad and her frustration level was that of sixth grade. While Cynthia says she understands what she had read, she was unable to answer many literal and interpretive questions about the text. In addition to struggling to comprehend the material she read, Ms. Hawthorne also saw Cynthia struggle to connect concepts to make meaning thus causing Cynthia to give up easily.
Ms. Hawthorne was impressed to see Cynthia’s enthusiasm for writing. She could complete concept maps and finish five paragraph essays in one period. In analyzing her writing, Ms. Hawthorne saw that Cynthia’s writing was rudimentary in context and structure. In addition to containing simple sentences, there were often many grammar and spelling errors.
As their meetings continued, Ms. Hawthorne noticed that Cynthia’s self-projected image of an enthusiastic learner did not always match her behavior. While it appeared to Ms. Hawthorne that Cynthia was seeking help for her literacy needs, it became clear to Ms. Hawthorne that she may actually be trying to avoid regular class work. This inconsistency and irresponsibility marked her performance showing issues with self-regulation in her schoolwork. This portrait of Cynthia is similar to that of many middle school students.
While the outcomes of a reader’s reading and a teacher’s instructional design are quite different, they have some of the same characteristics. They are developing self, instructional orientation, and task-engagement resources.
-Developing Self consists of the following aspects that shape the reader’s or teacher’s life‘s meaning and purpose. They are:
*Identity and self-schema- who am I vs. who will I become?
*Self-efficacy and self-worth,- the more efficacious I am, the more I will try but only if it does not make me look unintelligent.
*Expectations- personal expectations influence their level of aspiration and how teachers communicate different expectation messages to students whom the teacher considers to have high or low expectations.
*Experiential self- processes imagery, narratives, and metaphors to give us a sense of our experience’s meaning.
*Self knowledge- connections between students’ own emerging identities and the lives of fictional through classroom dialogue and reflective writing allows students to gain a deeper knowledge of themselves.
-Instructional Orientation consists of the alignment of teacher or student with a teaching or learning task, affects intention and motivation. It is made up of the following critical factors:
achievement goals- engagement of the learner in selecting, structuring, and making sense of achievement experience
T*wo kinds of goals-
Mastery- task oriented
Performance- ego oriented
*task values- finding the balance between challenge and boredom. Areas to consider are:
*attainment value
*intrinsic-interest value
*utility value
*cost of success
sociocultural values and beliefs- students are vulnerable to breakdowns in communication if their sociocultural values and beliefs are not the same as those of the teacher or if the teacher is not responsive to cultural differences
stance- perspective and orientation that a reader adopts toward the reading of a particular text.
Task-Engagement Resources consists of information structures that enable a teacher or a reader to undertake a learning task. Task-engagement resources provide the following:
· Reader text-processing resources include knowledge of language, word analysis, text-processing strategies, metacognitive strategies, knowledge of classroom and social interaction, and world knowledge not only focuses attention but also allows construct meaning to be negotiated through classroom discussions.
· teacher instructional design resources include knowledge of students and their meaning-construction process, knowledge of literature and content areas, teaching strategies, world knowledge, and metacognitive knowledge which allows teachers to create learning environments that nourish the developing self and activate students’ instructional orientation
This all relates to focus of intention in the central point of
the mind’s intent (e.g. of its direction, purpose, and
intensity when interacting with a learning environment).
To have readers engage with reading, interact in the classroom community, and participate in the meaning-negotiation process, they need motivation to read and to learn, if prior knowledge is activated, if tasks are personally relevant, and if they are encouraged to actively construct meanings. There is an interactive nature that occurs between the meaning-negotiation process teachers, readers, and the classroom community encounter in the classroom. This occurs through the teacher and reader bringing their interpretation of the text to the classroom and through discussion engaging in meaning. This is not a linear event and thus circles through the discussion about the text. This in addition to the psychological and instructional factors that are critical to the development of both reader and teacher intention and motivation can be used to foster an ideal learning environment.
Taking all this into consideration, Ms. Hawthorne decided to redesign her curriculum to a student-centered environment from a teacher directed environment. This she felt would help to build intrinsic motivation in her students.
Friday, September 7, 2007
Chapter 3: Literacy Policy: Policy Research that Makes a Difference by Sheila W. Valenci and Karen K. Wixson
This research focuses on what we know about effective literacy policy and what kind of policy research has been conducted.
The locus of authority refers to where does a policy originate and who has authority over it. The National Testing: NAEP: National Assessment of Educational Progress. This includes programs such as Title I, Special Ed ast the federal level, Standards and Assessment, State policies on teacher quality, class size, bilingual education, restrucring, resource allocation, power of the states, district policies, and classroom policies. All of this translates to how daily life is affected in the classroom, mandted curriculum, retention, professional development, special services, policies on grading, and grouping.
Policies differ for their targets. A narrow focus would be a particular practice, program, resource allocation, new assessments, and the establishment of cut scores for special programs. The point of systemic reform is to create a coherent set of efforts rather than discrete unrelated policies and actions.
Policy focus difference depends on what the researchers target such as: graduation requirements, organizational issues, groups of students, curriculum. Half of the policies in this study focussed both on curricula content and teaching in 1500 school districts. Research on reform began in 1980s with a goal of improving teaching practice.
Sources for the study included: published books, articles, conceptual pieces, technical reports from research projects and centers.
Overview of the Research: First the researchers varied on focus. Some were grounded in policy, others in measurement and others in literacy. They targeted audiences respectvely. Bibliographies had little overlap. Different research questions, conceptural frameworks, methodolgies, and perspectives on literacy were considered. These differences shaped what was learned from the research, limited the possiblity of learning across perspectives, and influenced policy.
Here is a comparison of the focus of research:
Policy Research focussed on reforms regarding standards, reorganization, governance, and literacy. The system of research was based on surveys, interviews, teacher self-reports, practices not observations of practice. The focuss on subjects related to specific issues in classroom instruction.
Research on measurement included assessment components of reform regarding the validity of issues and psychometric qualities. This research was based on statistical analysis, self-reports, interviews and artifacts.
Literacy offered questions about insruction and learning regarding literacy research and theory. The question of what makes better reading and writing instruction was addressed. What reforms are consistent with the research. Finally, looking closely at classroom teaching practices and evidence of resulting student learning. There was no exploration of the context of policies.
Two states were studied: Michigan and Kentucky.
Michigan: (Geotz, Floden, and O'Day 1995) Comprehension is the ultimate goal of reading and process must be interactive, constructive, dynamic. Key factors include: 1. local educators' desire to redirect reading curriculum from basic to higher-ordered thinking; 2. states want education to be more accountable; and 3. there is a historical use of educators outside of the state department to communicate reform efforts.
Global Empasis (Geortz 1995): Reading was studied in Michigan and writing in Michigan, California, and Vermont
Students had to respond to wht they read and then had questions in basic skills as phonics and word recognition. Half used lieterature from trade books while 30% used the basal readers. Focus was to review, revise, and develop curricula. Half of the students worked in pairs or individually and 75% in another study educated the whole class with discussion.
Studies that combined global and local emphasis (Standerford 1997): examined Michigan's plicy context. and saw a tension between classrom and district. Interpretations of state reading policy and design, district rules, objectives, plaers, audience, time frames focussed on compliance rather than substance. Teachers made changes in practice based on individual professional development but were unsure about the changes fitting into the state policy.
The conclusion: state and district policies influenced teacher efforts making them aware that the chages we expected in instruction but were not learn on specifics and didn't offer support to figure it out. Roles and objectives were defined differently at district and classroom levels.
More local emphasis (Jennings 19996) and Spillane and Jennings (199) found teacher practices were based on well reforms were elaborated on by the district. All used literature based reading program and trade books. Writers' workshops and comprehension over skill-based issues with "below the surface" difference in teaching were examined. The complexity of prior knowledge played a role as two teachers with the same training developed different dispoitions toward policy.
Researchers' knowledge of language arts and the important differences in teachers' learning as well as classroom practies led to new analytical frameworks and development.
The juxtaposition of studies: global to local examined the alignment of practice with state policy, differences in practices regarding policies from superficial to substantive, and the lack of information on responses to policy and its affect on strudents comprised the studies.
Case 2: Kentucky KERA (Kentucky Education Reform Act 1990)
KERA was designed to change the entire school system addressing administration, governance and finance, school organizations, accountability, professional development, curriculum, assessment, literacy: assessment and professional development. Kentucky developed mutlifacted professional development programs and KIRIS ( Kentucky Instructional Results Information System) became CATS (Commission Acounting Testing System aggregated for a school score for cash rewards to avoid sanctions.
Global Emphasis (Koertz 1996) In KIRIS Assessments, information about language arts, teachers new assessments, changed practices to include more time on writing but lots of time on tests preparation, expectations for high achiever rose but not for low achievers. Student gains for specific test practices and familiarity with test overrode the development of capabilities.
CRESST/RAND study (Stetcher, et. a. 1998) noted more of a subject matter emphasis to examine the contrast of practices of stand-based eduction vs. practices consistent with tradition. They found writing teachers aligned themselves with standards-based approaches but continued to combine traditional and standards-based practice. They also rated professional development high.
Stecher obsered KIRIS assessmetns, state curriculum material and trainig and concluded no convincing evidence that policies produced higher schores. Perhaps Kentucky educations have not found practices that promote higher achievement.
McDonnell and Choisser (1997) used interviews and teacher assignments as a measure of teaching practices in social studies, math, language arts. Few assignments included state learning goals that stressed critical thinking, developing solutions to complex problems, and organization of information to understand concepts though they changed strategies as working in groups but had little effect on depth of instruction.
Combining Global and Local emphasis (Bridge 1994): To what extent did teacher practices reflect on literary practices? Observations found teachers combined traditional and new approaches. Impact on literacy is unclear because teachers were not certain to what they could attribute changes.
Local empahsis (Calahan 1997) held schools accountable for student learning. English departments were charged with porfolio madates in Kentucky schools. This led them to ask for more and different kinds of writing. All needed to write personal narratives, stories, and powem and teachers explored ways to provide opportunities and engage students in personal goal setting, writing, self-reflection, and portfolio assessment. Basic tension existed between best practices in the classroom and preparing students for the demands of portfolios.
KERA and KIRIS noted that though there was change, teachers were not "up to speed" in instructional practices.
Conclusion and Implications: Literacy policies must be more than mandates. They must attend to new learning required by people and systems at all levels. Literacy policies must use a layered approach of complementary studies at all levels from globl to local and incorporate multiple perspectives. Literacy policies must have multiple perspective and must understand the relatinship between state policy and responses in district, school, and teacher levels.
Literacy policy research needs to probe deeply into relationships among classroom context, teacher practices, and specific types of student learnng. Research much address what counts as quality teaching and learning for literacy. There is a lack of consensus regarding what constitutes quality literacy teaching. The current need is to find literacy policy and policy research that makes a (an appreciable) difference.
The locus of authority refers to where does a policy originate and who has authority over it. The National Testing: NAEP: National Assessment of Educational Progress. This includes programs such as Title I, Special Ed ast the federal level, Standards and Assessment, State policies on teacher quality, class size, bilingual education, restrucring, resource allocation, power of the states, district policies, and classroom policies. All of this translates to how daily life is affected in the classroom, mandted curriculum, retention, professional development, special services, policies on grading, and grouping.
Policies differ for their targets. A narrow focus would be a particular practice, program, resource allocation, new assessments, and the establishment of cut scores for special programs. The point of systemic reform is to create a coherent set of efforts rather than discrete unrelated policies and actions.
Policy focus difference depends on what the researchers target such as: graduation requirements, organizational issues, groups of students, curriculum. Half of the policies in this study focussed both on curricula content and teaching in 1500 school districts. Research on reform began in 1980s with a goal of improving teaching practice.
Sources for the study included: published books, articles, conceptual pieces, technical reports from research projects and centers.
Overview of the Research: First the researchers varied on focus. Some were grounded in policy, others in measurement and others in literacy. They targeted audiences respectvely. Bibliographies had little overlap. Different research questions, conceptural frameworks, methodolgies, and perspectives on literacy were considered. These differences shaped what was learned from the research, limited the possiblity of learning across perspectives, and influenced policy.
Here is a comparison of the focus of research:
Policy Research focussed on reforms regarding standards, reorganization, governance, and literacy. The system of research was based on surveys, interviews, teacher self-reports, practices not observations of practice. The focuss on subjects related to specific issues in classroom instruction.
Research on measurement included assessment components of reform regarding the validity of issues and psychometric qualities. This research was based on statistical analysis, self-reports, interviews and artifacts.
Literacy offered questions about insruction and learning regarding literacy research and theory. The question of what makes better reading and writing instruction was addressed. What reforms are consistent with the research. Finally, looking closely at classroom teaching practices and evidence of resulting student learning. There was no exploration of the context of policies.
Two states were studied: Michigan and Kentucky.
Michigan: (Geotz, Floden, and O'Day 1995) Comprehension is the ultimate goal of reading and process must be interactive, constructive, dynamic. Key factors include: 1. local educators' desire to redirect reading curriculum from basic to higher-ordered thinking; 2. states want education to be more accountable; and 3. there is a historical use of educators outside of the state department to communicate reform efforts.
Global Empasis (Geortz 1995): Reading was studied in Michigan and writing in Michigan, California, and Vermont
Students had to respond to wht they read and then had questions in basic skills as phonics and word recognition. Half used lieterature from trade books while 30% used the basal readers. Focus was to review, revise, and develop curricula. Half of the students worked in pairs or individually and 75% in another study educated the whole class with discussion.
Studies that combined global and local emphasis (Standerford 1997): examined Michigan's plicy context. and saw a tension between classrom and district. Interpretations of state reading policy and design, district rules, objectives, plaers, audience, time frames focussed on compliance rather than substance. Teachers made changes in practice based on individual professional development but were unsure about the changes fitting into the state policy.
The conclusion: state and district policies influenced teacher efforts making them aware that the chages we expected in instruction but were not learn on specifics and didn't offer support to figure it out. Roles and objectives were defined differently at district and classroom levels.
More local emphasis (Jennings 19996) and Spillane and Jennings (199) found teacher practices were based on well reforms were elaborated on by the district. All used literature based reading program and trade books. Writers' workshops and comprehension over skill-based issues with "below the surface" difference in teaching were examined. The complexity of prior knowledge played a role as two teachers with the same training developed different dispoitions toward policy.
Researchers' knowledge of language arts and the important differences in teachers' learning as well as classroom practies led to new analytical frameworks and development.
The juxtaposition of studies: global to local examined the alignment of practice with state policy, differences in practices regarding policies from superficial to substantive, and the lack of information on responses to policy and its affect on strudents comprised the studies.
Case 2: Kentucky KERA (Kentucky Education Reform Act 1990)
KERA was designed to change the entire school system addressing administration, governance and finance, school organizations, accountability, professional development, curriculum, assessment, literacy: assessment and professional development. Kentucky developed mutlifacted professional development programs and KIRIS ( Kentucky Instructional Results Information System) became CATS (Commission Acounting Testing System aggregated for a school score for cash rewards to avoid sanctions.
Global Emphasis (Koertz 1996) In KIRIS Assessments, information about language arts, teachers new assessments, changed practices to include more time on writing but lots of time on tests preparation, expectations for high achiever rose but not for low achievers. Student gains for specific test practices and familiarity with test overrode the development of capabilities.
CRESST/RAND study (Stetcher, et. a. 1998) noted more of a subject matter emphasis to examine the contrast of practices of stand-based eduction vs. practices consistent with tradition. They found writing teachers aligned themselves with standards-based approaches but continued to combine traditional and standards-based practice. They also rated professional development high.
Stecher obsered KIRIS assessmetns, state curriculum material and trainig and concluded no convincing evidence that policies produced higher schores. Perhaps Kentucky educations have not found practices that promote higher achievement.
McDonnell and Choisser (1997) used interviews and teacher assignments as a measure of teaching practices in social studies, math, language arts. Few assignments included state learning goals that stressed critical thinking, developing solutions to complex problems, and organization of information to understand concepts though they changed strategies as working in groups but had little effect on depth of instruction.
Combining Global and Local emphasis (Bridge 1994): To what extent did teacher practices reflect on literary practices? Observations found teachers combined traditional and new approaches. Impact on literacy is unclear because teachers were not certain to what they could attribute changes.
Local empahsis (Calahan 1997) held schools accountable for student learning. English departments were charged with porfolio madates in Kentucky schools. This led them to ask for more and different kinds of writing. All needed to write personal narratives, stories, and powem and teachers explored ways to provide opportunities and engage students in personal goal setting, writing, self-reflection, and portfolio assessment. Basic tension existed between best practices in the classroom and preparing students for the demands of portfolios.
KERA and KIRIS noted that though there was change, teachers were not "up to speed" in instructional practices.
Conclusion and Implications: Literacy policies must be more than mandates. They must attend to new learning required by people and systems at all levels. Literacy policies must use a layered approach of complementary studies at all levels from globl to local and incorporate multiple perspectives. Literacy policies must have multiple perspective and must understand the relatinship between state policy and responses in district, school, and teacher levels.
Literacy policy research needs to probe deeply into relationships among classroom context, teacher practices, and specific types of student learnng. Research much address what counts as quality teaching and learning for literacy. There is a lack of consensus regarding what constitutes quality literacy teaching. The current need is to find literacy policy and policy research that makes a (an appreciable) difference.
Chapter 14: Phase of Word Learning: Implications for Instruction with Delayed and Disabled Readers by Linnea C. Ehri and Sandra Mc Cormick
The focus of this research is on cognitive and linguistic processes affecting reading ability rather than on instructional methods. The researchers emphasize noting the difference between learner and instruction. They studied the development of the process of word reading processes and the implication for instruction for the students who have particular difficulty with word identification. This knowledge can help teachers understand and interpert atypical word-reading behaviors of the less mature readers in an early development stage.
Phases of word development reading include: decoding, analogy, prediction, and sight (memory of a word read before). Students commit to memory the connections between graphemes and phonemes that recur in many words. Looking at a word, pronouncing it, and applying the corresponding graphemes enables a student to analyze how the letters symbolize individual phonemes to secure to memory.
Ehri distinguished five phases of word learning to understand and use the alphabetic system in word reading: 1. pre-alphabetic, 2. partial alphabetic, 3. full alphabetic, 4. consolidated-alphabetic, and 5. automatic-alphabetic stage.
Pre-alphabetic refers to lack of knowledge of the phoneme-grapheme relationship. Students use cues to remember words and utilize logos as well as architecture of the word such as length and shape. A word associated with a brand such as Cheerios would .be able to be remembered on the yellow box with the large black print but if written on a page with pen and ink recognition would be meager or. non-extistent. Similarly, if a word "look" is remembered because of its two 'eyes' in the middle form an association, the reader would not be able to distinguish that word from moon or tool. These readers need to engage in activities that engage the knowledge of associations between letter and word pronunciation . Teaching students the components of syllables. This instruction is most important in kindergarten to prevent difficulties before they arrive in latter years. Mnemonics and alliteration activities can be a strong support.
Partial-alphabetic phase refers to visual recognition. Students begin to detect letters in words and some of the letters are matched to pronunciations. Beginning letters of words when associated with picture clues can assist guessing though subtle differences in the middle of words such as man and men or horse and house may not be detected. Students who confused was and saw at this stage need practice in reading direction from left to right. The lack of full phonemic segmentation ability may link letters only partially to their sounds and words such as black and block may be confused. Additional confusions would be soft and hard sound letters and digraphs. Explicit instruction on phoneme-grapheme association is crucial to process the letters in the context of the words effectively. Pulling letters individually from their blends and segmenting the sound-grapheme relationship is crucial before replacting it back into the word for pronunciation. Of particular concern are vowels and the sound relationship to syllables. As students are learning phoneme-grapheme correspondence, teachers can scaffold learning to help students find hard-to-detect sound segments till they reach a sufficient knowlege base for identifying and forming words with accurate knowledge of the alphabetic system. To speed word learning, it is best to teach confusing words such as no and on in separate lessons in order to decrease confusion. Instruction at this phase should be aimed at helping them expand their word knowledge an build a sight vocabulary.
In full alphabetic phase, readers possess working knowledge of phoneme-grapheme correcspondence and know how to decode unfamiliar words. Slower readers consciously sound out words and fluency increases over time. Sight vocabularies grow tremendously in this phase. Familiarity with sounds assists in knowing the relationships of words such as peak and beak while they store in memory sufficient letter detail recognition and adapt their knowledge to new words. Tet reading is initial slow and laborious during this stage. In order for the material to be comfortable, students should have no more than a 25% challenge in the text with unfamiliar words with 95% accuracy for the development of fluency. This encourages learning by minimizing frustration. The key to speed is practice. Accuracy levels can be enhaced by having students read book they have read or listened to before as well as practice reading texts that they have not read before. Rimes and the usage of word families and then a return to reading words in context supports both accuracy and fluency. Further reading aloud combines the graphophonic processing for comprehension.
Consolidated-alphabetic phase has its roots in full-alphabetic and word learning becomes mature. Students learn to chunk letters including affixes, root words, onsets, rimes and syllables. There is careful distinctions of linguistic patterns are learned. A word such as interesting has ten graphophonic units and four graphosyllabic units. Students learn high frequency words, sight vocabularies grown, words are organized by spelling pattern and committed to memory. Unfamiliar words and decoding strategies are developed for a more complex understanding of the influence of parts of a word as the final e in words such as cone and con. The working knowledge allows a student to have implcit knowledge with unfamiliar words. Struggling readers need continues attention to analogizing with prompts, doing so on their own or doing so unconsciously on their own. Students need to learn syllable division and distinguish roots of spellings.
Finally in the automatic phase, the reader is proficient. There is speed and accuracy with familiar and unfamiliar words. There is large sight vocabulary knowledge and the reader is free to contemplate the meaning of text.
At each phase of learning in the reader's alphabetic development, student access strategies when dealing with the challenges presented in print. Teachers who have knowledge of phase learning can access teaching strategies to both scaffold and facilitate progression through the stages. Disabled or delayed readers have more difficulty learning to read and are slower in sight vocabulary. Limited knowledge of decoding and analogizing strategies requires thorough instruction on all aspects of word reading and teachers must offer ample opportunity for students to practice reading skills.
Phases of word development reading include: decoding, analogy, prediction, and sight (memory of a word read before). Students commit to memory the connections between graphemes and phonemes that recur in many words. Looking at a word, pronouncing it, and applying the corresponding graphemes enables a student to analyze how the letters symbolize individual phonemes to secure to memory.
Ehri distinguished five phases of word learning to understand and use the alphabetic system in word reading: 1. pre-alphabetic, 2. partial alphabetic, 3. full alphabetic, 4. consolidated-alphabetic, and 5. automatic-alphabetic stage.
Pre-alphabetic refers to lack of knowledge of the phoneme-grapheme relationship. Students use cues to remember words and utilize logos as well as architecture of the word such as length and shape. A word associated with a brand such as Cheerios would .be able to be remembered on the yellow box with the large black print but if written on a page with pen and ink recognition would be meager or. non-extistent. Similarly, if a word "look" is remembered because of its two 'eyes' in the middle form an association, the reader would not be able to distinguish that word from moon or tool. These readers need to engage in activities that engage the knowledge of associations between letter and word pronunciation . Teaching students the components of syllables. This instruction is most important in kindergarten to prevent difficulties before they arrive in latter years. Mnemonics and alliteration activities can be a strong support.
Partial-alphabetic phase refers to visual recognition. Students begin to detect letters in words and some of the letters are matched to pronunciations. Beginning letters of words when associated with picture clues can assist guessing though subtle differences in the middle of words such as man and men or horse and house may not be detected. Students who confused was and saw at this stage need practice in reading direction from left to right. The lack of full phonemic segmentation ability may link letters only partially to their sounds and words such as black and block may be confused. Additional confusions would be soft and hard sound letters and digraphs. Explicit instruction on phoneme-grapheme association is crucial to process the letters in the context of the words effectively. Pulling letters individually from their blends and segmenting the sound-grapheme relationship is crucial before replacting it back into the word for pronunciation. Of particular concern are vowels and the sound relationship to syllables. As students are learning phoneme-grapheme correspondence, teachers can scaffold learning to help students find hard-to-detect sound segments till they reach a sufficient knowlege base for identifying and forming words with accurate knowledge of the alphabetic system. To speed word learning, it is best to teach confusing words such as no and on in separate lessons in order to decrease confusion. Instruction at this phase should be aimed at helping them expand their word knowledge an build a sight vocabulary.
In full alphabetic phase, readers possess working knowledge of phoneme-grapheme correcspondence and know how to decode unfamiliar words. Slower readers consciously sound out words and fluency increases over time. Sight vocabularies grow tremendously in this phase. Familiarity with sounds assists in knowing the relationships of words such as peak and beak while they store in memory sufficient letter detail recognition and adapt their knowledge to new words. Tet reading is initial slow and laborious during this stage. In order for the material to be comfortable, students should have no more than a 25% challenge in the text with unfamiliar words with 95% accuracy for the development of fluency. This encourages learning by minimizing frustration. The key to speed is practice. Accuracy levels can be enhaced by having students read book they have read or listened to before as well as practice reading texts that they have not read before. Rimes and the usage of word families and then a return to reading words in context supports both accuracy and fluency. Further reading aloud combines the graphophonic processing for comprehension.
Consolidated-alphabetic phase has its roots in full-alphabetic and word learning becomes mature. Students learn to chunk letters including affixes, root words, onsets, rimes and syllables. There is careful distinctions of linguistic patterns are learned. A word such as interesting has ten graphophonic units and four graphosyllabic units. Students learn high frequency words, sight vocabularies grown, words are organized by spelling pattern and committed to memory. Unfamiliar words and decoding strategies are developed for a more complex understanding of the influence of parts of a word as the final e in words such as cone and con. The working knowledge allows a student to have implcit knowledge with unfamiliar words. Struggling readers need continues attention to analogizing with prompts, doing so on their own or doing so unconsciously on their own. Students need to learn syllable division and distinguish roots of spellings.
Finally in the automatic phase, the reader is proficient. There is speed and accuracy with familiar and unfamiliar words. There is large sight vocabulary knowledge and the reader is free to contemplate the meaning of text.
At each phase of learning in the reader's alphabetic development, student access strategies when dealing with the challenges presented in print. Teachers who have knowledge of phase learning can access teaching strategies to both scaffold and facilitate progression through the stages. Disabled or delayed readers have more difficulty learning to read and are slower in sight vocabulary. Limited knowledge of decoding and analogizing strategies requires thorough instruction on all aspects of word reading and teachers must offer ample opportunity for students to practice reading skills.
Chapter 13: Learning to read words: Linguistic units and instructional strategies
“Learning to read words: Linguistic units and instructional strategies” by Connie Juel and Cecilia Minden-Cupp, discusses the research done by the Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement (CIERA) as they attempted to answer teachers questions concerning the improvement of primary grade reading instruction. The teachers raised more questions about how to teach children to read words than any other area in early reading. Within this area, the teachers were most concerned with which, and how many, strategies for word recognition they should model for first grade children. At the same time, practitioners were also concerned about the amount of time spent on word recognition in their total language arts programs. They were very concerned about the development of both reading and writing and the development of rich vocabularies and world knowledge with which to comprehend decoded texts.
The CIERA group then examined how reading instruction works in real classrooms by following the activity in four classrooms for one school year. CIERA reasoned that certain instructional procedures might be more effective if their delivery occurs in a particular way and to specific groups of children. Some examples are onset and rime instruction, which might be most effective for children with some decoding skill and some degree of phonological awareness, and sequential letter-by-letter decoding might be more effective for children with less early literacy knowledge. It is also felt that the form of instruction may alter its effectiveness.
In sum, in the current study we examined whether specific forms of instruction might differentially affect students with varying levels of phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge, and other early literacy foundations. CIERA’s goal was to begin to identify specific instructional practices that appear to best foster learning to read words for particular profiles of children.
Background-
· Volume of words children are expected to read quickly and accurately is overwhelming. By third grade alone, children will encounter about 25,000 distinct words. By the end of eighth grade, children will encounter over 80,000 different words.
· Even the most comprehensive phonics programs rarely provide direct instruction for more than about 90 phonics rules. Yet, over 500 different spelling-sound rules are needed to read (Gough & Juel, 1990; Juel, 1994).
· Rules of phonics in most instructional programs is explicit, while the identification of spelling patterns by skilled readers is implicit and requires considerable orthographic knowledge.
· Primary-grade children are hit with an avalanche of printed words. While some words are seen a lot, the most content words are not.
· Self-teaching hypothesis (Share,1995; Share & Stanovich, 1995; Torgesen & Hecht, 1996), children basically learn to read by developing phonological awareness, learning some basic letter-sound relationships, and phonologically recoding a specific printed word a few times.
· This article mentions linguistic units such as onsets and rimes.
· At about age 4, many children can perceive, segment, and manipulate the rather distinctive syllable units in words. At about ages 4 to 5, onsets and rimes become transparent— which is one reason that, at this age, children seem fond of rhyming games, poems, chants, and even manipulations of linguistic units in the creation of pseudo languages such as Pig Latin.
· Awareness of the individual phonemes within rime units often develops only with reading instruction because of co-articulation.
· Some children may need to analyze words at the phoneme level before they can successfully make analogies involving rimes.
Instructional Strategies
The teacher may provide a menu of strategies ranging from using the contextual cues provided by illustrations to sounding out and blending individual letter-sounds.
The goal of reading is sense making. Orthographic representations of words are what account for the effortless process of word recognition in skilled reading.
To balance sense making and orthographic experience, a reader should ask themselves these questions:
1. Does it make sense?
2. Does that look right?
3. What would you expect to see?
4. Can we say it that way?
Research Questions
Does instruction with an emphasis on different levels of linguistic units (e.g., onsets and rimes, individual phonemes) differentially affect children at various levels of reading development?
When and how are which linguistic units and which instructional strategies best taught to children?
Method- Participants and Setting
Four first grade classrooms (containing 18 students each) in a city in the southeastern US
Approximately 70% percent of the children qualify for subsidized lunch, 60% are African American, 36% are Caucasian, and 4% are from other ethnic groups.
Each of the classroom teachers was a female Caucasian who had more than 10 years of teaching experience. They were each considered a very good teacher by their school principals.
The principals’ judgments were based on two primary factors. The first consideration was that the level of achievement in these classrooms compared favorably with that of other first-grade classrooms at the school. The second consideration was classroom management.
Consideration was based on classroom observations, disciplinary referrals, and accumulated input from parents. Classrooms 1 and 2 were in one school and Classrooms 3 and 4 at the other school.
Language arts instruction generally lasted for 1 ½ hours in each of the classrooms. The ELA period in Classroom 3 tended to run longer, however, while Classroom 2 never ran longer as time was limited by school scheduling.
Each classroom had three reading groups, the 90-minute language arts time period was spent somewhat differently.
Classroom 1- 20 to 30 minutes was spent in a whole class word wall activity before dividing up into reading groups.
Classroom 2- time was spent solely in reading groups.
Classroom 3- the morning message was expanded from the 15 minutes that each class spent on this activity to an additional 15 to 20 minutes. In this classroom, the whole-class morning message formed an integral part of language arts instruction.
Classroom 4- time was conducted solely in reading groups.
Each class had a teaching assistant that supervised students while they were doing seatwork or at their centers.
Each classroom also made weekly visits to the school library, which included listening to a story read by the librarian.
Teachers all had available a basal reading series from 1986. They also had commercial little books the school system had been adding in recent years. The teachers also could use the basal at their discretion.
Procedure
Through weekly classroom observations of language arts instruction (frequently 90 minutes) throughout the school year, the researchers observed each low group each week and the other two groups in each class at least once every 2 weeks. They developed a coding system that would focus their observations on the following primary areas: (a) activities, (b) materials, (c) strategies, and (d) linguistic units.
The researchers observed whole-class as well as small group sessions. The classes were divided into their reading groups. Each class had a low, medium, and high group.
When the class was divided into reading groups, we concentrated our coding on what went on in individual reading groups when the teacher was instructing them.
We initially intended to record the actual time children spent simply reading. This proved impossible for two reasons, first, children often shared a book and second, even when each child had a copy of the text it was apparent that many children were not looking at the text.
Assessment was done by administering the Book Buddies Early Literacy Screening. The BBELS assessment includes two parts. Part 1 assesses both early literacy understandings involved in word recognition and word recognition itself. Part 2 assesses ability to read and comprehend passages. A subtest of the Wide Range Achievement Test was also administered to every child to assess word reading. These assessments were done in September, December, and May.
In December and May, each child read five decodable words and five sight words that were specific to their reading groups.
Results
Reading and writing of texts was the activity all reading groups engaged in most extensively, except those in Classroom 4. Throughout the school year, about 40% or more of the language arts activities in all reading groups, except those in Classroom 4, involved reading and writing text.
Phonics and phonemic awareness activities were much more common in Classrooms 2 and 4 than in Classrooms 1 and 3
From September through December, 3% of the activities in the low-reading group in Classroom 1 involved phonics and, similarly, 6% of the activities in Classroom 3 involved phonics. In sharp contrast, during this same time, 50% of the activities in the low-reading group in Classroom 4 involved phonics, as did 37% of the activities in Classroom 2.
Some differences between Classrooms 2 and 4 in the phonics instruction. They were (a) both teachers made use of onsets and rimes, but Teacher 4 more frequently broke the rime unit into individual letter sounds, whereas Teacher 2 treated a key rime in a word as a source for analogies to other words; (b) the phonics curriculum was more preset in Classroom 4 than in Classroom 2; and (c) phonics instruction stayed at about the same level in Classroom 2 throughout the year, whereas systematic phonics instruction ceased in Classroom 4 by the end of February.
Teachers in Classrooms 1 and 3 relied on a class word wall and spelling activities to foster word recognition more than they did direct phonics instruction. Word wall and spelling activities in these two classrooms emphasized the visual letter strings of words.
End of the year BBELS testing showed the means on the passage reading of first grade, children in Classroom 4 were reading on a late-second-grade level; children in Classroom 3 were reading on a mid-second-grade level; children in Classroom 2 were reading at an end-of-first-grade level; and children in Classroom 1 were reading at a primer level.
Children could not comprehend passages in which they failed to identify many words. At the first-grade level, reading comprehension is ruled by word recognition ability.
Think aloud strategies were applied to read unfamiliar words. This includes sounding out and blending words together as well as using onsets and rimes. There are two primary findings from this strategy analysis. First, the strategies children tried to apply did reflect the strategies (or lack of such) that they were taught and second, children in the low groups had difficulty seeing the chunks in words.
Findings
It is important to know that this study contains limitations since it is not an experimental study and only contains four classrooms.
One important finding is that Differential Instruction may be helpful in first grade.
Phonics is critical for some children but may not be helpful for others.
Children who entered first grade with minimal reading skill seemed to have greatest success with the following classroom practices:
1. Teachers modeling word recognition strategies by (a) chunking words into
component units and encouraging the sound and blending them; and (b)
considering known letter-sounds in a word and what makes sense.
2. Children were encouraged to finger-point to words as text was read.
3. Children used hands-on materials (e.g., pocket charts for active sorting
of picture cards by sound and word cards by orthographic pattern).
4. Writing for sounds was part of phonics instruction.
5. Instructional groups were small with word recognition lesson plans
designed to meet the specific needs of children within that group.
The CIERA group then examined how reading instruction works in real classrooms by following the activity in four classrooms for one school year. CIERA reasoned that certain instructional procedures might be more effective if their delivery occurs in a particular way and to specific groups of children. Some examples are onset and rime instruction, which might be most effective for children with some decoding skill and some degree of phonological awareness, and sequential letter-by-letter decoding might be more effective for children with less early literacy knowledge. It is also felt that the form of instruction may alter its effectiveness.
In sum, in the current study we examined whether specific forms of instruction might differentially affect students with varying levels of phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge, and other early literacy foundations. CIERA’s goal was to begin to identify specific instructional practices that appear to best foster learning to read words for particular profiles of children.
Background-
· Volume of words children are expected to read quickly and accurately is overwhelming. By third grade alone, children will encounter about 25,000 distinct words. By the end of eighth grade, children will encounter over 80,000 different words.
· Even the most comprehensive phonics programs rarely provide direct instruction for more than about 90 phonics rules. Yet, over 500 different spelling-sound rules are needed to read (Gough & Juel, 1990; Juel, 1994).
· Rules of phonics in most instructional programs is explicit, while the identification of spelling patterns by skilled readers is implicit and requires considerable orthographic knowledge.
· Primary-grade children are hit with an avalanche of printed words. While some words are seen a lot, the most content words are not.
· Self-teaching hypothesis (Share,1995; Share & Stanovich, 1995; Torgesen & Hecht, 1996), children basically learn to read by developing phonological awareness, learning some basic letter-sound relationships, and phonologically recoding a specific printed word a few times.
· This article mentions linguistic units such as onsets and rimes.
· At about age 4, many children can perceive, segment, and manipulate the rather distinctive syllable units in words. At about ages 4 to 5, onsets and rimes become transparent— which is one reason that, at this age, children seem fond of rhyming games, poems, chants, and even manipulations of linguistic units in the creation of pseudo languages such as Pig Latin.
· Awareness of the individual phonemes within rime units often develops only with reading instruction because of co-articulation.
· Some children may need to analyze words at the phoneme level before they can successfully make analogies involving rimes.
Instructional Strategies
The teacher may provide a menu of strategies ranging from using the contextual cues provided by illustrations to sounding out and blending individual letter-sounds.
The goal of reading is sense making. Orthographic representations of words are what account for the effortless process of word recognition in skilled reading.
To balance sense making and orthographic experience, a reader should ask themselves these questions:
1. Does it make sense?
2. Does that look right?
3. What would you expect to see?
4. Can we say it that way?
Research Questions
Does instruction with an emphasis on different levels of linguistic units (e.g., onsets and rimes, individual phonemes) differentially affect children at various levels of reading development?
When and how are which linguistic units and which instructional strategies best taught to children?
Method- Participants and Setting
Four first grade classrooms (containing 18 students each) in a city in the southeastern US
Approximately 70% percent of the children qualify for subsidized lunch, 60% are African American, 36% are Caucasian, and 4% are from other ethnic groups.
Each of the classroom teachers was a female Caucasian who had more than 10 years of teaching experience. They were each considered a very good teacher by their school principals.
The principals’ judgments were based on two primary factors. The first consideration was that the level of achievement in these classrooms compared favorably with that of other first-grade classrooms at the school. The second consideration was classroom management.
Consideration was based on classroom observations, disciplinary referrals, and accumulated input from parents. Classrooms 1 and 2 were in one school and Classrooms 3 and 4 at the other school.
Language arts instruction generally lasted for 1 ½ hours in each of the classrooms. The ELA period in Classroom 3 tended to run longer, however, while Classroom 2 never ran longer as time was limited by school scheduling.
Each classroom had three reading groups, the 90-minute language arts time period was spent somewhat differently.
Classroom 1- 20 to 30 minutes was spent in a whole class word wall activity before dividing up into reading groups.
Classroom 2- time was spent solely in reading groups.
Classroom 3- the morning message was expanded from the 15 minutes that each class spent on this activity to an additional 15 to 20 minutes. In this classroom, the whole-class morning message formed an integral part of language arts instruction.
Classroom 4- time was conducted solely in reading groups.
Each class had a teaching assistant that supervised students while they were doing seatwork or at their centers.
Each classroom also made weekly visits to the school library, which included listening to a story read by the librarian.
Teachers all had available a basal reading series from 1986. They also had commercial little books the school system had been adding in recent years. The teachers also could use the basal at their discretion.
Procedure
Through weekly classroom observations of language arts instruction (frequently 90 minutes) throughout the school year, the researchers observed each low group each week and the other two groups in each class at least once every 2 weeks. They developed a coding system that would focus their observations on the following primary areas: (a) activities, (b) materials, (c) strategies, and (d) linguistic units.
The researchers observed whole-class as well as small group sessions. The classes were divided into their reading groups. Each class had a low, medium, and high group.
When the class was divided into reading groups, we concentrated our coding on what went on in individual reading groups when the teacher was instructing them.
We initially intended to record the actual time children spent simply reading. This proved impossible for two reasons, first, children often shared a book and second, even when each child had a copy of the text it was apparent that many children were not looking at the text.
Assessment was done by administering the Book Buddies Early Literacy Screening. The BBELS assessment includes two parts. Part 1 assesses both early literacy understandings involved in word recognition and word recognition itself. Part 2 assesses ability to read and comprehend passages. A subtest of the Wide Range Achievement Test was also administered to every child to assess word reading. These assessments were done in September, December, and May.
In December and May, each child read five decodable words and five sight words that were specific to their reading groups.
Results
Reading and writing of texts was the activity all reading groups engaged in most extensively, except those in Classroom 4. Throughout the school year, about 40% or more of the language arts activities in all reading groups, except those in Classroom 4, involved reading and writing text.
Phonics and phonemic awareness activities were much more common in Classrooms 2 and 4 than in Classrooms 1 and 3
From September through December, 3% of the activities in the low-reading group in Classroom 1 involved phonics and, similarly, 6% of the activities in Classroom 3 involved phonics. In sharp contrast, during this same time, 50% of the activities in the low-reading group in Classroom 4 involved phonics, as did 37% of the activities in Classroom 2.
Some differences between Classrooms 2 and 4 in the phonics instruction. They were (a) both teachers made use of onsets and rimes, but Teacher 4 more frequently broke the rime unit into individual letter sounds, whereas Teacher 2 treated a key rime in a word as a source for analogies to other words; (b) the phonics curriculum was more preset in Classroom 4 than in Classroom 2; and (c) phonics instruction stayed at about the same level in Classroom 2 throughout the year, whereas systematic phonics instruction ceased in Classroom 4 by the end of February.
Teachers in Classrooms 1 and 3 relied on a class word wall and spelling activities to foster word recognition more than they did direct phonics instruction. Word wall and spelling activities in these two classrooms emphasized the visual letter strings of words.
End of the year BBELS testing showed the means on the passage reading of first grade, children in Classroom 4 were reading on a late-second-grade level; children in Classroom 3 were reading on a mid-second-grade level; children in Classroom 2 were reading at an end-of-first-grade level; and children in Classroom 1 were reading at a primer level.
Children could not comprehend passages in which they failed to identify many words. At the first-grade level, reading comprehension is ruled by word recognition ability.
Think aloud strategies were applied to read unfamiliar words. This includes sounding out and blending words together as well as using onsets and rimes. There are two primary findings from this strategy analysis. First, the strategies children tried to apply did reflect the strategies (or lack of such) that they were taught and second, children in the low groups had difficulty seeing the chunks in words.
Findings
It is important to know that this study contains limitations since it is not an experimental study and only contains four classrooms.
One important finding is that Differential Instruction may be helpful in first grade.
Phonics is critical for some children but may not be helpful for others.
Children who entered first grade with minimal reading skill seemed to have greatest success with the following classroom practices:
1. Teachers modeling word recognition strategies by (a) chunking words into
component units and encouraging the sound and blending them; and (b)
considering known letter-sounds in a word and what makes sense.
2. Children were encouraged to finger-point to words as text was read.
3. Children used hands-on materials (e.g., pocket charts for active sorting
of picture cards by sound and word cards by orthographic pattern).
4. Writing for sounds was part of phonics instruction.
5. Instructional groups were small with word recognition lesson plans
designed to meet the specific needs of children within that group.
Thursday, September 6, 2007
Chapter 10: Young Bilingual Children and Early Literacy Development
Chapter 10: Young Bilingual Children and Early Literacy Development
by Patton O. Tabors and Catherine E. Snow
Introduction:
§ Little systematic research has been done in the field of literacy development of young bilingual children. The issue is urgent because more and more bilingual children are entering school in the US.
§ Around 8% of K, Gr 1 and Gr 2 children were reported to be LEP (limited English proficient) in the 1992-1993 school year. Predictions for their literacy achievement are less promising than that of monolingual English-speaking contemporaries.
§ Better understanding of process of literacy acquisition may lead to recommendations for 1) parents about language use at home, 2) increased program options at school 3) improved practices at home and in school
§ Research must examine formal reading practices in early grades as well as prior to entering KG.
§ Development of early language and literacy skills are foundational for more advanced literacy skills. Language input and support for literacy in Pre-K is predictive of literacy abilities in KG.
§ KG literacy ability is predictive of Gr. 4 reading comprehension. (Recent NAEP results found 64% of Hispanic children were reading below basic level in Gr. 4)
§ Alphabet, phonological awareness and print concept skills also predict later outcomes.
§ The authors pose the following questions:
§ Are young children capable of developing the full range of language skills in two languages at the same time?
§ How much exposure do children need by school entry to ensure a comparable level of English proficiency as compared to their monolingual counterparts?
§ Does the time needed to learn English detract from attention to preliteracy skills for these learners?
§ What happens to the language spoken at home? Wong Fillmore (1991a) reports that as a child begins to acquire a “high-prestige societal language”, development in L1 will be suspended or even lost.
§ Parents and children receive somewhat conflicting messages about their home language from educators and from the media. 1) The home language is irrelevant, valueless and a barrier to learning English and thereby to achievement of academic success. 2) If the home language is strong, all efforts should be directed to learning English. The result of this may be marginalization of the child’s ethnic group, low expectations for success in school and lack of maintenance of the home language.
If the home language is lost, what, then, is the impact on the child’s acquisition of literacy? (in that or in another language)
The purpose of the article is to develop a framework for detailing complexities in circumstances of young bilingual children in the US. The authors present this framework in three tables outlining children’s bilingual development in three periods: 0-3 years old, (Family and Community Language Environments); 3-5 years old, (Early Education Settings); and 5-8 years old (Bilingualism/Biliteracy in the Early Elementary Grades
§ 0-3 years old:Family and Community Language Environments for Bilingual Children
§ Four different bilingual environments are outlined.
Home language in English-language society
§ Family members use L1 with child in community that also uses L1
§ English is a powerful influence; child may acquire some English
§ Child develops L1; is incipient bilingual due to societal influence of English
Home language in English language community
§ Family and caretakers use L1; Community Language use is English. No established community of L1 speakers.
§ Child acquires L1 and may acquire some English.
§ Strong Development of L1; Child is incipient bilingual due to community sources. Child may know some English phonology and vocabulary.
§ Child not an active bilingual. Not much research on incipient bilinguals. Development might parallel that of monolingual child.
Bilingual Home in Bilingual Community
§ Family and caretakers use L1 and English. Community language is English.
§ Child acquires L1 and English; may begin to lose L1
§ There is a range of development in L1. Child is emergent bilingual.
§ Research has focused on types of language input they receive and the effect of that input on their emergent bilingualism.
§ Child must figure out that there are two languages present before beginning process of differentiating and acquiring them
Bilingual Home in English Language Community
§ Family members use L1 and English. Community uses English.
§ Child acquires L1 and English, but may begin to lose L1; there is a range of abilities in both languages.
§ The child is characterized as at-risk bilingual.
§ By age 3, bilingual children can fall anywhere along a continuum from monolingualism in home language to at risk for monolingualism in English.
§ Children with strong foundation in home language and support for it at home with activities such as book reading are developing skills that will transfer to English later.
§ At-risk bilinguals may also be at risk for acquiring English literacy. Parents may have insufficient literacy in English, but be so focused on it that they neglect in strong L1 activities at home. This leaves these children without foundational home support that seems crucial in this early period as well as in the preschool period to follow.
§ 3-5 years old: Early Care and Education Settings
§ Three different types of classrooms are outlined
§ First Language Classroom
§ Teachers are native speakers of L1 and likely bilingual in L1 and
English
§ Children are native speakers of L1 or all bilingual speakers of L1and
English or any combination of above
§ Language of interaction is all L1
§ Children develop L1 with no development of English
§ Bilingual Classroom
§ Teachers are bilingual in L1 and English or native speakers of
§ paired with native speakers of English
§ Children are all native speakers of L1 or all bilingual speakers of L1
§ and English or any combination of L1, English, and bilingual
§ Language of interaction spilt between L1 and English
§ Children maintain or develop L1 while developing English
§ English Language Classroom
§ Teachers are native speakers of English
§ Children are all native speakers of same L1 or different L1s, any combination of native speakers of same or different L1s, bilingual speakers of same or different L1s and English, or English speakers
§ Children develop English with little maintenance or development of L1
§ Children in a first language classroom with interactions taking place in L1 will tend to develop and maintain the literacy skills of their home, maintaining the important match between home support and classroom activity.
§ A program that is well-balanced and purposefully presents opportunities for children to be exposed to challenging levels in both languages is necessary if a maximum amount of learning in both languages is to occur in a bilingual early care/education classroom
§ One study compared Spanish-speaking children of Mexican descent who attended a Spanish-English bilingual classroom to children who did not attend preschool. Both groups made gains in Spanish, but those attending the bilingual classroom made greater gains in English.
§ The faster rate of English gains did not have a negative effect on the Spanish development of children in the bilingual classroom environment.
§ These children were living in a highly supportive Spanish speaking environment, so language development in Spanish, so Spanish language development was encouraged inside and outside the classroom, while greater amounts of English were presented inside the classroom.
§ English-language classrooms are the most typical experience for bilingual children in the US. Teachers communicate primarily in English. 1) It may be the only language teachers know 2) teachers may speak both languages, but feel it is important for children to acquire English language skills 3) teachers may be working with children from a variety of L1s, and English is the common language for classroom use.
§ Children move through four developmental phases when exposed to an out of home setting such as an English language classroom
§ 1) Home language use: children use home language with those who do and don’t know L1. They may take time to realize the language they are hearing is not the one they hear at home
§ 2) Nonverbal period in new language: Crying, whimpering, pointing and miming are used to communicate when children realize L1 does not always work
§ 3)Telegraphic/formulaic language: Moving from nonverbal phase to use of catch phrases in social situations: “I don’t know; “OK”, “lookit”, etc.
§ 4) Productive use of new language: Combination of formulaic phrases and newly learned vocabulary “I do a ice cream”; “I want a play dough”
It may seem that their language ability has decreased because they are using formulaic phrases less often while figuring out how English
works. Developmental sequence cumulative with individual differences
§ Four factors may have an impact on how quickly they acquire a new language
1. Motivation
2. Exposure
3. Age
4. Personality
§ Some may move through sequence more quickly
§ Conclusions that can be drawn concerning bilingual children’s vocabulary development 1) Variables in amounts of time devoted to each language will be reflected in the sophistication of the child’s use of that language 2) A child who has had no planning in the language environment will be exposed to less input than a monolingual, and thus have a less well-developed vocabulary 3) Because Vocabulary is an excellent predictor of reading skill, limitations in a child’s vocabulary may have implications for future literacy outcomes
§ Some preliteracy skills are transferable from one language to another, but these skills must have been developed in the first place. If not, there may be nothing to transfer to the new language.
§ In this case, teachers must begin again in a language over which the child has some control
§ 5-8 years old: Bilingualism / Biliteracy in the Early Elementary Grades
§ The authors present four possible programmatic options and possible outcomes for learners in these grades. Not all these placements may be available; there may be constraints from parents or school
§ First Language Program: Strong development of language and literacy outcomes in L1; Minimal English language and literacy development;;Incipient bilingual language and literacy development; Example: Exita para Todos (Success for All) establishes Eng. lit’y. only after child has reached Gr.2 Span.lit.
§ Transitional Bilingual Education: Continued,emergent or at risk development in language (L1 and English;) Continued, emergent or at risk development in English literacy; English dominant or at risk bilingualism or biliteracy; Example: Moving children quickly into Eng lit’y. L1 lit’y discontinued.May put children at risk for L1 lit’y, as this as not been consolidated
§ Two-way Bilingual Education: Strong development of L1 and English; Emergent literacy in L1; Emergent literacy in English; Range of bilingual/biliterate proficiencies. Example:two groups of children in same classroom. One Eng. Other L1. Instruction delivered alternately in two languages so literacy developed simultaneously. Ideal result: bilingualism/biliteracy for both groups
§ Mainstream Classrooms with or without ESL support: English only as language; no development of language or literacy skills in L1; Range of proficiencies in English language and literacy development; Highly at risk for bilingual language development in an English-only environment; No Bilingual literacy development. Most common experience for bilingual children.
§ Reasons a child may be placed in a mainstream classroom: 1) parental request 2) Native language not well represented in district 3) Child designated as proficient enough in English to warrant the placement
§ Risk factors: Children must speak, understand, read, write in English without benefit of instruction in L1; no possibility of becoming literate in L1; at risk for losing L1
§ In first language, transitional and two way classrooms, it is assumed more advantageous to begin lit’y instruction in L1. In mainstream classrooms, it is assumed children can catch up to monolingual peers and learn to read in English. Which assumption is correct?
§ Grounds for bilingual education: Children should be taught to read in language they know best because 1) reading is a meaning construction process: it is harder, less motivating and less authentic to read unknown words 2) literacy skills acquired in L1 transfer quickly to L2 once oral proficiency in L2 established, but many questions remain.
§ NRC Research: This research concluded that teaching a child to read in a not yet proficient language carried elements of risk for reading problems. Although it has worked, an Increment of risk to reading success was introduced for children learning to read in a language they did not know reasonably well.
§ Conclusion
§ There are multiple pathways available for young bilingual children, but these are susceptible to many different influences.
ü One pathway involves consistently supporting the child’s bilingualism as well as supporting the acquisition of literacy in two languages
ü Another pathway supports English-language literacy, but leads to dead ends for bilingualism or biliteracy.
ü Other pathways, one involving parents switching to English when it is not the stronger of their two languages, and another, children’s attending an English language preschool before their L1 is developed, may defer children’s achievement in English in the long run.
ü Research is still working on answers to those questions.
§ What can educators do to develop programs for young children?
ü Educators can encourage parents to maintain and use the L1 at home in quality interactions involving literacy activities and everyday conversation. The quality of the interaction is the critical factor.
ü Educators need to find out more about the bilingual child’s language and literacy background. 1)Obtain a detailed language history to ascertain what kinds of language exposure a child has had since birth. 2) Ask questions about home literacy experiences and the language associated with those experiences. (The authors suggest The Home Language and Literacy Exposure Index by Paez, De Temple and Snow. (2000))
ü Have creative ways in place of assessing what a child knows and in what language. Formal assessment tools that are still not widely available, but informal methods can be used.
ü Crucial point: that young bilingual children will have skills to bring to the process of learning to read in either or both languages.
ü Educators must know what those skills are and how to make best use of them to optimize bilingual children’s literacy acquisition.
Introduction:
§ Little systematic research has been done in the field of literacy development of young bilingual children. The issue is urgent because more and more bilingual children are entering school in the US.
§ Around 8% of K, Gr 1 and Gr 2 children were reported to be LEP (limited English proficient) in the 1992-1993 school year. Predictions for their literacy achievement are less promising than that of monolingual English-speaking contemporaries.
§ Better understanding of process of literacy acquisition may lead to recommendations for 1) parents about language use at home, 2) increased program options at school 3) improved practices at home and in school
§ Research must examine formal reading practices in early grades as well as prior to entering KG.
§ Development of early language and literacy skills are foundational for more advanced literacy skills. Language input and support for literacy in Pre-K is predictive of literacy abilities in KG.
§ KG literacy ability is predictive of Gr. 4 reading comprehension. (Recent NAEP results found 64% of Hispanic children were reading below basic level in Gr. 4)
§ Alphabet, phonological awareness and print concept skills also predict later outcomes.
§ The authors pose the following questions:
§ Are young children capable of developing the full range of language skills in two languages at the same time?
§ How much exposure do children need by school entry to ensure a comparable level of English proficiency as compared to their monolingual counterparts?
§ Does the time needed to learn English detract from attention to preliteracy skills for these learners?
§ What happens to the language spoken at home? Wong Fillmore (1991a) reports that as a child begins to acquire a “high-prestige societal language”, development in L1 will be suspended or even lost.
§ Parents and children receive somewhat conflicting messages about their home language from educators and from the media. 1) The home language is irrelevant, valueless and a barrier to learning English and thereby to achievement of academic success. 2) If the home language is strong, all efforts should be directed to learning English. The result of this may be marginalization of the child’s ethnic group, low expectations for success in school and lack of maintenance of the home language.
If the home language is lost, what, then, is the impact on the child’s acquisition of literacy? (in that or in another language)
The purpose of the article is to develop a framework for detailing complexities in circumstances of young bilingual children in the US. The authors present this framework in three tables outlining children’s bilingual development in three periods: 0-3 years old, (Family and Community Language Environments); 3-5 years old, (Early Education Settings); and 5-8 years old (Bilingualism/Biliteracy in the Early Elementary Grades
§ 0-3 years old:Family and Community Language Environments for Bilingual Children
§ Four different bilingual environments are outlined.
Home language in English-language society
§ Family members use L1 with child in community that also uses L1
§ English is a powerful influence; child may acquire some English
§ Child develops L1; is incipient bilingual due to societal influence of English
Home language in English language community
§ Family and caretakers use L1; Community Language use is English. No established community of L1 speakers.
§ Child acquires L1 and may acquire some English.
§ Strong Development of L1; Child is incipient bilingual due to community sources. Child may know some English phonology and vocabulary.
§ Child not an active bilingual. Not much research on incipient bilinguals. Development might parallel that of monolingual child.
Bilingual Home in Bilingual Community
§ Family and caretakers use L1 and English. Community language is English.
§ Child acquires L1 and English; may begin to lose L1
§ There is a range of development in L1. Child is emergent bilingual.
§ Research has focused on types of language input they receive and the effect of that input on their emergent bilingualism.
§ Child must figure out that there are two languages present before beginning process of differentiating and acquiring them
Bilingual Home in English Language Community
§ Family members use L1 and English. Community uses English.
§ Child acquires L1 and English, but may begin to lose L1; there is a range of abilities in both languages.
§ The child is characterized as at-risk bilingual.
§ By age 3, bilingual children can fall anywhere along a continuum from monolingualism in home language to at risk for monolingualism in English.
§ Children with strong foundation in home language and support for it at home with activities such as book reading are developing skills that will transfer to English later.
§ At-risk bilinguals may also be at risk for acquiring English literacy. Parents may have insufficient literacy in English, but be so focused on it that they neglect in strong L1 activities at home. This leaves these children without foundational home support that seems crucial in this early period as well as in the preschool period to follow.
§ 3-5 years old: Early Care and Education Settings
§ Three different types of classrooms are outlined
§ First Language Classroom
§ Teachers are native speakers of L1 and likely bilingual in L1 and
English
§ Children are native speakers of L1 or all bilingual speakers of L1and
English or any combination of above
§ Language of interaction is all L1
§ Children develop L1 with no development of English
§ Bilingual Classroom
§ Teachers are bilingual in L1 and English or native speakers of
§ paired with native speakers of English
§ Children are all native speakers of L1 or all bilingual speakers of L1
§ and English or any combination of L1, English, and bilingual
§ Language of interaction spilt between L1 and English
§ Children maintain or develop L1 while developing English
§ English Language Classroom
§ Teachers are native speakers of English
§ Children are all native speakers of same L1 or different L1s, any combination of native speakers of same or different L1s, bilingual speakers of same or different L1s and English, or English speakers
§ Children develop English with little maintenance or development of L1
§ Children in a first language classroom with interactions taking place in L1 will tend to develop and maintain the literacy skills of their home, maintaining the important match between home support and classroom activity.
§ A program that is well-balanced and purposefully presents opportunities for children to be exposed to challenging levels in both languages is necessary if a maximum amount of learning in both languages is to occur in a bilingual early care/education classroom
§ One study compared Spanish-speaking children of Mexican descent who attended a Spanish-English bilingual classroom to children who did not attend preschool. Both groups made gains in Spanish, but those attending the bilingual classroom made greater gains in English.
§ The faster rate of English gains did not have a negative effect on the Spanish development of children in the bilingual classroom environment.
§ These children were living in a highly supportive Spanish speaking environment, so language development in Spanish, so Spanish language development was encouraged inside and outside the classroom, while greater amounts of English were presented inside the classroom.
§ English-language classrooms are the most typical experience for bilingual children in the US. Teachers communicate primarily in English. 1) It may be the only language teachers know 2) teachers may speak both languages, but feel it is important for children to acquire English language skills 3) teachers may be working with children from a variety of L1s, and English is the common language for classroom use.
§ Children move through four developmental phases when exposed to an out of home setting such as an English language classroom
§ 1) Home language use: children use home language with those who do and don’t know L1. They may take time to realize the language they are hearing is not the one they hear at home
§ 2) Nonverbal period in new language: Crying, whimpering, pointing and miming are used to communicate when children realize L1 does not always work
§ 3)Telegraphic/formulaic language: Moving from nonverbal phase to use of catch phrases in social situations: “I don’t know; “OK”, “lookit”, etc.
§ 4) Productive use of new language: Combination of formulaic phrases and newly learned vocabulary “I do a ice cream”; “I want a play dough”
It may seem that their language ability has decreased because they are using formulaic phrases less often while figuring out how English
works. Developmental sequence cumulative with individual differences
§ Four factors may have an impact on how quickly they acquire a new language
1. Motivation
2. Exposure
3. Age
4. Personality
§ Some may move through sequence more quickly
§ Conclusions that can be drawn concerning bilingual children’s vocabulary development 1) Variables in amounts of time devoted to each language will be reflected in the sophistication of the child’s use of that language 2) A child who has had no planning in the language environment will be exposed to less input than a monolingual, and thus have a less well-developed vocabulary 3) Because Vocabulary is an excellent predictor of reading skill, limitations in a child’s vocabulary may have implications for future literacy outcomes
§ Some preliteracy skills are transferable from one language to another, but these skills must have been developed in the first place. If not, there may be nothing to transfer to the new language.
§ In this case, teachers must begin again in a language over which the child has some control
§ 5-8 years old: Bilingualism / Biliteracy in the Early Elementary Grades
§ The authors present four possible programmatic options and possible outcomes for learners in these grades. Not all these placements may be available; there may be constraints from parents or school
§ First Language Program: Strong development of language and literacy outcomes in L1; Minimal English language and literacy development;;Incipient bilingual language and literacy development; Example: Exita para Todos (Success for All) establishes Eng. lit’y. only after child has reached Gr.2 Span.lit.
§ Transitional Bilingual Education: Continued,emergent or at risk development in language (L1 and English;) Continued, emergent or at risk development in English literacy; English dominant or at risk bilingualism or biliteracy; Example: Moving children quickly into Eng lit’y. L1 lit’y discontinued.May put children at risk for L1 lit’y, as this as not been consolidated
§ Two-way Bilingual Education: Strong development of L1 and English; Emergent literacy in L1; Emergent literacy in English; Range of bilingual/biliterate proficiencies. Example:two groups of children in same classroom. One Eng. Other L1. Instruction delivered alternately in two languages so literacy developed simultaneously. Ideal result: bilingualism/biliteracy for both groups
§ Mainstream Classrooms with or without ESL support: English only as language; no development of language or literacy skills in L1; Range of proficiencies in English language and literacy development; Highly at risk for bilingual language development in an English-only environment; No Bilingual literacy development. Most common experience for bilingual children.
§ Reasons a child may be placed in a mainstream classroom: 1) parental request 2) Native language not well represented in district 3) Child designated as proficient enough in English to warrant the placement
§ Risk factors: Children must speak, understand, read, write in English without benefit of instruction in L1; no possibility of becoming literate in L1; at risk for losing L1
§ In first language, transitional and two way classrooms, it is assumed more advantageous to begin lit’y instruction in L1. In mainstream classrooms, it is assumed children can catch up to monolingual peers and learn to read in English. Which assumption is correct?
§ Grounds for bilingual education: Children should be taught to read in language they know best because 1) reading is a meaning construction process: it is harder, less motivating and less authentic to read unknown words 2) literacy skills acquired in L1 transfer quickly to L2 once oral proficiency in L2 established, but many questions remain.
§ NRC Research: This research concluded that teaching a child to read in a not yet proficient language carried elements of risk for reading problems. Although it has worked, an Increment of risk to reading success was introduced for children learning to read in a language they did not know reasonably well.
§ Conclusion
§ There are multiple pathways available for young bilingual children, but these are susceptible to many different influences.
ü One pathway involves consistently supporting the child’s bilingualism as well as supporting the acquisition of literacy in two languages
ü Another pathway supports English-language literacy, but leads to dead ends for bilingualism or biliteracy.
ü Other pathways, one involving parents switching to English when it is not the stronger of their two languages, and another, children’s attending an English language preschool before their L1 is developed, may defer children’s achievement in English in the long run.
ü Research is still working on answers to those questions.
§ What can educators do to develop programs for young children?
ü Educators can encourage parents to maintain and use the L1 at home in quality interactions involving literacy activities and everyday conversation. The quality of the interaction is the critical factor.
ü Educators need to find out more about the bilingual child’s language and literacy background. 1)Obtain a detailed language history to ascertain what kinds of language exposure a child has had since birth. 2) Ask questions about home literacy experiences and the language associated with those experiences. (The authors suggest The Home Language and Literacy Exposure Index by Paez, De Temple and Snow. (2000))
ü Have creative ways in place of assessing what a child knows and in what language. Formal assessment tools that are still not widely available, but informal methods can be used.
ü Crucial point: that young bilingual children will have skills to bring to the process of learning to read in either or both languages.
ü Educators must know what those skills are and how to make best use of them to optimize bilingual children’s literacy acquisition.
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Chapter 16, Fluency: A Review of Developmental and Remedial Practices by Melanie R. Kuhn and Steven A. Stahl
This article was originally printed in 2003 by the American Psychological Association in Journal of Educational Psychology 95 (1), 3-21 and examines the stages of a learner's progress in developing proficiency with print and the increase of familiarity to achieve fluency. It is a look at theory and studies that facilitate the role of fluency.
A beginning look at reading development focussed on chall's (1996) comprehensive view of the reading process and a look at the underpinnings of fluency beginning with word recognition. Ehri (1995,1998) describes phases of sight-word learning and automatic word recognition in fluency. Chall proposed six stages: 1. emergent literacy, behaviors developed before formal reading instruction begins such as book handling and phonemic awareness; 2. initial stage of conventional literacy, formal reading instruction including sound-symbol correspondence and decoding ability development; 3. confirmation fluency, "ungluing from print" includes automaticity, prosody, phrasing, stress, and intonation to reach meaning; 4. reading for learning new information and understanding content material though often from a single perspective; 5. multiple viewpoints, dealing with a variety of viewpoints enables the student to deal with complex texts and crtically evaluate the topics and the sources; and 6.construction and reconstruction, is the stage of synthesis of several viewpoints to determine the student's individual perspective thus becoming a critical reader.
Students need to focus on automatizing their decoding ability in order to have their minds free to focus on understanding. Fluency is essential for students to be able to focus on the primary goal in reading: constructing meaning from text.
Ehris's (1995) phases of sight-word development include familiarity and memory os spelling, pronunciation, and meaning. Ehri depicts the four phases as pre-alphabetic (visual aspects of a word), partial-alphabetic (recognizes at least the first and last letters of a word and graphemes as representatives of sound structure though this knowledge is incomplete particularly for sight words), full-alphabetic (differnces in grapheme representation of words is immediate and sight words that do not regularly correspond phonemically and graphemically are also recognized quickly), and consolidated-alphabetic, (recognition of words is automatic and accurate with fluency relieving the memory load and making it possible to learn new words)
Fluency rests on automaticity and prosody whose components are accuracy in deoding, automaticity of word recognition, and
prosodic features as stress, pitch, and phrasing as an aid to comprehension.
Automaticity contributes to fluency by recognition of words with less attention than is needed during decoding when facing cognitive tasks. The challenge is to determine what words compose the test and what meaning can be understood. Without automaticity, the reader relies on context to identify words. The instantaneous recognition of words frees the reader to focus on meaning.
The question is: how does a reader shift from decoding to automaticity? Practice, practice, practice! Familiarity breeds fluency. The automatic recognition of words frees the mind to contemplate meaning. Prosody including pitch and intonation, tone and timing allows chunch groups of words into meaningful units or phreases known as suprasegmental contributes to meaning. Chafe offers the idea that prosody may provide a connection between fluency and comprehension as if the act of prosody unlocks meaning that is embedded in syntax. Often the experience of hearing speech is easier to understand than reading and the hypothesis rests on the support prosody gives to microprocessing.
Dowhower (1991) identifies six distinct markers in prosodic reading. w. pausal intrusions, length of prases, appropriates of phrases, final phrase lengthening, terminal intonation contour, and stress enabling connections between written and oral language. Prosody is the transfer of this knowledge from speech into reading text. Children are tuned into prosody but also depend on it for fluency and comprehension.
Research on fluency instruction by National Reading Panel and National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (2000) examined instruction guided oral reading (reading with guidance and feedback) and independent silent reading. Researchers noted that the best predictor of gains in reading is the amount of tie spent reading, and students who kept daily logs of their reading in and out of school made gains through in-school reading. In repeated reading the child reads the passage, the teacher monitors and provides feedback. In another study, guidance is given before reading. In still another study, students read only once. The varied nature of these studies prohibited reliable information gathering.
In considering fluency instruction as remediation, the studies noted two categories: those that built on independent learnng known as unassistedg and assisted-reading strategies. Reading methods were designed for individual learners, dyads, or groups to note improvements in fluency measured in reading rate on unread texts and far transfer. Unassisted repeated reading asked students to read new text daily to improve word recognition skills and increase their reading rate to 100 words per minute. Students were expected to read the passage orally to an adult and then reread it silently while keeping track of the nuber of rereads. Repeated rereadings significantly reduced the number of miscues made while no significance was found in fluency with the use of isolated word recognition.
Dahl (1979) evaluated three reading strategies: training in the use of hypothesis testing, repeated reading, and isolated word recognition. Similarly, Samuels (1979) was interested in increasing the reading rate and learner accuracy and found that repeated reading led to success. The more automatic the words, the less time was spent in decoding and more time was allowed for the construction of meaning and comprehension.
Easy and difficult text with scaffolding was considered by Raschotte and Torgeson (1985) but failed to find significant difference betwen the control and experimental group. Researchers felt there needed to be more study in this area.
Cpmprehension studies mirrored fluency studies. Effects for microcomprehension were greater than general comprehension meausres. Fluency affects microcompreension through syntactic relations in sentences but macrocomprehension processes are more affected by prior knowledge. Repeated reading effected speech pauses and intonation. Assisted reading strategies emphasized practice as a means of improving accuracy, automaticity, and prosody thereby enhancing comprehension.
Neurological Impress Method (Assisted Reading sometimes known as choral reading because a tutor reads the material into the ear of the student. The teacher slides a finger under the words and can vary the speed and volume of aloud reading. This study resulted in significant increase in fluency and comprehension (1.9 years)
Reading while listening approach studies by Chamsky (1978) encouraged students to select their own reading material, listen to the books on tape while setting their own pace. First they listed to the book and then selected a prtion to practice. Finally they read along while listed to the story and the parts they wanted to rehearse. They were to slide their fingers under the word for tactile reindorcement. The more they practiced the better.
Closed-Caption TV benefitted turned-off learners for effective lessons in fluency.
Comparisons of repeated reading (Dowhower 1987) required students to reread a meaninful passage until it became fluid. Students were encouraged to practice with a tape recorder and to increase their rate and accuracy. Microcomputer was used to detect length of phrases and number of words. Both forms of repeated reading increased word accuracy and comprehension. Reading-while listening strategy was easiest to implement. In listening centers, student were asked to recite the readings and were held responsible to practice or they would not practice.
Integrated Fluency Lessons has the teacher read aloud. The group discusses it and then the teacher rereads the story and children follow along or echo. Students were assigned a section of text to master. This differs from round-robin training and there was an increase in fluency and reading time.
Students in the shared-book approach made significant gains in fluency elements and comprehension with the opportunity to practice. Conclusios stated that fluency instruction was highly effective in reading at primary level and higher
and that fluency instruction can increase the amout of reading a student does. Assisted, repeated and parsed reading increases fluency rate and self-monitoring. Increasing the amount of reading done has positive effects and at a point in development,
A beginning look at reading development focussed on chall's (1996) comprehensive view of the reading process and a look at the underpinnings of fluency beginning with word recognition. Ehri (1995,1998) describes phases of sight-word learning and automatic word recognition in fluency. Chall proposed six stages: 1. emergent literacy, behaviors developed before formal reading instruction begins such as book handling and phonemic awareness; 2. initial stage of conventional literacy, formal reading instruction including sound-symbol correspondence and decoding ability development; 3. confirmation fluency, "ungluing from print" includes automaticity, prosody, phrasing, stress, and intonation to reach meaning; 4. reading for learning new information and understanding content material though often from a single perspective; 5. multiple viewpoints, dealing with a variety of viewpoints enables the student to deal with complex texts and crtically evaluate the topics and the sources; and 6.construction and reconstruction, is the stage of synthesis of several viewpoints to determine the student's individual perspective thus becoming a critical reader.
Students need to focus on automatizing their decoding ability in order to have their minds free to focus on understanding. Fluency is essential for students to be able to focus on the primary goal in reading: constructing meaning from text.
Ehris's (1995) phases of sight-word development include familiarity and memory os spelling, pronunciation, and meaning. Ehri depicts the four phases as pre-alphabetic (visual aspects of a word), partial-alphabetic (recognizes at least the first and last letters of a word and graphemes as representatives of sound structure though this knowledge is incomplete particularly for sight words), full-alphabetic (differnces in grapheme representation of words is immediate and sight words that do not regularly correspond phonemically and graphemically are also recognized quickly), and consolidated-alphabetic, (recognition of words is automatic and accurate with fluency relieving the memory load and making it possible to learn new words)
Fluency rests on automaticity and prosody whose components are accuracy in deoding, automaticity of word recognition, and
prosodic features as stress, pitch, and phrasing as an aid to comprehension.
Automaticity contributes to fluency by recognition of words with less attention than is needed during decoding when facing cognitive tasks. The challenge is to determine what words compose the test and what meaning can be understood. Without automaticity, the reader relies on context to identify words. The instantaneous recognition of words frees the reader to focus on meaning.
The question is: how does a reader shift from decoding to automaticity? Practice, practice, practice! Familiarity breeds fluency. The automatic recognition of words frees the mind to contemplate meaning. Prosody including pitch and intonation, tone and timing allows chunch groups of words into meaningful units or phreases known as suprasegmental contributes to meaning. Chafe offers the idea that prosody may provide a connection between fluency and comprehension as if the act of prosody unlocks meaning that is embedded in syntax. Often the experience of hearing speech is easier to understand than reading and the hypothesis rests on the support prosody gives to microprocessing.
Dowhower (1991) identifies six distinct markers in prosodic reading. w. pausal intrusions, length of prases, appropriates of phrases, final phrase lengthening, terminal intonation contour, and stress enabling connections between written and oral language. Prosody is the transfer of this knowledge from speech into reading text. Children are tuned into prosody but also depend on it for fluency and comprehension.
Research on fluency instruction by National Reading Panel and National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (2000) examined instruction guided oral reading (reading with guidance and feedback) and independent silent reading. Researchers noted that the best predictor of gains in reading is the amount of tie spent reading, and students who kept daily logs of their reading in and out of school made gains through in-school reading. In repeated reading the child reads the passage, the teacher monitors and provides feedback. In another study, guidance is given before reading. In still another study, students read only once. The varied nature of these studies prohibited reliable information gathering.
In considering fluency instruction as remediation, the studies noted two categories: those that built on independent learnng known as unassistedg and assisted-reading strategies. Reading methods were designed for individual learners, dyads, or groups to note improvements in fluency measured in reading rate on unread texts and far transfer. Unassisted repeated reading asked students to read new text daily to improve word recognition skills and increase their reading rate to 100 words per minute. Students were expected to read the passage orally to an adult and then reread it silently while keeping track of the nuber of rereads. Repeated rereadings significantly reduced the number of miscues made while no significance was found in fluency with the use of isolated word recognition.
Dahl (1979) evaluated three reading strategies: training in the use of hypothesis testing, repeated reading, and isolated word recognition. Similarly, Samuels (1979) was interested in increasing the reading rate and learner accuracy and found that repeated reading led to success. The more automatic the words, the less time was spent in decoding and more time was allowed for the construction of meaning and comprehension.
Easy and difficult text with scaffolding was considered by Raschotte and Torgeson (1985) but failed to find significant difference betwen the control and experimental group. Researchers felt there needed to be more study in this area.
Cpmprehension studies mirrored fluency studies. Effects for microcomprehension were greater than general comprehension meausres. Fluency affects microcompreension through syntactic relations in sentences but macrocomprehension processes are more affected by prior knowledge. Repeated reading effected speech pauses and intonation. Assisted reading strategies emphasized practice as a means of improving accuracy, automaticity, and prosody thereby enhancing comprehension.
Neurological Impress Method (Assisted Reading sometimes known as choral reading because a tutor reads the material into the ear of the student. The teacher slides a finger under the words and can vary the speed and volume of aloud reading. This study resulted in significant increase in fluency and comprehension (1.9 years)
Reading while listening approach studies by Chamsky (1978) encouraged students to select their own reading material, listen to the books on tape while setting their own pace. First they listed to the book and then selected a prtion to practice. Finally they read along while listed to the story and the parts they wanted to rehearse. They were to slide their fingers under the word for tactile reindorcement. The more they practiced the better.
Closed-Caption TV benefitted turned-off learners for effective lessons in fluency.
Comparisons of repeated reading (Dowhower 1987) required students to reread a meaninful passage until it became fluid. Students were encouraged to practice with a tape recorder and to increase their rate and accuracy. Microcomputer was used to detect length of phrases and number of words. Both forms of repeated reading increased word accuracy and comprehension. Reading-while listening strategy was easiest to implement. In listening centers, student were asked to recite the readings and were held responsible to practice or they would not practice.
Integrated Fluency Lessons has the teacher read aloud. The group discusses it and then the teacher rereads the story and children follow along or echo. Students were assigned a section of text to master. This differs from round-robin training and there was an increase in fluency and reading time.
Students in the shared-book approach made significant gains in fluency elements and comprehension with the opportunity to practice. Conclusios stated that fluency instruction was highly effective in reading at primary level and higher
and that fluency instruction can increase the amout of reading a student does. Assisted, repeated and parsed reading increases fluency rate and self-monitoring. Increasing the amount of reading done has positive effects and at a point in development,
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