The Reading Process

Chapter 6

            After reading the chapter concerning the role of perception in the process of reading, I found it difficult to limit myself to choosing only two key ideas.  This chapter reinforced many of the mental processes and strategies that I have already seen occur with my own students as they engage in reading activities and work to construct meaning through the texts they read.  One of the key ideas I discovered in reading this chapter is the influence of an individual’s background knowledge, or schemata, on the process of reading (Kucer, 2009, p. 134).  As the author states, schemata “represent the reader’s knowledge of objects, situations, and events, as well as knowledge of processes, such as reading, washing clothes, or home buying” (Kucer, 2009, p. 135).  As a teacher, I must always be cognizant of the fact that children search for relevant background knowledge that will assist them in deriving meaning from the books they read.  Each year, I help my students understand what “schema” is and how it relates to their reading.  My students learn that schema is everything they already know and have experienced.  I almost always begin by asking my students who has ever been to a hospital before.  A few of the students who raise their hands will share why they were in a hospital, and then I’ll ask them to describe what types of things they noticed while they were there.  Once several students have shared their experiences, I remind the class that the students who have just shared have schema about hospitals.  We then discuss the implications their background knowledge might have if they were reading a book in which the main character has to go to a hospital.  Through this discussion, I help the students recognize that the background knowledge you have about a topic such as hospitals helps you better understand the feelings and experiences of the characters in the books you read.  I model how to activate this prior knowledge through think alouds as I read a variety of text types and structures.  These think alouds are genuine and purposeful because I want my students to truly see what it looks like when a reader activates their background knowledge to help them better understand the text’s meaning.  I’ve found that students become so excited about using their schema to help them understand their reading that they often begin to intentionally choose books based on the depth of their prior knowledge on a particular topic.  Teachers must not overlook the significance of prior knowledge on the process of reading, especially in content area subjects such as science and social studies.  When students are lacking essential information on a topic, they must be provided with opportunities to discover and build the necessary background knowledge that will facilitate their comprehension of informational texts.

            Another key idea from this chapter that I found to be particularly important was the lack of miscue analysis in many classrooms today.  As Kucer points out in his examination of proficient and less proficient readers, all too often the teacher’s “analysis of student reading is quantitative rather than qualitative; that is, the number of words ‘missed’ are calculated but not the impact of these miscues on meaning” (Kucer, 2009, p. 145).  After analyzing the patterns of miscues in texts read by proficient and less proficient readers, it becomes obvious that struggling readers have difficulty monitoring for meaning because they are spending so much time and energy on decoding every single word correctly.  In contrast, the majority of the miscues made by proficient readers made “sense within the context of the sentence” (Kucer, 2009, p. 145).  As a teacher, analyzing miscues similar to the ones found in this chapter is absolutely crucial in determining what instruction your students need most.  Once you have done this, you can focus your reading instruction for the less proficient readers in your class on developing “repair” strategies that will teach students how to monitor for meaning as they read.  I believe that too often teachers assume that their students already know how to re-read the sentence or read-on to see if their guess makes sense.  However, children must have multiple opportunities to learn and experience strategies such as these.  I found the “Reading Strategy Wall Chart” on page 153 of this chapter to be very helpful, and I plan on using a chart similar to this one to help reinforce these strategies with my struggling readers this year.

Background Knowledge and Comprehension

Chapter 7

          The qualities of knowing a word that are described in detail in Chapter 7 of Dimensions of Literacy emphasize the value of vocabulary instruction in relation to reading comprehension.  Deep and rich levels of word knowledge must be developed in students in order to provide the background knowledge that is so critical to reading comprehension.  Although I have often experienced the benefits of vocabulary instruction, I can see that this type of instruction in classrooms is no longer optional.  Rather, explicit vocabulary instruction appears to be necessary for the increasingly diverse student populations found within classrooms all over the world.  I vividly remember the ineffective vocabulary instruction I received in school growing up.  I was given a list of twenty vocabulary words at the beginning of each week, and the expectation was that I have each word’s definition memorized in preparation for the quiz at the end of the week.  Perhaps in part due to my own unpleasant experience with learning vocabulary, I often find planning vocabulary instruction one of the most challenging areas to plan within my literacy instructional block.

          One of the lesson plans found in Teaching the Dimensions of Literacy that looks particularly effective is called “Predicting Word Meanings” and can be found on page 280.  The objective of this lesson is to teach students how to use their background knowledge and the surrounding context to determine and expand the meanings of words.  In this lesson, students are responsible for reading a text that may contain unfamiliar words as well as familiar words that may be used in a new way.  Working individually or in small groups, students are given a four-column chart where they can keep track of unfamiliar words as they are reading through the text.  In this lesson, the teacher has already selected the words for this activity and they can be found in the first column of the chart.  Once students have identified the words, they predict what they believe each word might mean in the story they are about to read and record their prediction in the second column.  After sharing several student predictions and having students justify the reasoning behind their predictions, the students are then given the story from which the words came from.  Once they are finished reading the text, they record the actual meanings of the words in the third column of the chart based on the context in which they were found in the story.  In the fourth and final column of the chart, students support their predictions using information from the text as well as their background knowledge.  At the end of this lesson, the teacher takes a moment to discuss with students the importance of using the surrounding context to help them predict what unfamiliar words might mean.  This lesson perfectly illustrates the author’s assertion that “it is only through the use of context and knowledge of the subject matter or topic that readers are able to access the appropriate meaning of each word” (Kucer, 2009, p. 171).  Words that we think we “know” may not help us in comprehending a text if we do not understand the context within which the words are found.

Reader-Text-Writer

Chapter 8

            After reading Chapter 8, I found myself questioning the ways in which I currently teach writing to my students.  I had always been instructed to teach the steps of the writing process and guide students through this process one step at a time.  By doing this, I was told that I would be helping my students organize their thoughts and ideas, as well as focusing their attention toward refining each part of their piece of writing.  It seems that I’m not the only teacher with this mistaken understanding.  As the author states, “despite the fact that writing is such a dynamic, transactive, and recursive process, it is interesting to note that much writing instruction – even that labeled as ‘process’ oriented – continues to reflect a stage view of writing” (Kucer, 2009, p. 187).  I had never stopped to consider the possibility that this process might interfere with my students’ ability to generate meaning through their writing.  Rather, I had always perceived the writing process as a helpful teaching tool that gives students a clear and predictable structure to follow when working on their writing.  Now that I have read this chapter, I can see that teaching the process of planning, writing, and revising continues to be an essential component of writing instruction.  However, perhaps allowing students more flexibility to choose which steps of the writing process they feel they need as well as the sequence that works best for them is something that I need to reconsider in my own classroom.

            One topic covered in this chapter that did not surprise me was the fact that “having knowledge of the topic can improve the writing of both children and adults” (Kucer, 2009, p. 182).  We certainly cannot expect children to write proficiently about an unfamiliar topic.  When integrating writing into other subject areas, teachers must ensure that adequate time has been spent in learning about the specified topic prior to requiring the students to write about that topic.  For example, when teaching students about the biography reading genre, I would never expect my students to write a biography before they have had multiple opportunities to read a variety of biographies and explore the text structure that authors typically use within a biography.  Once they are familiar with the biography genre, they are much more prepared to write a biography of their own pertaining to an individual they are knowledgeable about.

            I’ve always believed that children need to understand that writing is never perfect or flawless in the beginning.  When reading that writers “typically will withhold judgments that would initiate revision” until they finish writing their first drafts because “this stance allows for the free-flow of ideas and the exploration of knowledge that might be relevant for the writing task,” I found myself nodding my head in agreement (Kucer, 2009, p. 187).  As a self-professed perfectionist, I struggled for years with understanding that revision is only something to worry about after you feel that your writing is finished.  One of the goals I have in my own writing instruction is to teach my students that making your writing “polished” takes hard work and dedication.  Providing my students with strategies they can use to help them as they revise their writing is an important part of my responsibility as their writing teacher, and I am continuously searching for additional strategies and tools that I can share with my students.

The Sociocultural Dimension of Literacy

Chapters 9 & 10

          These two chapters were very interesting and introduced a lot of ideas that I had never really taken the time to stop and think about before.  For example, I had never thought of what specific social groups I was a member of, aside from my gender, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and occupation because these are the identities that seem to be emphasized most often in our society.  After all, it seems that many of these social identities are required each and every time I have to complete any type of application, medical form, or questionnaire.  It makes sense that our membership in various social groups impacts our beliefs and behavior, as well as our interpretations and interactions with those around us.  The statement that "often, the group's members are unaware of the source of their beliefs and behaviors" (Kucer, 2009, p. 219) was incredibly eye-opening for me, and caused me to take a step back and evaluate some of my own beliefs to see if I could determine their original source.  Many of my beliefs came from my parents and the environment in which I was raised as a child, but I can see that many others have developed from my socioeconomic status and occupation as a full-time teacher now that I am a fully-grown adult.

          After reflecting on the social groups that I belong, I found that I have more social identities than I realized I had prior to reading these chapters.  Some of the social groups that I identify with include the following: female, middle-class, teacher, graduate student, European-American, and Christian.  However, I am not a member of a specific political group, and I am not married and do not have children of my own.  I become acutely aware of the fact that I am not a member of these particular social groups whenever I have conversations with married colleagues and friends who have children or are currently expecting a baby.  I am also aware of my religious identity and how that may influence my thoughts regarding people who belong to other social groups whose values and beliefs may differ from my own.  Once I evaluated the various types of literacy that I use on a daily basis, I found it interesting that I primarily use literacy for daily living, work-related, educational, and social-interactional purposes.  With the overwhelming demands of my job as a teacher and my coursework as a graduate student, I’ve found that the time I spend using literacy for entertainment/recreational and news-related purposes has recently decreased drastically.

          I found the study that portrayed the differences in language use that were found in three different towns in the southeastern United States to be particularly insightful.  The differences in terms of literacy development and success in school among the children growing up in Maintown, Roadville, and Trackton were strikingly apparent, and it left me feeling uneasy about the state of literacy instruction in schools today.   How is it possible that, even with our current understanding of the sociocultural dimension of literacy, many children continue to be assessed not “so much for what they learned in school, but what they learned at home and brought to the classroom setting” (Kucer, 2009, p. 227)?  Regardless of what area of the country we teach, we will undoubtedly come into contact with children who come from diverse backgrounds and bring diverse literacy experiences with them to school.  As teachers, the last thing we should be doing is creating unrealistic demands for children who may be bringing conflicting understandings of literacy with them into the classroom.  The examination of the explicit and implicit layers of meaning in written discourse using the original folktale (The Three Little Pigs) and the same story told from a different perspective (The True Story of the Three Little Pigs) was also helpful in recognizing an author’s intended purpose.  I’ve used these two stories in my own classroom each year to highlight the differences in the narrator’s point of view and explore how these differences alter the meaning of the story.  I loved the idea of using inquiry charts to help students consider the concept that is currently being studied in class by using multiple resources that “represent various voices, perspectives, and positions” (Kucer, 2009, p. 258).  These inquiry charts appear to be excellent tools that can be used in the classroom to help students respond to the literature they read in a more critical and analytical way. 

Reference

Kucer, S.B. (2009). Dimensions of literacy: A conceptual base for teaching reading and writing in school settings. (3rd Edition). New York, NY: Routledge.