ENGED 370 – Kaitlin Roth
Chapter 3: Meeting the Literacy Needs of Diverse Learners

“Learning a second language should not mean losing a first language.”

ELL Developmental Language Levels: a four-by-four model of language arts instruction that focuses on listening, speaking, reading, and writing at four levels of English proficiency.

– teachers need to understand that English language learners face unique challenges such as limited background knowledge and vocabulary constraints, and they are often unfamiliar with the text structures found in academic content books

– for ELL students, BICS (basic interpersonal communication skills) are needed in social situations but don’t develop until 6 months to 2 years after arrival in the United States

– CALP (cognitive academic language proficiency ) refers to formal academic learning. It includes listening, speaking, reading and writing and about subject material. It usually takes 5 to 7 years to develop

Response Protocol: a framework for teacher responses to English language learners when they respond to teacher questions.

– designed to help teachers better their understanding of students’ language development and broaden their repertoire for meeting the needs of this special population

Contribution Approach: a multicultural approach that typically includes culturally specific celebrations and holidays.

– teachers typically include Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Additive Approach: a thematic approach that addresses multicultural issues.

– teachers might integrate into the curriculum a unit that addresses multicultural issues; otherwise, the curriculum remains relatively the same

Transformative Approach: a multicultural approach that provides students with opportunities to read about cultural concepts and events that are different from their own, make judgments about them, think critically, and generate conclusions.

– teachers attempt to help students understand diverse ethnic and cultural perspectives by providing them with opportunities to learn about culture and cultural differences

Decision-making and Social-Action Approach: a multicultural approach that provides students with opportunities to undertake activities and projects related to cultural issues.

– projects that involve social action and civic duties are encouraged

Academic and Cognitive Diversity: the situation that results when children learn faster than, slower than, or differently from what is expected in school.

– exceptional children: students who “differ from the norm (either below or above) to such an extent that an individualized program of adapted specialized education is required to meet their needs”

Public Law 94-142: the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, passed in 1975 and since amended, is based on several principles that remain in effect today.

• “to assure that all children with disabilities have available to them … a free appropriate public education which emphasizes special education and related services designed to meet their unique needs
• to assure that the rights of children with disabilities and their parents … are protected
• to assist States and localities to provide for the education of all children with disabilities
• to assess and assure the effectiveness of efforts to educate all children with disabilities”

IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act): a four-part piece of American legislation that ensures students with a disability are provided with Free Appropriate Public Education that is tailored to their individual needs.

– The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004: a United States law that mandates equity, accountability and excellence in education for children with disabilities. There are approximately 6.7 million children and youth with disabilities in public schools across the United States

Instructional Principles for Academic and Cognitive Diversity: useful guidelines that capture the beliefs for what literacy learning for students with diverse cognitive and academic abilities should include:

• students need to be engaged with authentic texts
• students with diverse abilities need to see reading as purposeful; they need to see reading as “real” in their lives
• students who differ in their reading abilities need experiences with literacy tasks that are highly engaging and that are focused on their interests as learners
• students who struggle need teachers who can guide them toward success
• teachers of students with a variety of abilities need to be focused
• effective teachers involve parents

Inclusion: incorporating the diverse needs and abilities of all students into classroom instruction

– the concept of inclusion means that children with special needs are included in the regular classroom and receive assistance from the regular education teachers as well as the special education teachers

– special education students in regular education settings have opportunities to learn from their peers and to develop friendships and social skills

Literacy Coaches: a primary goal of coaching reading is to provide long-term professional development for teachers that ultimately results in improved reading achievement

Ideal characteristics of literacy coaches include: 

• strong understanding of the reading process
• excellence in teaching reading
• exemplary communication skills with peers
• skill in literacy assessment and instructional practices

Differentiated Instruction: adapting teaching for all learners to meet individual needs

– the teacher proactively plans a variety of ways to “get at” and express learning

– is based assessing students needs, implementing multiple approaches to learning, and blending whole class, small group, and individual instruction

– teachers can differentiate based on the students’ levels of readiness for a topic, student abilities, and students’ interests

“Different learners have different needs.”

Running Records review from Chapter 2’s blog: running record information

Classroom Application

• Basic interpersonal communication skills for English language learners don’t develop until 6 months to 2 years after arrival to the United States
• Cognitive academic language proficiency for ELL’s usually take 5 to 7 years to develop
• The response protocol is designed to help teachers better their understanding of students’ language development
• Contribution and Transformative approaches are both multicultural approaches that provide students with opportunities to expand their knowledge and understanding of cultures different than their own
• IDEA improvement act of 2004 is a law that “mandates equity, accountability and excellence in education for children with disabilities.”
• The goal of a literacy coach is to better a students reading skills and achieve long term results/improvement
• Different learners will have different needs–it’s up to the teacher to figure out what those specific needs are and how to fulfill them

ENGED 370 – Kaitlin Roth
Chapter 2: Approaches to Reading Instruction

ENGED 370| Blog #1| Kaitlin Roth
Chapter 1: Knowledge and Beliefs about Reading

“The main goal of reading instruction is teaching children to become independent readers & learners.”

Autobiographical narrative: an instructional strategy to help students and teachers reflect upon personal knowledge.

– a powerful tool that helps link personal history as a reader to instructional beliefs and practices

– helps inquire into the past in order to better understand what people in the present and what one would like to do in future classroom situations

– teachers and students who engage in narrative inquiry explore mental pictures of memories, incidents, or situations in their lives

– inquiry allows reflection, builds connections, and can project

“Where we have been and where we are going interact to make meaning of the situations in which we find ourselves.” 

Professional knowledge: knowledge acquired from an ongoing study of the practice of teaching.

– throughout teachers professional development, the books and journals teachers read, the courses and workshops they take, and the conferences they attend contribute to the vision they have of reading & learning to read

– the instructional differences among teachers reflect the knowledge teachers put to use in classroom situations

– teachers construct theories of reading and learning to read based on their ways of knowing, which influence the way they teach, including the ways they plan, use & select texts, interact with learners, and assess literate activity

Literacy coach: an individual who provides professional development opportunities and resources. In-class coaching and support provide a variety of professional development activities while in a non-evaluative role.

– primary role of a reading coach is to support teacher learning

– using their expertise in reading & learning to read, literacy coaches provide professional development opportunities and resources.

– help develop expertise in the classroom

– role of literacy coach varies on the age of the student and reading ability

Alphabetic principle: principle suggesting that letters in the alphabet map to phonemes, the minimal sound units represented in written language.

– suggests that there is a correspondence between letters (graphemes), and sounds (phonemes)

– Pearson likens the discovery of the alphabetic principle to learning a great secret- that English writing represents sounds

– A teacher needs to understand how beginning readers come to master the alphabetic system & use their knowledge of English writing to identify those words

Orthographic knowledge: knowledge of common letter patterns that skilled readers use rapidly and accurately to associate with sounds.

– knowledge that is so thoroughly learned that skilled readers do not have to put any energy into identifying words

– it is important to know how to help beginning readers develop into skilled readers who can identify words quickly and accurately as they read

– Phonological Awareness *click for phonological awareness overview*

Schemata: mental frameworks that humans use to organize and construct meaning.

– reflect the prior knowledge, experiences, conceptual understandings, attitudes, values, skills, and procedures a reader brings to a reading situation

– children use what they know already to give meaning to new events and experiences

– cognitive psychologists use the singular term “schema” to describe how humans organize and construct meaning in their heads

– schemata have been called “the building blocks of cognition” and “a cognitive map to the world” because they represent elaborate networks of concepts, skills, and procedures that we use to make sense of new stimuli, events, and situations

– According to schema theory, comprehending a text is an interactive process between the reader’s background knowledge and the text. Efficient comprehension requires the ability to relate the textual material to one’s own knowledge.

Metacognition: awareness of one’s own cognitive processes, including task knowledge and self-monitoring of activity.

– In reading metacognition refers to:

• self-knowledge: the knowledge students have about themselves as readers & learners
• task knowledge: the knowledge of reading tasks and the strategies that are appropriate given a task at hand
• self-monitoring: the ability of students to monitor reading by keeping track of how well they are comprehending

Implicit: based on unstated assumption in conjunction with given information

Explicit: based on stated information

Jean Piaget: a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development. Piaget’s theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called “genetic epistemology”.

– Jean’s theory of cognitive development helps explain that language acquisition is influenced by more general cognitive attainments

– as children explore their environment, they interpret and give meaning to events they experience

– the child’s need to interact with immediate surroundings and to manipulate objects is critical to language development

Lev Vygotsky: a Russian psychologist, the founder of an unfinished Marxist theory of human cultural and bio-social development.

– viewed children as active participants in their own learning

– at some point in early development, children begin to acquire language competence which then stimulates cognitive development

– Vygotsky believed that children carry on external dialogues with themselves and eventually external dialogue gives way to inner speech

– children must be actively involved in order to grow; environment only is not enough to grow

“When teachers embrace reading as a language process, they understand the importance of learning oral language but are also acutely aware that written language develops in humans along parallel lines.”

– Readers search for & coordinate information cues from three distinct systems in written language:

• Graphophonemic System: the print itself provides readers with a major source of information: the graphic symbols or marks on the page represent speech sounds.
• Syntactic System: is provided by the grammatical relationships within sentences patterns. Readers use their knowledge of the meaningful arrangement of words in sentences to construct meaning from text material.
• Semantic System: stores the schemata that readers bring to a text in terms of background knowledge, experiences, conceptual understandings, attitudes, beliefs, and values.
• ThreeCueingSystems-detail *click for cueing systems overview*

– Four Steps of Literacy Development: 

• Text intent: Children expect written language to be meaningful. Their encounters with text support the expectation that they will be able to re-create and construct the author’s message.
• Negotiability: Because children expect print to make sense, they use whatever knowledge and resources they possess to negotiate meaning. Negotiation suggests that reading is a give and take process between reader & author.
• Risk-taking: children experiment with how written language works, they take risks, they make hypotheses and than test them out. Risk-taking situations permit children to grow as language users
• Fine-tuning: an encounter with a written language becomes a resource for subsequent literacy events & situations. The more children interact with authors and texts, the better they get at constructing meaning.

Models of Reading: reading models have been developed to describe the way readers use language information to construct meaning from print. How a reader translates print to meaning is the key issue in the building of models of the reading process. This issue has led to the development of three models:

• Bottom-Up: Assume that the process of translating print to meaning begins with the print. The process is initiated by decoding graphic symbols into sounds. The reader first identifies features of letters; links these features together to recognize letters; combines letters to recognize spelling patterns; links spelling patterns to recognize words; and then proceeds to sentence-, paragraph-, and text-level processing.
• Top-Down: Assume that the process of translating print to meaning begins with the reader’s prior knowledge. The process is initiated by making predictions about the meaning of some unit of print. Readers decode graphic symbols into sounds to check out hypotheses about meaning.
• Interactive Models: Assume that the process of translating print to meaning involves making use of both prior knowledge and print. The process is initiated by making predictions about meaning and/or decoding graphic symbols. The reader formulates hypotheses based on the interaction of information from semantic, syntactic, and graphophonemic sources of information.

RTI – Response to Intervention Models: Derived from the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is a systematic approach to identification and instruction of struggling readers.

– Tier 1: All students are provided research-based instruction differentiated to meet each student’s needs.

• preventive & proactive

– Tier 2: More intensive work is provided to learners who have not been successful in traditional classroom learning situations.

• More focused small group interventions with frequent monitoring
• Continuous measure of progress
• Regular classroom teachers receive support from special educators and literacy coaches

– Tier 3: Learners receive intensive, individualized intervention targeting specific deficits and problem areas. Special educators and literacy specialists are responsible for the intervention and assessment processes; classroom teachers provide support.

Systematic Instructional Approach: is a method for teaching individuals with disabilities. It incorporates the principles of applied behavior analysis and allows for educators to teach a wide range of skills,

• Skills including academic and functional living skills
• Process of breaking a skill down into individual components so for students and identify the appropriate teaching method or prompting strategy that allow for students to fully comprehend instruction

Classroom Application: 

• Teachers who engage in self-reflection will better understand the context of their teaching & who to engage learners
• It’s important to understand the theoretical and evidence-based foundations of the reading and writing processes
• Learn to make connections between theory & instructional practices
• Tier 1 of RTI is provided to all students
• Tier 3 of RTI is when a special educator gets involved
• Interactive models of reading involves using prior knowledge & print to translate print to meaning
• Teach students to be metacognitive
• implicit = implied / explicit = clear, directly stated

“Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach.” 
― Aristotle

ENGED 275 | Blog #13 | Kaitlin Roth
Chapter 12: Reading and Writing in the Content Areas

Learning Tools
Reading & writing are learning tools because reading has a powerful impact on writing, & writing has a powerful impact on reading. 

Trade book: A published book that isn’t a textbook; the type of books in bookstores and libraries.

Text Sets: Text sets are collections of texts tightly focused on a specific topic. They may include varied genres (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, etc) and media (such as blogs, maps, photographs, art, primary-source documents, and audio recordings).

• Teachers collect text sets of books & other reading materials on topics to use in teaching thematic units.
• Materials for text sets are carefully chosen to include different genres, a range of reading levels to meet the needs of students, and multimedia resources that present a variety of perspectives.
• It’s important to include books and other materials that English learners and struggling readers can read.

Teachers collect as many types of materials as possible, for example:

• atlases and maps
• brochures and pamphlets
• digital articles
• films and videos
• magazines
• models and diagrams
• newspaper articles
• nonfiction books
• photographs
• poems and songs
• primary source materials
• reference books
• stories
• websites and WebQues

Mentor Texts: Mentor texts are pieces of literature that both teacher and student can return to and reread for many different purposes. They are texts to be studied and imitated.

“Mentor texts help students to take risks and be different writers tomorrow than they are today. It helps them to try out new strategies and formats.”

• Teachers use stories, nonfiction books, and poems that students are familiar with to model the writer’s craft
• Picture books are useful mentor texts because they’re short enough to be reread quickly.
• Teachers begin by rereading a mentor text and pointing out a specific feature such as adding punch with strong verbs, writing from a different perspective, or changing the tone by placing adjectives after nouns. Then students imitate the feature in brief collaborative compositions and in their own writing.

Learning Logs: a personalized learning resource for children. In the learning logs, the students record their responses to learning challenges set by their teachers. Each log is a unique record of the child’s thinking and learning.

• Students use learning logs to record and react to what they’re learning in content areas.
• Learning logs are “a place to think on paper”.
• Students write in these journals to discover gaps in their knowledge and to explore relationships between what they’re learning and their past experiences.
• Through these activities, students practice taking notes, writing descriptions and directions, and making graphic organizers.

Double-Entry Journals: students divide their journal pages into two parts and write two different types of information in each one.

• Example: They can write important facts in one column and their reactions to the information in the other column, or questions about the topic in the left column and answers in the right column.

Quickwriting: students write on a topic for five to ten minutes, letting thoughts flow from their minds to their pens without focusing on mechanics or revisions.

• Young students often draw pictures or use a combination of drawing & writing to explore their ideas.
• Teachers use quickwriting to activate students’ background knowledge at the beginning of the unit, monitor their progress and clarify misconceptions during the unit, and review big ideas at the end.

Demonstrating Learning
Students research topics and then use writing to demonstrate their learning. This writing is more formal, and students apply their knowledge of the writing process to revise and edit their writing before making the final copy. Four ways that students demonstrate learning are by writing reports, developing essays, crafting poems, and constructing multigenre projects.

Essays: a short form of literary composition based on a single subject matter, and often gives the personal opinion of the author.

• Students write essays to explain, analyze, and persuade; sometimes their topics are personal, other times they address national and international issues.
• Students write essays from their own viewpoints, and their voices should come clearly through their writing.
• Examples of different essays include: personal, comparison, persuasive, five-paragraph essay.

Collaborative Books: Form of writing by a group of students who share creative control of a story.

• Students work together in small groups to make collaborative books.
• Students each contribute one page or work with a classmate to write a page or a section of the book, using the writing process as they draft, revise, and edit their pages.
• Teachers often make class collaborations with students as a first bookmaking project and to introduce the stages of the writing process.
• Students write collaborative books to retell a favorite story, illustrate a poem with one line or a stanza on each page, or write a nonfiction book or biography.

Content Area Textbooks
Too often, content area textbooks are unappealing and too difficult for students to read and understand, and they cover too many topics superficially. It’s up to teachers to plan instruction to make content area textbooks more comprehensible and to supplement students’ learning with other reading and writing activities during thematic units.

• Teachers use a variety of activities to activate and build students’ background knowledge about a topic, including developing KWL charts, reading aloud stories and nonfiction books, reading digital articles, and viewing videos and DVDs.
• KWL Charts:  a graphical organizer designed to help in learning. The letters KWL are an acronym, for what students, in the course of a lesson, already know, want to know, and ultimately learn. AKWL table is typically divided into three columns titled Know, Want and Learned.

Anticipation Guides: Teachers introduce a set of statements on the topic of the chapter, students agree or disagree with each statement, and then they read the assignment to see if they were right.

Making Textbooks More Comprehensible
Teachers use a variety of activities during each stage of the reading process to make content area textbooks more reader friendly and to improve students’ comprehension of what they’ve read.

Stage 1 – Prereading:  Teachers prepare students to read the chapter and nurture their interest in the topic in these ways:
– Activate and build students’ background knowledge about the topic
– Introduce big ideas and technical words
– Set purposes for reading Preview the text

Stage 2 – Reading: Teachers support students as they read the textbook chapter in these ways:
– Ensure that students can read the assignment
– Assist students in identifying the big ideas
– Help students organize ideas and detail

Stage 3 – Responding: Teachers help students develop and refine their comprehension in this stage as they think, talk, and write about the information they’ve read in these ways:
– Clarify students’ misunderstandings
– Help students summarize the big ideas
– Make connections to students’ lives

Stage 4 – Exploring: Teachers ask students to dig into the text during the exploring stage to focus on vocabulary, examine the text, and analyze the big ideas in these ways:
– Have students study vocabulary words
– Review the big ideas in the chapter
– Help students to connect the big ideas and detail

Stage 5 – Applying: Teachers support students as they apply what they’ve learned by creating projects in these ways:
– Expand students’ knowledge about the topic
– Have students personalize their learning
– Expect students to share their knowledge

Prereading Plan: Teachers introduce the big ideas in a chapter when they
create a prereading plan in which they present an idea discussed in the chapter and then have students brainstorm words and ideas related to it.

• They begin a word wall with some key words.
• Another activity is possible sentences, in which students compose sentences that might be in the textbook chapter using two or more vocabulary words from the chapter.
• Teachers set the purpose through prereading activities, and they also can have students read the questions at the end of the chapter, assume responsibility for finding the answer to a specific question, and then read to find the answer.
• To preview the chapter, teachers take students on a “text walk” page by page through the chapter, noting main headings, looking at illustrations, and reading diagrams and charts.
• Sometimes students turn the main headings into questions and prepare to read to find the answers to the questions or check the questions at the end of the chapter to determine the Question-Answer-Relationships

“Students are more successful when they have a purpose for reading.”

• Question-Answer-Relationships (QAR): A procedure teaches students to be aware of whether they’re likely to find the answer to a comprehension question “right there” on the page, between the lines, or beyond the information provided in the text so that they’re better able to answer it.
• SQ4R Study Strategy: a six-step technique in which students survey, question, read, recite, relate, and review as they study a content area reading assign-ment. This study strategy incorporates before-, during-, and after-reading components.
• Word sorts: activities in which students categorize words according to the words’ features. Sorting makes it easier to see the similarities and differences of words. Even before being able to read, students can begin sorting.
• To focus on the big ideas when reading textbooks, students make data charts to record information according to the big ideas or create a semantic feature analysis chart to classify important information.
• Semantic feature analysis: strategy uses a grid to help kids explore how sets of things are related to one another. By completing and analyzing the grid, students are able to see connections, make predictions and master important concepts. This strategy enhances comprehension and vocabulary skills.

Thematic Units
Interdisciplinary units that integrate reading & writing with social studies, science, and other curricular areas. Students are often involved in planning the thematic units and identifying some of the questions they want to explore and the activities that interest them. Textbooks are one of the many used resources.

How To Develop A Unit

1. Determine the focus: Teachers identify three or four big ideas to emphasize in the unit. Teachers also choose the grade-level standards to address during the unit.
2. Collect a text set: teachers collect stories, nonfiction books, and poems on topics related to the unit for the text set and place them in a special area in the classroom library.
3. Coordinate textbook reading: Teachers review the content area textbook chapters related to the unit and decide how to use them most effectively. They also think about how to make the textbook more comprehensible, especially for English learners and struggling readers.
4. Locate digital & multimedia materials: Teachers locate websites, DVDs, maps, models, artifacts, and other materials for the unit. Some materials are used to build students’ background knowledge and others to teach the big ideas.
5. Plan Instructional Activities: Teachers think about ways to teach the unit using reading and writing as learning tools, brainstorm possible activities, and then develop a planning map with possible activities. They also make decisions about coordinating the thematic unit with a literature focus unit using a related book, literature circles featuring books from the text set, or reading and writing workshop.
6. Identify minilesson topics: Teachers plan minilessons to teach strategies and skills related to reading and writing nonfiction as well as content area topics connected to the unit, based on state standards and needs they’ve identified from students’ work.
7. Plan ways to differentiate instruction: Teachers devise ways to use flexible grouping to adjust instruction to meet students’ developmental levels and language proficiency levels, provide appropriate books and other instructional mate-rials for all students, and scaffold struggling students and challenge high achievers with tiered activities and projects.
8. Brainstorm possible projects: Teachers think about projects students can develop to apply and personalize their learning at the end of the unit. Students usually work independently or in small groups, but sometimes the whole class works together on a project.
9. Plan for assessment: Teachers consider how they’ll monitor students’ progress and evaluate learning at the end of the unit.

Choosing Alternative Assessments: Teachers monitor English learners’ progress using a combination of observing them and asking questions.

• Try to avoid asking ELs “Do you understand?” this usually isn’t effective because EL’s tend respond positively, even when they’re confused. It’s more productive to interact with students, talking with them about the activity they’re involved in or asking questions about the book they’re reading.
• Instead of writing an essay, students can draw pictures or graphic organizers about the big ideas and add words from the word wall to label them to demonstrate their learning, or they can talk about what they’ve learned in a conference with the teacher.
• Instead of giving written tests, teachers can simplify the wording of the test questions and have ELs answer them orally.
• When it’s important to have English learners create written projects, they’ll be more successful if they work collaboratively in small groups.
• Portfolios are especially useful in documenting ELs’ achievement.
• Students also place work samples in their portfolios to show what they’ve learned about content area topics and how their English proficiency has developed.

Classroom Application

• Portfolios are a great resource to utilize when documenting English Language Learners’ progress.
• Alternative Assessment for students writing an essay is drawing pictures or creating a graphic organizer about the “big ideas” or main concepts then sharing it with the teacher and their thought process behind it.
• Try to avoid asking students “Do you understand” instead, ask the question differently. “What questions do we have?” or “What would you like me to clarify?” Avoid asking questions that warrant a “yes” or “no” response.
• The SQR4 study strategy was first developed in 1930, but has since been revised and reintroduced to include the “relate” step.
• When students are quickwriting, they are focusing on their ideas and the concepts, not worrying about grammatical or mechanical errors.
• A purpose of learning logs is to provide a place to think on paper
• It’s important to have tradebooks available in the classroom which contain a variety of different reading levels, genres, and perspectives.

ENGED 275 | Blog #12 | Kaitlin Roth
Chapter 11: Differentiation for Success

Differentiate: make or become different in the process of growth or development

Differentiation: tailoring instruction to meet individual needs

Differentiated Instruction: based on the understanding that students differ in important ways. It means to “shake things up” that go on in the classroom so that students have multiple options for taking information, making sense of ideas, and expressing what they learn.

“Differentiated instruction is especially important for struggling readers and writers who haven’t been successful and who can’t read grade-level textbooks.”

Example: A teacher personalizes his or her instruction to meet the students’ needs and provided support for the struggling readers & writers so that they too can be successful. 

Ways to Differentiate Instruction
Because students’ achievement levels differ and their interests and ways of learning vary, teachers modify their instruction so that all students can be successful. 

“Teachers provide specific ways for students to learn as deeply as possible and as quickly as possible without assuming one student’s road map for learning is identical to anyone else’s.”

Differentiated Instruction is categorized as: 

Rigorous: teachers provide challenging instruction that encourages students’ active engagement in learning.

Relevant: teachers address literacy standards to assure that students learn essential knowledge, strategies, and skills.

Flexible: teachers use a variety of instructional procedures and grouping techniques to support students.

Complex: teachers engage students in thinking deeply about books they’re reading, compositions they’re writing, and concepts they’re learning.

Teachers modify instruction in three ways:

Content: The “what” of teaching, the literacy knowledge, strategies, and skills that students are expected to learn at each grade level. The content reflects Common Core grade-level standards. Teachers concentrate on teaching the essential content, and to meet students’ needs, they provide more instruction and practice for some students and less for others. For those who are already familiar with the content, they increase the complexity of instructional activities. Teachers decide how they’ll differentiate the content by assessing students’ knowledge before they begin teaching, and then they match students with appropriate activities.

Process:  The process is the “how” of teaching, the instruction that teachers provide, the materials they use, and the activities students are involved in to ensure that they’re successful. Teachers group students for instruction and choose reading materials at appropriate levels of difficulty. They also make decisions about involving students in activities that allow them to apply what they’re learning through oral, written, or visual means.

Product: The product is the result of learning; it demonstrates what students understand and how well they can apply what they’ve learned. Students usually create some type of project. Teachers often vary the complexity of the projects they ask students to create by changing the level of thinking that’s required to complete the project.

“Teachers create a classroom culture that promotes acceptance of individual differences. Having a classroom community where students respect their classmates and can work collaboratively is vital.”

Grouping for Instruction
Teachers use grouping patterns such as whole class, small groups, and individually. 

• Teachers use the three types of groups for a variety of activities. Whole-class activities typically include interactive read-alouds and word walls. Revising groups and shared reading are small-group activities. Other activities, such as the Language Experience Approach and reading logs, are often done individually. Some activities, such as mini-lessons and interactive writing, are used with more than one type of group.

Guided Reading

• a instructional approach that involves a teacher working with a small group of readers. During the lesson, the teacher provides a text that students can read with support, coaching the learners as they use problem-solving strategies to read the text. The ultimate goal is independent reading.
• Developed to use with beginning readers, but teachers also use it with older students such as English Language Learners and struggling readers who need more teacher support.

Tiered Activities
To match students’ needs, teachers create several tiered activities that focus on the same essential knowledge but vary in complexity. 

• These activities are alternate ways of reaching the same goal
• Creating tiered lessons, increases the likelihood that all students will be successful
• Creating tiered activities doesn’t mean that some students do more work and others do less. Each activity is equally interesting and challenging to the students
• It is recommended that teachers begin by designing an interesting activity that requires high-level thinking
• Teachers create one, two or three versions of the activity at different levels of difficultly to meet the needs of the students

Literacy Centers
Contain meaningful, purposeful literacy activities that students can work at in small groups.

• Students practice phonics skills at the phonics center, sort word cards at a vocabulary center, or listen to books related to a book they’re reading at the listening center.
• Centers are usually organized in special places in the classroom or at groups of tables
• Literacy centers can be used effectively to differentiate instruction at all grade levels
• In most classrooms, the teacher works with a small group of students while the other students work at centers
• The activities in these literacy centers relate to concepts, strategies, and skills that the teacher recently taught in minilessons

Struggling Readers & Writers
It’s crucial to identity students at risk for reading problems early so these problems can be addressed quickly, before they’ve compounded. 

These are factors that predict early reading difficulty in kindergarten or first grade:

• Difficulty developing concepts about written language, phonemic awareness, letter names, and phoneme–grapheme correspondences
• Slower to respond than classmates when asked to identify words
• Behavior that deviates from school norms
• Ineffective decoding skills or not reading fluently
• Insufficient vocabulary knowledge or difficulty understanding and remembering the author’s message
• *Children with a family history of reading problems are more likely to experience difficulty in learning to read*

Many students struggle with writing. It’s easy to notice some of their problems when you examine their compositions:

• Difficulty developing and organizing ideas
• Struggles with word choice and writing complete sentences and effective transitions
• Problems with spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and grammar skills.
• Difficultly with the writing process and using writing strategies effectively
• Student complains that their hands and arms hurt when they write
• Show little interest and do the bare minimum
• Show frustration with writing that they refuse to write at all.

How to Address Struggling Readers’ Problems

How to Address Struggling Writers’ Problems

High-Quality Instruction
The best way to help struggling readers & writers is to prevent their difficulties in the first place by providing high-quality classroom instruction and adding an intervention. Teachers use a balanced approach that combines explicit instruction in decoding, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing along with daily opportunities for students to apply what they’re learning in authentic literacy activities. It’s standards driven and incorporates research-based procedures and activities.

Teachers address these four components to enhance the literacy development of struggling readers and writers:

Personalized Instruction: Teachers adjust their instructional programs to match students’ needs using flexible grouping and tiered activities.

Using Appropriate Instruction Materials: Use a single text with the whole class only about 25% of the time because students need more opportunities to read books at their reading levels.

Expanding Teachers’ Expertise: Teachers continue to grow professionally during their careers. They join professional organizations, participate in professional books clubs, and attend workshops and conferences.

Collaborating with Literacy Coaches: Literacy coaches are experienced teachers with special expertise in working with struggling readers & writers. They support teachers by working alongside them in their classrooms. Through their efforts, teachers are becoming more expert, and schools are becoming better learning environments.

Interventions
Schools use intervention programs to address low-achieving students’ reading and writing difficulties and accelerate their literacy learning. They’re used to build on effective classroom instruction, not as a replacement for it. 

Teachers have developed three types of interventions for preschoolers, kindergartners, and first graders:

• Preventive programs to create more effective early-childhood programs
• Family-focused programs to develop young children’s awareness of literacy, parents’ literacy, and parenting skills
• Early interventions to resolve reading and writing problems and accelerate literacy development for low-achieving K–3 students

Intervention programs still exist for older low-achieving students, but teachers believe that earlier and more intensive intervention will solve many of the difficulties that older students exhibit today.

Reading Recovery: the most widely known intervention program for the lowest-achieving first graders. It involves 30-minute daily one-on-one tutoring by specifically trained and supervised teachers for 12 to 30 weeks.

Reading Recovery lessons involve these components:

• Rereading familiar books
• Independently reading the book introduced in the previous lesson
• Learning decoding and comprehension strategies
• Writing sentences
• Reading a new book with teacher support

Once students reach grade-level standards and demonstrate that they can work independently in their classroom, they leave the program.

75% of students who complete the Reading Recovery program meet grade-level literacy standards and continue to be successful.

RTI (Response to Intervention): a school-wide initiative to identify struggling students quickly, promote high-quality classroom instruction, provide effective interventions, and increase the likelihood that students will be successful.

RTI involves three tiers: 

• Tier 1: Screening & Prevention: Teachers provide high-quality instruction that’s supported by scientifically based research, screen students to identify those at risk for academic failure, and monitor their progress. If students don’t make adequate progress toward meeting grade-level standards, they move to Tier 2.
• Tier 2: Early Intervention: Trained reading teachers provide enhanced, individualized instruction targeting students’ specific areas of difficulty. If the intervention is successful and students’ reading problems are resolved, they return to Tier 1; if they make some progress but need additional instruction, they remain in Tier 2; and if they don’t show improvement, they move to Tier 3, where the intensity of intervention increases.
• Tier 3: Intensive Intervention: Special education teachers provide more intensive intervention to individual students and small groups and more frequent progress monitoring. They focus on remedying students’ problem areas and teaching compensatory strategies.
  

Interventions for Older Students
Despite teachers’ best efforts, approximately one quarter of students in the upper grades are struggling readers, and they need effective classroom interventions in addition to high-quality reading instruction

It is recommended that teachers design intervention programs that include these components:

• High-Quality Instruction: Teachers provide high-quality, appropriate literacy instruction that’s tailored to students’ needs. Researchers have found that decoding is a strength for most struggling readers, and instructional time is better spent on vocabulary and comprehension.
• Instructional-Level Reading Materials: Teachers teach reading using books at students’ instructional level that are also appropriate for their age.
• More Time for Reading: Teachers increase the amount of time students spend reading independent level books each day, and they ensure that students choose interesting books to read.

Classroom Application

• Teachers differentiate instruction by changing the content, the process, and the product to meet the needs of all students and learners
• Interventions can be in place at any age to help a struggling reader or writer, however, it is best to intervene earlier in life rather than in middle school
• Once students reach the grade-level standards and prove that they can work independently in the classroom, they leave the reading literacy program
• Literacy coaches are experienced teachers with a special expertise in working with struggling readers & writers
• It’s important to identity students at risk for reading problems early on so these problems have be identified and solved right away
• Although differentiated instruction is important for all students, it’s especially beneficial to those who are behind or who struggle in school

ENGED 275 | Blog #11 | Kaitlin Roth
Chapter 10: Organization for Instruction

Teaching with Basal Reading Programs

• Today’s basal readers include more authentic literature selections that really emphasize diversity & focus on developing students’ skills
  + + + + Pros + + + +
• Teachers have copies of grade-level textbooks for every student
• Instructional program is planned for students
• Teachers follow step-by-step directions to teach strategies and skills, and workbooks provide practice materials
  x x x x Cons x x x x
  
• Unrealistic to assume that any commercial reading program could be a complete literacy program
• Students who read above or below grade level don’t have reading materials at their level
• All students need many more opportunities than a basal reading program provides to listen to books read aloud and to read and reread books.
• A complete literacy program involves more than reading; students also need opportunities to learn the writing process, draft and refine compositions, and learn writing strategies and skills

Components of a Basal

• Selections in grade-level textbooks
• Instruction about decoding and comprehension strategies and skills
• Workbook assignments
• Independent reading opportunities

Instructional Materials in Basal

A teacher’s instructional guide is provided for each grade level. This handbook gives comprehensive information about how to plan lessons, teach the selections, and assess students’ progress. The selections are shown in reduced size in the guide, and each page includes background information about the selection, instructions for reading the selections, and ideas for coordinating skill and strategy instruction. In addition, information is presented about which supplemental books to use with each selection and how to assess students’ learning. These guides are typically available in both print and eBook editions.

• At the center of a basal reading program is the student textbook, called an anthology.
• In the primary grades, two or more books are provided at each grade level, and in fourth through sixth grades, there’s usually one book
• Most basal reading pro-grams end in sixth grade
• The selections are grouped into units and each unit includes stories, poems, and informational articles
• Textbooks contain a table of contents and a glossary
• Provides a wide variety of print and digital materials to support student learning
• Consumable workbooks are probably the most known support material; students write letters, words, and sentences in these books to practice phonics, comprehension, and vocabulary strategies and skills
• Some multimedia materials, such as audio-cassettes, CDs, and videos, are available
• Basal reading programs also offer a variety of assessment tools, often available online

Teaching with Literature Focus Units
Literature focus units include activities incorporating the five stages of the reading process:

• Prereading: Teachers involve students in activities to build background knowledge and interest them in reading the book.
• Reading: Students read the featured selection independently, or the teacher reads it aloud or uses shared reading if it’s too difficult for students to read themselves.
• Responding: Students participate in grand conversation to talk about the book and write entries in reading logs to deepens their understanding.
• Exploring: Students post vocabulary on word walls, participate in word-study activities, learn comprehension strategies, examine text factors, and research.
• Applying: Students apply their learning as they create oral, written, visual, and digital projects and share them with their classmates.

“Through these activities, teachers guide students as they read and respond to high-quality literature.”

Steps in Developing a Literacy Focus Unit
Teachers develop a literature focus unit through a series of steps, beginning with choosing the literature and setting goals, then identifying and scheduling activities, and finally deciding how to assess students’ learning.

1. Select the Literature: Teachers select the book for the literature focus unit (a picture-book, novel, nonfiction, or a poetry book). Each student has their own copy of the book that was chosen.
2. Set Goals: Teachers decide what they want their students to learn during the unit and they connect the goals they set with the standards that their students are expected to learn.
3. Develop a Unit Plan: Teachers read or reread the selected book and then think about the focus they’ll use for the unit. Sometimes they focus on an element of story structure, the historical setting, wordplay, the author or genre, or a topic related to the book. After determining the focus, they choose activities to use at each of the five stages of the reading process and think about how they’ll differentiate instruction so all students can be successful.
4. Coordinate Grouping Patterns with Activities: Teachers think about how to incorporate whole-class, small-group, partner, and individual activities into their unit plans. These grouping patterns should be alternated during various activities in the unit.
5. Create a Time Schedule: Teachers create a schedule that provides enough time for students to move through the five stages of the reading process and to complete the activities planned for the unit. They also plan mini-lessons to teach reading and writing strategies and skills identified in their goals.
6. Assess Students: Teachers link assessment with instruction. They begin thinking about assessment as they choose the featured book and plan the unit. Next, they use informal assessment tools to monitor students’ progress during the literature focus unit so they can reteach lessons or adapt their instruction so that all students are successful. At the end of the literature focus unit, they evaluate the projects that students create. In the final step, reflecting, teachers think about the effectiveness of their teaching, and students self-assess their learning and work habits.
   

Literature Circles
Small, student-led book discussion groups that meet regularly in the classroom.

• Also known as book clubs
• Reading materials can range anywhere from stories, poems, biographies, and other non fiction books
• Goal is to provide materials that are of interest to students and grow their interest and understanding of literature
• Students choose the books to read and form groups
• Students set a reading and discussion schedule
• Students can read independently or with partners
• Promotes grand conversations
• Teacher can actively be involved or have students construct literature circles independently
• Depending on the length of the book, age of students, and reading levels, literature circles can take several days to weeks.

“One of the best ways to nurture students’ love of reading and ensure that they become lifelong readers is through literature circles.”

Key Features of Literature Circles
The key features of literature circles are choice, literature, and response. Teachers organize literature circles, and they make decisions about the structure of the program. 

• Choice: Students make choice in literature circles. They choose the books they’ll read and the groups they’re in. They also decide how they’ll share the book with classmates. Teachers prepare students for making choices by creating a community of learners in their classrooms in which students assume responsibility for their learning and can work collaboratively with classmates.
• Literature: The books chosen for literature circles should be interesting and at students’ reading level. They must seem manageable to the students, especially during their first literature circles.
• Response: Students meet several times during a literature circle to discuss the book. Through these discussions, students summarize their reading, make connections, learn vocabulary, and explore the author’s use of text factors. They learn that comprehension develops in layers. They learn to return to the text to reread sentences and paragraphs in order to clarify a point or state an opinion.

Types of Talk During Literature Circle Discussions

Roles Students Play in Literature Circles

Reading Workshop

• Nancie Atwell introduced reading workshop in 1987 as an alternative to traditional reading instruction
• In reading workshop, students read books that they choose themselves and respond to books through writing in reading logs and conferencing with teachers and classmates
• This approach represented a dramatic change in what teachers believe about how children learn and how literature should be used in the classroom.
• Reading workshop is an individualized reading program
• There are several versions of reading workshop, but they usually contain five components: reading, responding, sharing, teaching mini-lessons, and reading aloud to students
• Students spend 30 to 60 minutes independently reading books
• They choose the books they read, usually books on favorite topics
• Classroom libraries need to contain hundreds of books, (including books written at a range of reading levels) so that every student can find books to read
• Sharing: For the last 15 minutes of reading workshop, the class gathers together to discuss books they’ve finished reading. Students talk about a book and why they liked it. Sharing is important because it helps students become a class-room community to value and celebrate each other’s accomplishments.
• Teaching Minilessons: The teacher spends 5 to 15 minutes teaching minilessons on reading workshop procedures, comprehension strategies, and text factors. Sometimes minilessons are taught to the whole class or they’re taught to small groups. Teachers teach minilessons on drawing inferences and other comprehension strategies and text factors. 
  
• Reading Aloud to Students: Teachers use the interactive read-aloud procedure to read picture books and chapter books to the class as part of reading workshop. They choose high-quality literature that students might not be able to read themselves, award-winning books that they believe every student should be exposed to, or books that relate to a thematic unit. After reading, students talk about the book and share the reading experience. This activity is important because students listen to a book read aloud and respond to it together as a community of learners, not as individuals.
• Sustained Silent Reading (SSR): A independent reading time set aside during the school day for students to silently read self-selected books. It’s used to increase the amount of reading students do and to encourage them to develop the habit of daily reading.

“Teachers play an important role in helping students expand and enrich their responses to literature.”

Response Patterns

Writing Workshop

“Writing workshop is the best way to implement the writing process.”

• Students write on topics that they choose themselves
• Teacher’s role changes from being the provider of knowledge to serving as a facilitator and guide
• Writing workshop is a 60-to 90-minute period scheduled each day
• During this time, students are involved in three components: writing, sharing, and mini-lessons
• Writing: Students spend 30 to 45 minutes working independently on writing projects. Students work at their own pace on writing projects they’ve chosen themselves. Most students move at their own pace through all five stages of the writing process, but young children often use an abbreviated process consisting of prewriting, drafting, and publishing. Teachers conference with students as they write. As students meet to share their writing during revising, they continue to develop as a community of writers. They share their rough drafts in revising groups composed of four or five students.
• Sharing: For the last 10 to 15 minutes of writing workshop, the class gathers together to share their new publications. Students take turns to read their compositions aloud. Students can make comments and suggestions, but the focus is on celebrating completed writing projects, not on revising the composition to make it better.
• Teaching Minilessons: During this 5-to 30-minute period, teachers provide minilessons on writing workshop procedures, the writer’s craft, and writing strategies and skills, such as organizing ideas, proofreading, and using quotation marks with dialogue. In the middle and upper grades, teachers often display an anonymous piece of writing (perhaps from a student in another class or from a previous year). Students read the writing, and the teacher uses it to teach the lesson, which may focus on giving suggestions for revision, combining sentences, proofreading, or writing a stronger lead sentence. Teachers also select excerpts from books students are reading for minilessons to show how published authors use writing strategies and skills.

“The classroom becomes a community of writers who write and share their writing, and there’s a spirit of pride & acceptance.”

Managing a Workshop Classroom

• It takes time to establish a workshop approach
• Students first need to form a community of readers and writers in the classroom
• For reading and writing workshop, students need to learn how to select reading materials
• Teachers develop a schedule for reading & writing workshop with time allocated for each component (see figure 10-7 below)
• During the allocated time, teachers set aside as much time as possible for the students to read & write
• Teachers should not only teach, but should model workshop procedures
• Many teachers use a classroom chart to monitor students’ work
• Teachers take time during reading & writing workshops to observe students as they work

Terms

• Word wall: collection of words displayed in large visible letters on a wall, bulletin board, or other display in a classroom; is designed to be an interactive tool for students and contains an array of words that can be used during writing and reading.
• Grand conservation: conversations/discussions among the entire classroom of students where they ask the questions, discuss their thoughts and feelings, and make meaning about what they’re learning.
• Minilessons: short lesson with a narrow focus that provides instruction in a skill or concept that students will then relate to a larger lesson that will follow.
• Shared reading: teachers reading a book to students and having students read certain portions of the book or specific words.
• Think-aloud: A procedure in which teachers or students verbalize their thoughts while reading or writing to describe their strategy use.
• Goldilocks Strategy: A strategy for choosing “just right” book

Classroom Application

• It takes time to build a reading and writing workshop classroom because students need to develop new ways of learning and working
• Teachers should not only teach, but should model workshop procedures to help the students become good readers & writers themselves
• As students gain experience with their reading & writing workshop skills, the gain confidence and enthusiasm
• Teachers tend to fear that when they implement the workshop approach to their classrooms, that standardized test scores will decrease. However, there is no evidence of this–only increase or similar results.
• Provide a wide variety of books in the classroom library so students have options and can find the “just right” book
• Teachers need to incorporate choice into their literature circles and reading & writing workshops. This will help increase students interests

ENGED 275 | Blog #10 |Kaitlin Roth
Chapter 9: Promoting Comprehension: Text Factors

Important text factors that affect reading comprehension

Genres: The three broad categories of literature are stories, informational books or nonfiction, and poetry, and there are sub-genres within each category. For example, science fiction, folktales, and historical fiction are sub-genres of stories.

Text Structures: Authors use text structures to organize texts and emphasize the most important ideas. Sequence, comparison, and cause and effect, for example, are three internal patterns used to organize nonfiction text.

Text Features: Authors use text features to achieve a particular effect in their writing. Literary devices and conventions include symbolism and tone in stories, headings and indexes in nonfiction books, and page layout for poems.

“When students understand how authors organize and present their ideas, this knowledge about text factors serves as a scaffold, making comprehension easier.”

Narrative Genres

Folklore: Stories that began hundreds of years ago and were passed down from generation to generation by storytellers before being written down are folk literature.

• Fables: brief narratives designed to teach a moral. The story format makes the lesson easier to understand, and the moral is usually stated at the end.

  Fables exemplify these characteristics:
  – They are short (often less than a page long)
  – The characters are usually animals
  – The characters are one-dimensional: strong or weak, wise or foolish
  – The setting is barely sketched; the stories could take place anywhere
  – The theme is usually stated as a moral at the end of the story

• Folktales: Folktales began as oral stories, told and retold by medieval storytellers as they traveled from town to town. The problem in a folktale usually revolves around one of four situations: a journey from home to perform a task, a journey to confront a monster, the miraculous change from a harsh home to a secure home, or a confrontation between a wise beast and a foolish beast.

  Here are other characteristics:
  – The story often begins with the phrase “Once upon a time . . .”
  – The setting is generalized and could be located anywhere.
  – The plot structure is simple and straightforward.
  – Characters are one-dimensional: good or bad, stupid or clever, industrious or lazy.
  – The end is happy, and everyone lives “happily ever after”

• Myths: People around the world have created myths to explain natural phenomena. Some explain the seasons, the sun, the moon, and the constellations, and others tell how the mountains and other physical features of the earth were created. Ancient peoples used myths to explain many things that have since been explained by scientific investigations.

  Myths exemplify these characteristics:
  – Myths explain creations
  – Characters are often heroes with supernatural powers
  – The setting is barely sketched
  – Magical powers are required

• Legends: myths about heroes who have done something important enough to be remembered in a story; they may have some basis in history but aren’t verifiable.

Fantasies: Imaginative stories. Authors create new worlds for their characters, but these worlds must be based in reality so that readers will believe they exist. Four types of fantasies are modern literary tales, fantastic stories, science fiction, and high fantasy. Fantastic stories are realistic in most details, but some events require readers to suspend disbelief.

• Fantasies exemplify these characteristics:
  – The events in the story are extraordinary, things that couldn’t happen in today’s world
  – The setting is realistic
  – Main characters are people or personified animals
  – Themes often deal with the conflict between good and evil
• Science fiction stories: authors create a world in which science interacts with society. Many stories involve traveling through space to distant galaxies or meeting alien societies. Authors hypothesize scientific advancements and imagine technology of the future to create the plot.

  Science fiction exemplifies these characteristics:
  – The story is set in the future
  – Conflict is usually between the characters and natural or mechanical forces, such as robots.
  – The characters believe in the advanced technology
  – A detailed description of scientific facts is provided

Realistic Fiction: These stories are lifelike and believable. The outcome is reasonable and the story is a representation of action that seems truthful. Realistic fiction helps students discover that their problems aren’t unique and that they aren’t alone in experiencing certain feelings and situations. Realistic fiction also broadens students’ horizons and allows them to experience new adventures. Two types are con-temporary stories and historical stories.

• Contemporary stories: readers identify with characters of their own age and have similar interests and problems.

  Here are the characteristics of contemporary fiction:
  – Characters act like real people or like real animals
  – The setting is in the world as we know it today
  – Stories deal with everyday occurrences or “relevant subjects”

• Historical Stories: set in the past. Details about food, clothing, and culture must be typical of the era in which the story is set because the setting influences the plot.

  Historical stories illustrate these characteristics:
  – The setting is historically accurate
  – Conflict is often between characters or between a character and society
  – The language is appropriate to the setting
  – Themes are universal, both for the historical period of the book and for today

Elements of Story Structure
Stories have unique structural elements that distinguish them from other genres. These elements work together to structure a story, and authors manipulate them to develop their stories.

• Plot: the sequence of events involving characters in conflict situations. It’s based on the goals of one or more characters and the processes they go through to attain them. The main characters want to achieve the goal, and other characters are introduced to prevent them from being successful. Characters set the story events in motion as they attempt to over-come conflict and solve their problems.

• Characters: Characters are the people or personified animals in the story. They’re the most important structural element when stories are centered on a character or group of characters.

  Characters are developed in four ways: 
  – Appearance: Readers learn about characters through descriptions of their facial features, body shapes, habits of dress, mannerisms, and gestures.

  – Action: The best way to learn about characters is through their actions.

  – Dialogue: Authors use dialogue to breathe life into their characters, develop the plot, provide information, move the story forward, and spark reader interest.

  – Monologue: Authors provide insight into characters by revealing their thoughts.
  

• Setting: The setting is generally thought of as the location where the story takes place, but that’s only one aspect.

  Setting has four dimensions:
  – Location: Many stories take place in predictable settings that don’t contribute to a story’s effectiveness, but sometimes the location is integral.

  – Weather: Severe weather, such as a blizzard, a rainstorm, or a tornado, is crucial in some stories. But in other books, the weather isn’t mentioned because it doesn’t affect the outcome of the story.

  – Time period: For stories set in the past or in the future, the time period is important.

  – Time: This dimension involves both the time of day and the passage of time.

• Points of view: Stories are written from a particular viewpoint, and this perspective determines to a great extent reader’s understanding of the characters and events of the story.

  Stories can be told from these points of view: 
  – First person viewpoint: this point of view is used to tell a story through the eyes of one character using the first person pronoun I. The narrator, usually the main character, speaks as an eyewitness and a participant in the events.

  – Omniscient Viewpoint: The author is godlike, seeing and knowing all, telling readers about the thought processes of each character without worrying about how the information is obtained.

  – Limited Omniscient Viewpoint: This viewpoint is used so that readers know the thoughts of one character. It’s told in third person, and the author concentrates on the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of the main character or another important character.

  – Objective Viewpoint: Readers are eyewitnesses to the story and are confined to the immediate scene. They learn only what’s visible and audible and aren’t aware of what any characters think.

• Theme: the underlying meaning of a story; it embodies general truths about human nature. Themes usually deal with the characters’ emotions and values, and can be either explicit or implicit: Explicit themes are stated clearly in the story, but implicit themes must be inferred. In a fable, the theme is often stated at the end, but in most stories, the theme emerges through the thoughts, speech, and actions of the characters as they try to overcome the obstacles that prevent them from reaching their goals.
  

Narrative Devices
Authors use narrative devices to make their writing more vivid and memorable

Text Factors of Nonfiction
Stories have been the principal genre for reading and writing instruction in the primary grades because it’s been assumed that constructing stories in the mind is a fundamental way of learning; however, many students prefer to read nonfiction books, and they’re able to understand them as well as they do stories. The shift to nonfiction traditionally happens in fourth grade.

Alphabet Books: Many alphabet books are designed for young children who are learning to identify the letters of the alphabet. Other alphabet books are intended for older students

Biographies: Students read biographies to learn about a person’s life. These books are individual biographies because they focus on a single person; others are collective biographies with short vignettes about a group of people who are related in some way. Autobiographies are life stories written by the people themselves. 

Reference Books: Students use reference books, such as almanacs, dictionaries, and atlases, to track down information and research topics. 

Expository Text Structures
Particular ways in which nonfiction books are organized

• Description: The author describes a topic by listing characteristics, features, and examples. Phrases such as for example and characteristics are cue this structure

• Sequence:  The author lists or explains items or events in numerical, chronological, or alphabetical order. Cue words for sequence include first, second, third, next, then, and finally. Students use this pattern to write directions for completing a math problem or the stages in an animal’s life cycle.

• Comparison: The author compares two or more things. Different, in contrast, alike, and on the other hand are cue words and phrases that signal this structure. When students compare and contrast book and movie versions of a story they use this organizational pattern.

• Cause & Effect: The author explains one or more causes and the resulting effect or effects. Reasons why, if . . . then, as a result, therefore, and because are words and phrases that cue this structure. 

• Problem & Solution: The author states a problem and offers one or more solutions. A variation is the question-and-answer format, in which the writer poses a question and then answers it. Cue words and phrases include the problem is, the puzzle is, solve, and question . . . answer. 

Nonfiction Features
Nonfiction books have unique text features that stories and poems normally don’t have, such as margin notes and glossaries. The purpose of these features is to make text easier to read and to facilitate students’ comprehension.

Nonfiction texts often include these features:
– Headings and subheadings to direct reader’s attention to the big ideas
– Photos and drawings to illustrate the big ideas
– Figures, maps, and tables to provide diagrams and detailed information visually
– Margin notes that provide supplemental information or direct readers to additional facts about a topic
– Highlighted vocabulary words to identify key terms
– A glossary to assist readers in pronouncing and defining key terms
– Review sections or charts at the end of chapters or the entire book
– An index to assist readers in locating specific information

“It’s important that students understand nonfiction text features so they can use them to make their reading more effective and improve their comprehension.”

Text Factors of Poetry
Poems are written in a variety of forms. It’s important to point out poetic forms and devices to establish a common vocabulary for talking about poems, and because poems are shorter than other types of text, it’s often easier for students to examine the text, notice differences in poetic forms, and find examples of poetic devices that authors have used.

Formats of Poetry Books

• Picture-book versions: each line or stanza is presented and illustrated on one page
• Specialized collections: written by a single poet or related to a single theme
• Comprehensive Anthologies: feature 50 to 500 or more poems arranged by category 
• Verse Novels: stories that are told through poems rather than prose. Some are one long poem, and others are a collection of shorter poems. Novels in verse are unique in that they’re musical and create powerful visual images.

Poetic Forms

• Rhymed Verse: most common poetic form.
• Narrative poetry: a form of poetry that tells a story, often making the voices of a narrator and characters as well; the entire story is usually written in metered verse. They do not need rhyme.
• Contemporary Form/Free Verse: unique 
• Acrostics: Students use a key word to structure acrostic poems. They choose a word and write it vertically on a sheet of paper, and then they create lines of poetry, each line beginning with a letter in their key word.
• Apology Poems: Using William Carlos Williams’s poem “This Is Just to Say” as the model, students write apology poems in which they apologize for something they’re secretly glad they did. Middle and upper graders are familiar with offering apologies and enjoy writing humorous ones.
• Bilingual Poems: Students write free verse poems and insert words from another language into their poems. The words that are written in a second language are key words, chosen to elicit strong images and cultural memories.
• Color Poems: Students write color poems by beginning each line or stanza with a color word. Instead of writing “The spooky night sky was black,” students write the color word first: “Black is the spooky night sky.”
• Concrete Poems: The words and lines in concrete poems are arranged on the page to help convey the meaning. When the words and lines form a picture or outline the objects they describe, they’re called shape poems. Sometimes the layout of words, lines, and stanzas is spread across a page or two to emphasize the meaning.
• Found Poems: Students create found poems by clipping key words and phrases from stories, newspaper, Internet, and magazine articles, and nonfiction books and arranging the clippings to make a poem.
• Haiku: A Japanese poetic form that contains just 17 syllables, arranged in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. It’s a concise form, much like a telegram, and the poems normally deal with nature, presenting a single clear image.
• List Poems: Students create list poems using words and phrases from a list they’ve brainstormed about a topic. Each line in the poem follows the same structure and the last line is a twist or sums up the topic.
• Odes: Odes celebrate everyday objects, especially those things that aren’t usually appreciated. The unrhymed poem, written directly to that object, tells what’s good about the thing and why it’s valued.
• Poems for Two Voices: Students write poems in two side-by-side columns that two readers read simultaneously; one reads the left column, and the other reads the right column. When both readers have words—either the same words or different ones—written on the same line, they read them together so that the poem sounds like a duet.

Poetic Devices
Poetic devices are especially important tools because poets express their ideas very concisely. 

“Every word counts!”

They use these poetic devices:
– Assonance: the type of alliteration where vowel sounds are repeated in nearby words.
– Consonance: the type of alliteration where consonant sounds are repeated in nearby words.
– Imagery: words and phrases that appeal to the senses and evoke mental pictures.
– Metaphor: a comparison between two unlikely things, without using like or as.
– Onomatopoeia: words that imitate sounds.
– Repetition: words, phrases, or lines that are repeated for special effect.
– Rhyme: words that end with similar sounds used at the end of the lines.
– Rhythm: the internal beat in a poem that’s felt when poetry is read aloud.
– Simile: a comparison incorporating the word like or a

Utilizing Minilessons
Researchers have documented that when teachers teach students about text factors, their comprehension increases.

• The Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts emphasize that at each grade level (kindergarten through eighth) students grow in their ability to use text factors to comprehend stories and nonfiction texts more effectively 
• Teachers teach students about text factors directly
  
• They highlight a genre, explain its characteristics, and then read aloud books representing that genre, modeling their thinking about text factors
• Students make charts of the information they’re learning and hang them in the classroom
• Students often create graphic organizers to visualize the structure of nonfiction books they’re reading

Teachers teach about genres, structural patterns, and literary devices so students can accomplish these tasks:
– Noticing how point of view and other elements of story structure shape the content and style of stories
– Making connections among big ideas and details
– Integrating information presented visually and through media
– Examining sentences and paragraphs to see how they relate to each other and the      whole text
– Analyzing texts to draw conclusions
– Citing textual evidence to support conclusions
– Becoming more sensitive to poor reasoning in texts

Comprehension Strategies
The goal for comprehension is for the students to actually use what they’ve learned about text factors when they’re reading and writing. This is called noticing text factors. It involves considering genre, recognizing text structure, and attending to literary devices. 

• Think-alouds: Teachers also use think-alouds to help students internalize the information and apply it when they’re reading and writing as they do by modeled and shared writing
  
• Reading & Writing Activities: Students need opportunities to read books and listen to teachers read books aloud while they’re learning about text factor

Assessing Text Factors
There are no formal tests to assess students’ knowledge of text factors. Students demonstrate what they’re learning as they participate in reading & writing activities and develop oral and written projects.

Teachers use this assessment cycle:

• Step 1 – Planning: As teachers plan for instruction, they determine which text factors they’ll teach and how they’ll monitor students’ progress and assess students’ learning.
• Step 2 – Monitoring: Teachers monitor students’ progress as they observe and conference with them about their reading and writing activities. They also take note of students’ understanding of text structures as they make graphic organizers and their awareness of structural elements and literary devices in their reading log entries.
  
• Step 3 – Evaluating: Teachers encourage students to apply their knowledge of genres, structural elements, and literary devices as they respond to literature, develop projects, and write stories and other compositions. One way to do this is to include items on rubrics and checklists that pertain to text factors.
• Step 4 – Reflecting: Teachers ask students during conferences to reflect on how they’re growing in their ability to use text factors to comprehend complex texts, and students also write reading log entries, letters, and essays to reflect on their learning. Teachers also consider the effectiveness of their instruction and think about ways they can adapt instruction to emphasize text factors to enhance students’ comprehension abilities.
  

“It’s up to teachers to notice how students are applying their knowledge about text factors, and to find new ways for them to share their understanding.”

Classroom Application/New Ideas

• Teachers play an important role in teaching students that stories have unique factors and provide them with the tools to distinguish them among one another
• Teachers teach students about text factors because they play a huge role in the way students comprehend reading & writing
• There are no formal tests to assess a students’ knowledge of text factors. Instead, use the 4 step model: plan, monitor, evaluate, and reflect
• The Common Core State Standards require that at each grade level (k-8) grow in their ability to use text factors to comprehend stories and nonfiction texts. 
• When students understand how authors organize and present their ideas, it makes the comprehension process much easier.

ENGED 275 | Blog #9 |Kaitlin Roth
Chapter 8: Promoting Comprehension: Reader Factors

“The fact that comprehension is an invisible mental process makes it difficult to teach; however, through explicit instruction, teachers can make comprehension more visible.”

• The comprehension process begins during prereading as students activate their background knowledge and preview the text, and it continues to develop as students read, respond, explore, and apply their reading.
• Readers are actively engaged with the text when they’re reading; they think about many things as they comprehend the text such as: 
  – Activate prior knowledge
  – Examine the text to uncover its organization
  – Make predictions
  – Connect to their own experiences
  – Create mental images
  – Draw inferences
  – Notice symbols and other literary devices
  – Monitor their understanding

Text Complexity
 A new way of examining comprehension to determine the cognitive demands of books, or more specifically, how well readers can complete an assigned task with a particular text.

A number of factors affect text complexity; the Common Core State Standards identified these three components: 

• Qualitative Dimensions: Teachers make informed judgement about a book’s grade appropriateness by examining it’s layout, text structure, language features, purpose, and meaning. These dimensions are difficult to evaluate because they can’t easily be quantified. 
• Quantitative Measures: Teachers use readability formulas or other scores to determine a book’s grade appropriateness by calculating word length, word frequency, word difficulty, sentence length, and text strength. They often rely on computers to determine book’s reading levels (Lexile scores)
• Reader & Task Considerations: Teachers reflect on how they expect students to interact with the book and on students’ literacy knowledge and strategy use as well as their motivation and interests. With instruction, students grow in their understanding of how to read complex texts, and they learn to think about ideas and information in different ways. 

Prerequisites for Comprehension
For students to comprehend a text, they must have enough background knowledge, understand most words in the text, and be able to read fluently. When any of these prerequisites for comprehension are lacking, students aren’t able to understand what they’re reading.

“Teachers can improve readers’ difficulties through differentiated instruction.”

Background Knowledge: Having world knowledge & literacy knowledge provides a bridge to a next text. When students don’t have enough background knowledge, they’re likely to find the text challenging, and it prevents them from succeeding. Teachers use prereading activities to build students’ background knowledge (both their understanding of the topic and their familiarity with the genre). They use a combination of experiences, visual representations, and talk to build knowledge. Involving students in experiences such as field trips, participating in dramatizations, and examining artifacts is the best way to build background knowledge, but photos and pictures, picture books, websites, and videos can also be used. 

Vocabulary: Students’ knowledge of words plays a huge role in comprehension because it’s difficult to comprehend a text that’s loaded with unfamiliar words. It is recommended to create a word-rich classroom environment to immerse students in words & teaching world-learning strategies so they can figure out the meaning of new words. Teachers also preteach key words when they’re building background knowledge using KWL charts, anticipation guides, and other prereading activities.
Anticipation guides: a strategy that is used before reading to activate students’ prior knowledge and build curiosity about a new topic. Before reading a selection, students respond to several statements that challenge or support their preconceived ideas about key concepts in the text.

Reading Fluency: Fluent readers read quickly and efficiently because they aren’t constantly trying to decode unfamiliar words–they are able to devote their attention to comprehension. If a student is a struggling reader, their lack of fluency negatively affects their ability to understand what they read. Teachers can help older students who struggle to read by reteaching them word-identification strategies, having students repeat readings, and providing students with books at their reading levels. 

“In primary grades, developing reading fluency is an important component of comprehension instruction because children need to learn to recognize words automatically so that they can concentrate on comprehending what they’re reading.”

Comprehension Strategies
 Thoughtful behaviors that students use to facilitate their understanding as they read. Some strategies are cognitive—they involve thinking; others are metacognitive—students reflect on their thinking.

• Students learn to use a variety of cognitive and metacognitive strategies, including predicting, drawing inferences, and monitoring, to ensure that they comprehend what they’re reading.
• Students use these comprehension strategies to under-stand not only what they’re reading, but also while they’re listening to books read aloud and when they’re writing. These 12 strategies emphasize how readers think during the reading process; they’re reader factors. 

Comprehension Skills
Comprehension skills are related to strategies, but the difference is that skills involve literal thinking; they’re like questions to which there’s one answer.

• Students use the determining importance strategy to identify main ideas, and they use these related skills: 
  – Recognizing details
  – Noticing similarities & differences
  – Identifying topic sentences
  – Comparing & contrasting main ideas & details
  – Matching causes & effects
  – Sequencing details
  – Paraphrasing ideas
  – Choosing a good title for a text

• When main ideas & relationships among them aren’t specifically stated in the text, students use the drawing inferences strategy to comprehend them because higher level thinking is required. Students use these skills:
  – Recognizing the author’s purpose
  – Detecting propaganda
  – Distinguishing between fact & opinion

“Teachers teach these 12 skills (and students practice them) until they become automatic procedures that don’t require conscious thought or interpretation.”

Teaching Students About Reader Factors
Comprehension instruction involves teaching students how to understand what they’re reading. Teachers use explicit instruction, reading, and writing to develop students’ understanding of fiction and nonfiction texts.

Teachers create an expectation of comprehension in these ways:

• Involving students in authentic reading activities every day
  
• Providing access to well-stocked classroom libraries
• Teaching students to use comprehension strategies
• Ensuring that students are fluent readers
• Providing opportunities for students to talk about the books they’re reading
• Linking vocabulary instruction to underlying concepts

Teachers can’t assume that students will learn to comprehend simply by doing lots of reading; instead, students develop an understanding of comprehension and what readers do to be successful through a combination of instruction and authentic reading activities.

The Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts emphasize the importance of reader factors: They focus on having students read increasingly complex texts through the grades and on teaching them how to comprehend the author’s message. The Standards place equal emphasis on teaching students how to use reader factors to comprehend fiction and nonfiction texts.

• Key Ideas & Details: Students demonstrate their understanding of a text, ask and answer literal and inferential questions, and explain relationships among ideas.
• Integration of Knowledge & Ideas: Students analyze visual and multimedia elements, use reasons and evidence to support ideas, and make comparisons between two texts.
• Range of Reading: Students read & understand grade-level fiction and nonfiction texts independently and proficiently. 
• Level of Text Complexity: Students learn how to read increasingly challenging texts. 

Ways to Teach the Comprehension Strategies

Assessing Reader Factors
Teachers use the integrated instruction-assessment cycle to ensure that students are growing in their ability to understand complex texts to use increasingly more sophisticated strategies to deepen their understanding of grade-level texts. They also use diagnostic tests with struggling readers.

Step 1) Planning: Teachers make decisions about how they’ll teach comprehension strategies and they decide how to monitor students’ progress during instruction and evaluate it afterward.

Step 2) Monitoring: Teachers assess students’ comprehension informally every day; they listen to the comments students make during grand conversations, conference with students about books they’re reading, and examine their entries in reading logs. Students’ interest in a book is sometimes an indicator too. When students dismiss a book as “boring,” they may mean that it’s confusing or too difficult.

• Cloze Procedure: A way in which teachers examine students’ understanding of a text. Students supply the deleted words in a passage taken from a text they’ve read. Filling in the blanks can be a challenging activity because students need to consider the context of the passage, vocabulary words, and sentence structure to choose the exact word that was deleted. 
• Story Retellings: Another way to access literal comprehension is to having students retell stories they’ve read or listened to aloud. Students’ retellings should be should be coherent and well organized and should include the big ideas and important details. If teachers prompt the students with questions such as “Tell me more,” it is considered aided retellings. Otherwise, they’re considered unaided retellings. Teachers typically use rubrics to score students’ story retellings. 
• Running Records: Teachers use running records to examine children’s oral reading behaviors, analyze their comprehension, and determine their reading levels. Children read a book, and afterward they orally retell what they remember of it.
• Think-Alouds: Teachers assess students’ ability to apply comprehension strategies by having them think aloud and share their thinking as they read a passage. Students usually think aloud orally, but they can also write their thoughts on small self-stick notes that they place beside sections of text, write entries in reading logs, and do quickwrites.
• Reciprocal teaching: refers to an instructional activity in which students become the teacher in small group reading sessions.Teachers model, then help students learn to guide group discussions using four strategies: summarizing, question generating, clarifying, and predicting.

Step 3.) Evaluating: Teachers assess students’ knowledge about reading strategies  using similar ways that they monitor students’ progress during instruction. They ask students to think aloud about the strategies they applied as they read the book. Students also create projects, double-entry journals, hot seat, sketch-to-stretch, and open-minded portraits. 

Step 4.) Reflecting: Students reflect on what they’ve learned about reader factors through conferences with the teacher and by writing entries in reading logs about the strategies they’ve learned and can use independently. Teachers also reflect on the effectiveness of their instruction and how they can improve it. 

Motivation
Motivation is intrinsic, the innate curiosity that makes us want to figure things out. It involves feeling self-confident, believing you’ll succeed, and viewing the activity as pleasurable. Motivation is social too. People want to share ideas and participate in group activities.

Motivation is more than one characteristic, it’s a network of interacting factors. 

How to Engage Students

Students are more highly motivated when they have ownership of learning activities. Examples include:

• Students express their own ideas and opinions
• Students choose topics for writing and books for reading
• Students talk about books they’re reading
• Students share their writing with classmates
• Students pursue authentic activities—not worksheets—using reading, writing, listening, and talking

Comparing Capable & Less Capable Students

Researchers have compared students who are capable readers and writers with other students who are less successful and have found some striking differences. All of the characteristics of capable readers and writers relate to comprehension, and because these students know and use them, they’re better readers and writers than students who don’t use them. It’s noteworthy that all re-search comparing readers and writers focuses on how students use strategies, not on their use of reading and writing skills.

Classroom Application

• Students use comprehension strategies that teachers teach them ~ This helps direct their reading and keep track of their understanding 
• The way teachers instruct can affect students’ motivation ~ If the teacher uses explicit instruction and chooses activities that give students’ ownership of their learning
• Comprehension is a process ~ It involves reader & text factors. Teach students to know and be aware of both
• When monitoring students’ learning, sometimes cloze procedures are used ~ This seems easy, but is very challenging because it involves students examining the text, applying prior knowledge, understanding sentence structure, and examining vocabulary words
• Create a word-rich classroom environment ~ This will help teach students  world-learning strategies so they can figure out the meaning of new words
• Motivation is intrinsic ~ Help students build their confidence so they will be more likely want to learn and succeed

ENGED 275 | Blog #8 |Kaitlin Roth
Chapter 7: Expanding Academic Vocabulary

Academic Vocabulary
Words that are frequently used in language arts, social studies, science, and math. 

• These words are found in books and textbooks that students read
• Teachers use academic vocabulary words in mini-lessons and discussions
• Students use them in classroom assignments and are expected to understand them in high-stakes tests

Examples
Primary Grades                             Middle Grades                                     Upper Grades
character                                          bias                                                          apartheid
minus                                                colonial                                                   biome 
pattern                                              justify                                                      jargon
sentence                                           parasite                                                   perpendicular 
graph                                                semicolon                                                plagiarize
pledge                                               prey                                                          irony
vote                                                   idiom                                                        variable

Three Tiers of Words

Tier 1: Basic Words
These common words are used socially, in informal conversation at home & on the playground.
Examples: animal, clean, laughing

Tier 2: Academic Vocabulary
These words have a wide application in school and are used more frequently in written than in oral language. Some are related to literacy concepts or they’re found in literature. Other academic vocabulary words are more sophisticated terms related to familiar concepts. Teaching these words expands students’ knowledge and has a powerful impact on learning. 
Examples: apostrophe, paragraph, preposition, greedy, keen, evidence, smell — scent, odor, aroma

Tier 3: Specialized Terms
These technical words are content-specific and often abstract. They aren’t used frequently enough to devote time to teaching them when they come up during language arts, but they’re words that teachers explicitly teach during thematic unites and in content area classes.
Examples: minuend, osmosis, suffrage

Levels of Word Knowledge
Students develop knowledge about a word gradually, through repeated oral and written exposure to it. 

4 Levels

Unknown Word: Students’ don’t recognize the word

Initial Recognition: Students have seen or heard the word or can pronounce it, but they don’t know the meaning

Partial Word Recognition: Students know one meaning of the word and can use it in a sentence. 

Full Word Knowledge: Students know more than one meaning of the word and can use it in several ways. 

• Once students reach the third level, they can usually the word in context and use it in writing.
• Students don’t reach the fourth level with every word they learn, but when they do develop full word knowledge, they’re described as flexible word users because they understand the core meaning of a word and how it changes in different contexts. 

Word Consciousness
Students interest in learning & using words. Word consciousness increases students’ word knowledge and their interest in learning academic vocabulary.

Students who have word consciousness demonstrate these characteristics

• Students use words skillfully, understanding the nuances of word meanings
• Students gain a deep appreciation of words and value them
• Students are aware of differences between social and academic language
• Students understand the power of word choice
• Students are motivated to learn the meaning of unfamiliar words

“Word consciousness is important because vocabulary knowledge is generative. It transfers to and enhances students’ learning of other words.”

Goals for Word Consciousness

• Students become more aware of words
• Students manipulate words playfully
• Students appreciate the power words carry

How to Foster and Encourage Word Consciousness

• Teachers model interest in words and precise use of vocabulary
• Teachers encourage students interest in words
• Teachers use precise vocabulary 
• Teachers share books about words 
• Teachers call students’ attention to words by highlighting words of the day, posting words on word walls, and having students collect words from book they’re reading
• Teachers promote wordplay by sharing riddles, jokes, puns, songs, and poems

Types of wordplay to encourage students to experiment with

• Alliteration: Students repeat words with the same beginning consonant or vowel sound in words within a phrase or sentence. Alliterative sentences are often called tongue twisters.
  Example: now or never, do or die, and Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
• Eponyms: Students recognize that people’s names can become words.
  Example: teddy bear, sandwich, maverick, pasteurization, and Ferris Wheel.
• Hyperbole: Students create exaggerated statements.
  Example: I almost died laughing, my feet are killing me, and I’m so hungry I could eat a horse. 
• Onomatopoeia: Students use words that imitate sounds.
  Example: tick-tock, kerplunk, and sizzling. 
• Oxymorons: Students combine two normally contradictory words to create a paradoxical image. Oxymorons usually inadvertent errors, but sometimes they’re used intentionally.
  Example: jumbo shrimp, pretty ugly, and deafening silence. 
• Palindromes: Students notice words and phrases that read the same forward and backward.
  Example: mom, civic, and a man, a plan, a canal—Panama
• Personification: Students endow inanimate objects with human traits or abilities.
  Example: the old VW’s engine coughed, raindrops danced on my umbrella, and fear knocked on the door 
• Portmanteau: Students commonly use words that were created by fusing two words to combine the meaning of both words. Sometimes they also create their own port-manteau words. This wordplay form was invented by Lewis Carroll in Jabberwocky.
  Example: spork (spoon + fork), brunch (breakfast + lunch), and smog (smoke + fog). 
• Spoonerisms: Students switch sounds in words, often with a humorous effect. These “slips of the tongue,” named for Reverend William Spooner (1844–1930), usually occur when a person is speaking quickly.
  Example: butterfly–flutterby, take a shower–shake a tower, and save the whales–wave the sails. 

“As students learn these types of wordplay, they become powerful word users.”

Multiple Meanings of Words
Many words have more than meaning. Multiple meanings develop for the noun and verb forms, but sometimes additional means develop through wordplay and figurative language. 

Synonyms
Words that have nearly the same meaning as other words. Synonyms are useful because they’re more precise. 

• Teachers should carefully articulate the differences among synonyms
• Teachers should focus on teaching concepts and related words, not just provide single-word definitions using synonyms

Example: Synonyms for the word cold: cool, chilly, frigid, icy, frosty, and freezing.

To tell a student that frigid means cold, provides limited information. Explain to the student that frigid is a degree of cold. 

Each word has a different shade of meaning. Cool means moderately cold; chilly is uncomfortably cold; frigid is intensely cold; icy means very cold; frosty means covered with frost; and freezing is so cold that water changes into ice. English would be limited if we had only the word cold.

Antonyms
Words that express opposite meanings. Antonyms express shades of meaning just as synonyms do, and some opposites are more appropriate for one mean than for another. 

Example:Antonyms for the word loud: soft, subdued, quiet, silent, inaudible, sedate, somber, dull, and colorless. 

To locate synonyms and antonyms, students learn to use a thesaurus. Students need to learn how to use these references to locate more effective words when they’re revising their writing and during word-study activities. 

Homonyms
Each of two words having the same pronunciation but different meanings, origins, or spelling.

• Words with identical spellings but different meanings and pronunciations, such as the noun and verb forms of wind and the noun and adjective forms of minute, are homographs. Other examples include live, read, bow, conduct, present, and record.

• Primary grade teachers introduce homonyms and teach the easier pairs, including see–sea, I–eye, right–write, and dear–deer.
• In the upper grades, teachers focus on homographs and the homophones that students continue to confuse, such as there–their–they’re, morning–mourning, flair–flare, and complement–compliment.
• Teachers teach mini-lessons to explain the concept of homophones and homographs and have students make charts of the homophones and homographs
• Explicit instruction is especially important for English learners

Students can also make homonym posters, using drawings and sentences to contrast homonyms. 

Root Words & Affixes
Teaching students about root words and affixes shows them how words work. Many words come from a single root word. Latin is the most common source of English root words; Greek and English are two other important sources.

Morpheme: a meaningful morphological unit of a language that cannot be further divided

• Affix: A syllable added to the beginning (prefix) or end (suffix) of a word to change its meaning (example: il– in illiterate and -al in national).
• Suffix: A syllable added to the end of a word to change its meaning (example: -y in hairy, -ful in careful).
• Some root words are whole words and others are word parts
• Root words are free morphemes when they’re words (a word element that can stand on it’s own)
  Example: the word cent comes from Latin root word cent meaning “hundred”. English treats the word as a root word that’s used independently and in combination with affixes, as in century, bicentennial, and centipede. 
• Affixes are bound morphemes that are added to words
• Prefixes are placed at the beginning
  Example: disrespect and refill
• Suffixes are located at the end
  Example: fluently, elevator, and courageous 
• Affixes often change a word’s meaning or change parts of speech 
  Example:Adding un- to happy to make unhappy; adding -tion to attract to form attraction (the verb attract becomes a noun)
• When a word’s affix is removed, the remaining word is usually a real word
  Example: pre- is removed from preview is view; the suffix -er is removed from viewer, the word view stands alone

Etymologies

• The English language began in a.d. 447 when Angles, Saxons, and other Germanic tribes invaded England
• The English of the period from 450 to 1100 is known as Old English
• During this time, English was a very phonetic language and followed many German syntactic patterns
• Many loan words, including ugly, window, egg, they, sky, and husband, were contributed by the marauding Vikings who plundered villages along the English coast
• The Norman Conquest in 1066 marks the beginning of Middle English
• William, Duke of Normandy, his lords, and the royals who accompanied him spoke French, so it became the official language of England for nearly 200 years
• Many French words entered the language, and their spellings replaced Old English spellings
  Example: night was spelled niht and queen was spelled cwen in Old English to reflect their pronunciations; their modern spellings reflect changes by French scribes
• William Caxton brought the first printing press to England in 1476, and soon books and pamphlets were being mass-produced
• Words continued to flow into English from almost every language in the world.
• Exploration and colonization in North America and around the world accounted for many of the loan words
  Example: canoe and moccasin are from Native American languages; bonanza, chocolate, and ranch are from Mexican Spanish; and cafeteria, prairie, and teenager are American English
• Other loan words include zero (Arabic), tattoo (Polynesian), robot (Czech), yogurt (Turkish), restaurant (French), dollar (German), jungle (Hindi), and umbrella (Italian)
• New words continue to enter English every year, and some of these words, reflect new inventions and cultural practices
• Students use etymological information in dictionaries to learn how particular words evolved and what the words mean
• Etymological information is included in brackets at the beginning or end of dictionary entries

• Idioms: Expressions that mean something different than the literal meanings of the individual words (example: “kick the bucket,” “a piece of cake,” “hold your horses”).
• Simile: A comparison expressed using like or as.
• Metaphor: A comparison expressed directly, without using like or as

“Even though words have entered English from around the world, the three main sources of words are English, Latin, and Greek.”

Teaching Students to Unlock Word Meanings
Vocabulary instruction plays an important role in balanced literacy classrooms because of the crucial role it plays in both reading and writing achievement.

Components of Vocabulary Instruction

• Immerse students in words through listening, talking, reading, and writing
• Teach specific words through active involvement and multiple encounters with words
• Teach word-learning strategies so students can figure out the meanings of unfamiliar words
• Develop students’ word consciousness, their awareness of and interest in words

• Word wall: collection of words displayed in large visible letters on a wall, bulletin board, or other display in a classroom; is designed to be an interactive tool for students and contains an array of words that can be used during writing and reading

Explicit Instruction
Teachers purposefully teach students about academic vocabulary, which means that they provide multiple encounters with words, present variety of information (including definitions, contexts, examples, and related words) and involve students in word-study activities so that they have multiple opportunities to interact with words

Minilessons: provide information about words, including both definitions and contextual information, and they engage students in activities to get them to think about and use words orally and in reading and writing. 

Word-Study Activities
Students examine new words and think more deeply about them as they participate. 

• Word posters: Students choose a word & write it on a poster, then they draw a picture of it and write a sentence using the word on the poster. This helps the students visualize their word
• Word Maps: Students create a diagram to examine a word they’re learning. They write the word, make a box around it, draw several lines from the box and add information about the word in additional boxes they make at the end of each line. 
• Possible Sentences: To activate background knowledge about a topic and increase their curiosity before reading a book, students write possible sentences using vocabulary words. After reviewing the definitions of a set of words, students work with classmates to craft sentences using the words and afterward share them. Then after reading or later in the unit, students review the sentences and revise those that aren’t accurate.
  
• Dramatizing Words: Students each choose a word and dramatize it for class-mates, who then try to guess it. Sometimes an action is more effective than a verbal definition for explaining a word.
  
• Word Sorts: Students sort a collection of words taken from the word wall into two or more categories in a word sort. Words from a story might be sorted by character, or words from a thematic unit on machines might be sorted according to type of machine. The words are written on cards, and then students sort them into piles.
  
• Word Chains: Students choose a word and then identify three or four words to sequence before or after it to make a chain. Students can draw and write their chains on a sheet of paper, or they can make a chain out of construction paper and write a word on each link.
• Semantic Feature Analysis: Students learn the meanings of related words by examining their characteristics in a semantic feature analysis. Teachers select a group of related words, such as animals and plants in the rain forest or planets in the solar system, and then make a grid to classify them according to distinguishing characteristics.Students analyze each word, characteristic by characteristic, and they put check marks, circles, and question marks in each cell to indicate whether the word represents that characteristic. 

Word-Learning Strategies
When students come across an unfamiliar word while reading, they reread the sentence, analyze root words and affixes in the word, check a dictionary, sound out the word, look for context clues in the sentence, skip the word and keep reading, or ask the teacher or classmate for help. 

Three Effective Word-Learning Strategies

1. Using context clues
2. Analyzing word parts
3. Checking a dictionary

Procedure when figure out the meaning of an unfamiliar word

1. Students reread the sentence containing the word
2. Students use context clues to figure out the meaning of the word, and if that doesn’t work, they continue to the next step.
3. Students examine the word parts, looking for familiar root words and affixes to aid in figuring out the meaning. If they’re still not successful, they continue to the next step
4. Students pronounce the word to see if they recognize it when they say it. If they still can’t figure it out, they continue to the next step
5. Students check the word in a dictionary or ask the teacher for help

Assessing Students’ Vocabulary Knowledge

1.) Planning:  Teachers consider students’ current level of vocabulary knowledge, identify the academic words they’ll teach, and plan mini-lessons and word-study activities. 

• Teachers give students a list of key vocabulary words, and students assess their word knowledge by writing beside each word the number that indicates their level of knowledge. Teachers often have students repeat the assessment at the end of the unit to examine how their knowledge has grown.
  

2.) Monitoring: Teachers use these informal assessment tools to monitor students’ progress

• Observations
• Conferences
• Monitoring tools to check their own instructions for effectiveness and modify if necessary. 

3.) Evaluating:  Teachers often choose more authentic measures to evaluate students’ vocabulary knowledge because they provide more useful information than formal tests do. 

• Rubrics
• Quickwrites: students write about a word listed on the word wall and explain what they know about the word
• Word Sorts
• Visual Representations

4.) Reflecting: Teachers take time at the end of the unit to reflect on their teaching. They can also ask students to reflect on their growing word knowledge. 

Classroom Application

• Unfamiliar words are organized into three tiers; basic words, academic vocabulary, and specialized terms —> basic words are every day words students would hear and use at home, academic vocabulary are common in an academic setting and in literacy, and specialized terms aren’t used as often and typically are only covered during specific classes. 
• Learning etymologies —> will help students know how to communicate effectively in written and oral contexts
• An activity that will help activate students’ prior knowledge before reading a book is possible sentences —> this will help students’ learn to predict and draw conclusions all from their own previous experiences and knowledge
• When teachers provide explicit instruction, they help students encounter words in a variety of different ways and methods —> helps students interact and become more comfortable with words (especially those that they’re unfamiliar with) 
• Teachers should focus on teaching concepts and related words, not just provide single-word definitions using synonyms —> This ensures that the student fully understands the word and doesn’t assume that the synonym is the definition

ENGED 275 | Blog #7 | Kaitlin Roth
Chapter 6: Developing Fluent Readers & Writers

Reading Fluency
the ability to read quickly, accurately, and with expression

• to read fluently, students must recognize most words automatically and be able to identify unfamiliar words easily
  
• a bridge between decoding and comprehension
  

Automaticity

• Fluent readers recognize familiar words automatically without conscious thought (they identify unfamiliar words almost as quickly)
  
• Students need to know 98 or 99% of the words to read fluently, otherwise, they’re stopping too often to figure out unfamiliar words
  

Speed

• Fluent readers read at least 100 words per minute
• Most students reach this speed by 3rd grade
• By 8th grade, students can read 150 words per minute & adults read 250 words per minute or more

Prosody

• fluent readers read expressively, with appropriate phrasing & intonation (inflection)
• the ability to read in expressive rhythmic melodic patterns
• as readers gain prosody, they begin to chunk words into phrases, attend to punctuation, and apply appropriate syntactic emphases (word selection or word tense) 

High-Frequency Words
a word that is immediately recognized as a whole and does not require word analysis for identification

• Tough to learn because they’re difficult to decode (can’t define, or sound out, don’t carry much meaning)
• Teachers create word walls with high-frequency words
• Word wall: collection of words displayed in large visible letters on a wall, bulletin board, or other display in a classroom; is designed to be an interactive tool for students and contains an array of words that can be used during writing and reading
• Slowly introduce by chunking (3-5 words per week)
• Use explicit instruction when teaching 
• Language Experience Approach: a whole language approach that promotes reading and writing through the use of personal experiences and oral language

Chant & Clap Procedure
1.) See and hear the word. Teachers point to a new word on a high-frequency word wall and pronounce it as students look at it.
2.) Say the word. Students pronounce the word.
3.) Spell the word. Students spell the word aloud, clapping their hands as they say each letter. Teachers remind students to check the word wall if they’re unsure about the spelling.
4.) Spell the word again. Students repeat the third step.
5.) Write the word. Students write the word on a small whiteboard or a sheet of paper, making sure to spell it correctly.
6.) Check the word. Students hold up their whiteboards or sheets of paper so teachers can quickly check the spelling.
7.) Say the word again. Students repeat the second step.

***The words in red are the first 100 most frequently used words***

Word-Identification Strategies
students use these 4 strategies to decode unfamiliar words

• Fluent readers recognize most words automatically & apply word-identification strategies effectively to decode unfamiliar words.
• Less fluent readers depend on explicit instruction to learn how to identify words

Phonics Analysis

• Students apply what they’ve learned about phoneme-grapheme correspondences & phonics rules to decode words
• Very useful strategy since almost every word has some phonetically regular parts
• Biggest difference between students who identify words effectively & those who don’t, is whether they notice almost all the letters in a word and analyze the letter sequences

Decoding by Analogy

• Students use this strategy to identify words by associating them with words they already know
• Students learn to apply this strategy when they read & write word families and other phonograms
• Students must be familiar with consonant blends & digraphs and be able to manipulate sounds
• Teachers can also share picture books that show several words containing a similar phonogram

Syllabic Analysis

• More experienced readers divide longer words into syllables to identify them

Morphemic Analysis

• Students use this analysis to identify multi-syllabic words
• Students locate the root word by removing prefixes & suffixes (a root word is a morpheme)
• Morpheme:  The smallest meaningful part of a word; sometimes it’s a word (cup, hope) & sometimes it isn’t a whole word
  

Reading Speed

• Students must develop an adequate reading speed to have cognitive resources available to focus on meaning
• Students who have background knowledge about the topic read more quickly and connect the ideas they’re reading to what they already know
• Students who are knowledgeable about the genre, text structure, and text layout can anticipate what they’re reading
• Once students become fluent readers, the focus shifts to helping them develop stamina so they can read for 30 minutes or more

To develop students reading speed & stamina, teachers offer a variety of teacher-guided & independent reading practice:

Choral Reading
Students work in small groups or together as a class. They experiment different ways to read poems & other short texts aloud

Readers Theater
Students practice reading a story script to develop speed & expressiveness before performing it for classmates
*Researchers have found that readers theater significantly improves students reading fluency*

Listening Centers
Students read along in a book at their instructional reading level while listening to it being read aloud at a listening center

Partner Reading
Classmates get together to decide what interests them, decide how they’ll read it, (unison or take turns) read or reread book together

Prosody

“When students read expressively, they use their voices to add meaning to the words”

• Teachers emphasize prosody by modeling expressive reading every time they read aloud & use the think-aloud procedure to reflect on how they varied their expression, chunked words into phrases, modulated the loudness of their voice, or varied the pacing

Components of prosody

• Expression
• Phrasing
• Volume
• Smoothness
• Pacing

Assessing Reading Fluency

Automaticity

• Teachers informally monitor students’ reading fluency by listening to them read aloud during guided reading lessons, reading workshop, and any other reading activity
• Teachers check students’ knowledge of high-frequency words & their ability to use word-identification strategies to decode other words
• Teachers use running records, informal reading inventories, and classroom texts to document students’ reading fluency
• Running Record: a way to assess a student’s reading progress by systematically evaluating a student’s oral reading & identifying error patterns

Speed

• Teachers time students as they read a passage aloud & determine how many words they read correctly per minute

Prosody

• Teachers choose excerpts for students to read from both familiar & unfamiliar instructional-level texts
• As teachers listen, they determine whether students read with appropriate expression
• Rubrics can be used
• Rubric: A guide listing specific criteria for grading student work; it includes levels of achievement and is scored numerically

Writing Fluency
Fluent writers spell words automatically & write quickly, so they can focus on developing their ideas

“Fluent writing sounds like talking–it has a voice.“

Each week introduce five or six words & provide daily opportunities for students to practice reading and writing them through these activities:
– Students write the words and sentences they compose on whiteboards
– Students use letter cards or magnetic letters to spell the words
– Students write the words during interactive writing activities

Writing Speed

• For students to become fluent writers, their transcription of ideas onto paper must be automatic; that means they spell most words automatically and use legible handwriting without thinking about how to form letters or keyboard without hunting for letter keys
• Students develop writing speed through practice
• Interactive writing is a useful procedure for examining young children’s handwriting skills & demonstrating how to form letters legibly
• Interactive writing: a process used to teach young students how to write. The process involves the sharing of a pen between the teacher and students. It can be done in a one-on-one private lesson with a student, or with a small group of students.

Writer’s Voice

• The writer’s voice reflects the person doing the writing
• It sounds natural, not stiff or unnatural
• Doing lots of reading & writing helps students develop their voices
• As students read books & listen to the teacher read aloud, students develop an awareness of voice
• Students writing in a personal journal or writing in reading logs on topics will help develop their voice

Assessing Writing 

• Teachers assess writing fluency as they observe students writing and examine their approach/structure

Questions to Consider

• Do students spell most words automatically, or do they stop to figure out how to spell many words?
• Do students write quickly enough to complete the assignment, or do they write slowly or try to avoid writing?
• Is the students’ handwriting legible?
• Do students write easily, or do they write unnaturally, complaining that their hands hurt?

Automaticity

• teachers assess students’ ability to spell the high-frequency words & use strategies to spell other words on spelling tests or by examining their writing samples
• Fluent writers spell most words correctly

Speed

• Teachers time students as they write a paragraph or two to assess their speed
• Teachers repeat this assessment several times throughout the year, using a different but familiar topic
• Monitoring their speed when writing on the topic, not the knowledge on the topic itself
• Teachers carefully observe students as they write to look for handwriting problems

Writer’s Voice

• Teachers reread compositions students have written to evaluate their unique style
• There isn’t standards to use in assessing voice, so teachers typically compare one students’ writing to another

Dysfluent Students

• By the time students reach 4th grade, they typically have become fluent readers and writers
• It is estimated that 10-15% of older students have difficulty recognizing words & their reading achievement is slowed
• Students in fourth grade & above who aren’t fluent readers are dysfluent
• Read hesitantly and without expression
• Often try to sound out phonetically irregular words such as what & their
• Can’t spell many high-frequency words 
• Handwriting is often difficult to decipher 
• Writing lacks a voice or is expressiveness
• Many of these students also struggle to get their ideas down on paper, form letters legibly, and spell common words correctly
• It’s crucial that teachers intervene to help students overcome these obstacles to reading and writing fluency

Obstacles to Fluency

• Students who struggle with fluency may have a single problem such as slow reading speed or delayed spelling development, or they may face numerous obstacles in both
• Providing targeted instruction is necessary to help students overcome these fluency obstacles

Most effective interventions include

• Providing explicit instruction on diagnosed fluency problems
• Increasing the time for students to read books at their independent level
• Modeling fluent reading and writing
• Clarifying the connections between reading fluency and comprehension and between writing fluency and effective compositions
• Increasing opportunities for writing
• Sustained silent reading for 15-20 minutes 

Obstacle 1: Lack of Automaticity
Teachers use clear instruction to teach students to read & write high frequency words

Involve students in these activities to practice

• Students locate examples of the words in books they’re reading
• Students practice reading flash cards with the words to partners
• Students play games (such as Concentration) using the words
• Students write the words & sentences they compose with them on whiteboards
• Students spell the words with letter cards or magnetic letters
• Students write the words during interactive writing activities
  

Obstacle 2: Unfamiliarity with Word-Identification Strategies
Students need to learn strategies for identifying unfamiliar words. Teachers use mini lessons to teach phonic analysis, decoding by analogy, syllabic analysis, and morphemic analysis with words that students are attempting to read & write

Teachers include these components in their intervention programs to develop students’ ability to read & spell words

• Develop students’ background knowledge & introduce new vocabulary words before reading
• Teach word-identification strategies
• Provide more time for reading & writing practice

Obstacle 3: Slow Reading Speed
The most important way that teachers intervene is by providing daily practice opportunities to develop students’ reading speed & stamina

Ways to improve students’ reading speed

• Teacher guided & independent reading practice; choral reading, guided reading, readers theatre, listening center, and partner reading
• Repeated readings procedure
• Sustained silent reading

Obstacle 4: Slow Writing Speed
The best way to improve students’ writing speed is through lots of writing.

Quickwriting: Students choose a topic for quickwriting & write without stopping for 5 or 10 minutes to explore the topic & deepen their understanding. The writing is informal, and students are encouraged to pour out ideas without stopping to organize them

Reading Logs: Students write entries in reading logs. In their entries, students share their predictions, write summaries, ask questions, collect quotes, & reflect on the reading experience

Simulated Journals:  Students assume the role of a book character & write entries from that character’s viewpoint in simulated journals. They dive into the character’s thoughts & actions to deepen their understanding 

Learning Logs: Students write entries in learning logs as part of thematic units. They’re using writing as a tool for learning as they take notes, draw and label graphic organizers, summarize big ideas, and write answers to questions

Obstacle 5: Lack of Prosody
Teachers stress prosody by modeling expressive reading every time they read aloud and using the think-aloud procedure to reflect on how they varied their expression, chunked words into phrases, adjusted the loudness of their voices, or varied their pacing. 

Ways to improve students’ expressiveness

• Choral reading
• Readers theatre
• Break sentences into phrases & read the sentences expressively
• Practice rereading sentences with expression

Obstacle 6: Voiceless Writing
Doing lots of reading & writing helps dysfluent writers develop their voices. As they read books & listen to the teacher read others aloud, students develop an awareness of voice. 

Classroom Application

• 10-15% of older students have difficulty recognizing words & their reading achievement is slowed –> Help students that are behind by continuous practice & clear instructions
• Fluent writing should sound like talking, it has a voice –> All students will have a different writing voice than one another 
• Introduce high frequency words 3-5 words at a time in a week –> Gives opportunity for the students to practice & really understand
• Provide chunking if students are struggling with expressiveness
• When assessing a students’ reading speed, don’t focus on the students’ knowledge on the topic, spelling or grammar 
• Students may misbehave to avoid reading or writing 
• Doing lots of reading & writing helps students develop their voice 
• Components of prosody include expression, phrasing, volume, smoothness, & pacing –> Help students work on prosody by gaining confidence on reading aloud