Assigment #3 Adolescents, Reading Comp & Strategies

Sources

Beers, Kyleen. "When Kids Can't Read, What Teachers Can Do"

Willingham, Daniel T. "The Usefulness of Brief Instruction in Reading Comp Strategies" American Educator winter 2006-2007


Finding the path to literacy comprehension and reading strategies seem to be the constant discourse among teachers, theorists, researchers and those of the educational community. However we as teachers struggle daily to solve the literacy and comp skills that is ever lacking in the majority of our students. As a result, schools across America, in particular high needs schools like mine, have adopted programs such as Ramp-Up, America's Choice and Springboard in order to boost the literacy and fluency of our students. In response to the readings I chose for this blog, I would like to address the topic of whether these strategies actually work, and if so how useful they actually are in classroom.

In the Kyleen Beers Book, she tackles literacy issues that she encountered as a first year teacher through modes of motivation and reinforcement strategies. Her strategies offer strategies that deal with Vocabulary skills, Comprehension, Fluency, Word Recognition, and Motivation in order to address the main issue of illiteracy. What is great about this book is that Beers offers reproducible materials and graphic organizers that can be used with her suggested activities such as "say something" "think-alouds" "double entry journals" and "signal words." The best part of these strategies is that they build the confidence through motivation and positive reinforcement, which is something that I employ in my classes. I have adapted Beers' theories in my classroom by assigning intensive vocabulary skills, (4 words a day/ 16 per week) where it is mandatory for some words to be used in writing assignments, oral assignments and reading assignments. I use an incentive chart to reflect their progress, and motivate the usage of certain words. Also I reinforce these words as replacements to slang in order for them to feel comfortable and confident when communicating with adults in workplace. This strategy also aids their fluency and command of the language.

Daniel Willingham's article in the American Educator, in my opinion, supports the usage of these strategies because he argues that reading comp overlaps directly with the spoken language. Studies show that listening comp contributes to reading comp abilities because the ability to decode words and ideas fluently correlates to the decoding process required in literacy abilities. Listeners and speakers monitor others' communicating styles, hence, the way one is spoken to is the way he or she will likely communicate. This contributes to the "African American dialects" that we encounter, and the persistence of the usage of slang in our classrooms. Furthermore Willingham gives evidence of the effectiveness and ineffectiveness of reading strategies. Multiple strategy instruction, (predictions, summaries, questions)comp monitoring, Graphic organizers, Q&A's, and Cooperative learning and all strategies designed to encourage students to relates sentences to echo her are found to be effective.


I know there is a lot of info here, but the topic was very broad, and I hope this is fodder for an exciting discussion!
Sumana ;-)