Critical Literacy

Critical Literacy

In order to help students facilitate this type of discussion, Jen Jones-Hello Literacy created these sentence frames in order to help students frame their thoughts, ideas and opinions. They are FREE and you can download them Here.  

- See more at: http://helloliteracy.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/informational-text-unit.html#sthash.AEG2RXJC.dpuf

Theme Statements in Critical Literacy

Critical literacy questions

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Good for opinion or fact and going into critical literacy

http://oscarlearnoscarteach.tumblr.com/

 

Hello Literacy: Informational Literacy Unit - Post Revised

Reading Specialist Blog

http://helloliteracy.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/informational-text-unit.html

 

 

Examples of useful critical literacy forms provided by our Reading Education 530 professor Monica Billen.  

This is a record sheet for teacher use during literature circles.

Each child in a literary group will have a job.
One job is the word finder. 
This child looks for unknown words in the story 

and completes this chart.

Illustrator,  a student draws a specific scene from the story.

 

 

The job of the connector is to find a 'connection' between the book and the outside world.

 

The discussion director creates questions for their group to discuss about their book.

 

This form is filled out when the book club members meet to discuss the book and do the above mentioned job. It is a Group Meeting Log 

This is a Teacher Daily Log that can be used when she observes the groups to see if they are fulfilling the requirements of their jobs.

   

This is a SAMPLE Teacher Daily Log Form

Articles that I found helpful for reading instruction.

The Impact of Early School Experiences on Initial Reading

By: Connie Juel

Summary

The research presented in this article sums up that much of the work teachers have been doing over the past few decades has left many students reading below basic.  This is especially prevalent in children of lower social economic families.  Juel findings show that children poor reading skills followed them throughout their academic careers.  The best predictor of children that would continue to struggle in reading would be phonemic awareness.  Her study finds that preschool can narrow these reading gaps.

Vocabulary and knowledge are huge predictors of later reading comprehension.  Children with more worldly exposures and rich language will have much greater success as readers. The things schools need to get right in early school years are vocabulary and word recognition.  Again vocabulary of entering first graders predicts their 11^th grade reading comprehension.  Moats’s “word poverty” estimates successful first grader readers have vocabulary knowledge with a difference of 15,000 words. The research stating that 90% of words in books are within the same 5,000 words. 

The comprehension of the other 10% of words used are what causes comprehension problems.  Teachers are provided guidelines of which words to select from texts from Beck, McKeown and Kucan.  The words are divide into Tiers 1, 2, and 3. Allowing teachers to spend time on words that will be more helpful to students in the future.  Again this research brings back the fact word recognition is important is the access card to reading.

Children with reading problems suffer self-esteem issues much more in higher grades.  First graders tend to attribute reading problems to effort rather the ability.  As students get older they feel it is their own lack of ability that prevents them from reading making many stop trying.

The two aspects of phonemic awareness are that reading fosters it and writing facilitates it. Awareness of phonological structure seems to be fostered through invented spelling.  Teachers directing this activity with exaggerating gestures and sounds helps children learn and attach letters to sounds.  Juel refers to this as instruction that makes sense. 

Writing systems that employ syllables as a base for speech representation are easier to learn than one that works on phoneme level.  Sounding out a word using rules and letter sound associations taught in phonics can create problems because of the mismatch of how the word is spoken (dialect) and the animal being one the child knows. (hog, huh, huhaaawwwguh)

Researchers claimed a child that is armed with phonemic awareness and some basic letter sound correspondences and has a rich exposure to print and spoken words can teach themselves to read “self teaching hypothesis”.

Phonics is an umbrella term that stands for many forms of instruction that links letters and sounds. The individual classroom teacher makes the difference in learning outcomes, no matter what the program or curriculum.  Of the phonics programs studied the only true difference revealed was the effectiveness of the classroom teacher.

First are the concerns that phonic or sounding out words is based on the assumption that children know the meanings of the words they are decoding.  Phonics works only if the sounds produce a recognizable word.  In many cases this untrue and serious problem.  Second concern is spending large amount of time on letter sounds and less time on developing oral vocabulary and knowledge.

Comments:

This article reveals a scary truth that is hard for teachers to face.  I feel that we all become teachers to help children learn and make their lives better.  Now to realize that we have been doing things wrong for decades is terrible.  It is difficult to know that first grade can determine to the rest of a child’s academic career especially now that I teach first grade. 

“The things schools need to get right in early school years are vocabulary and word recognition.”

 I am so thankful that we have begun using Guided Reading this year.  Through the leveled text and the way we work and discuss in our small groups has allowed me a closer look at how first graders think and perceive things.  I am so surprised everyday at the things they know and don’t know.  I feel Guided Reading will hopefully help children not only be able to decode and read the word but they will understand what the word means.  In each lesson I find my students are running into different words that they have not been exposed to or use in a different context.  Just last week a child in my J group could decode and read, “engine” but she did not have a clue they were taking about the truck’s motor in the story.  Engine meant a train to her.

I can relate to all of the research in this article.  I have taught reading in grades 1^st through 7^th.  I have had those children in my class with the academic low self-esteem that would rather get into trouble rather than read.  I am broken hearted over the research that children rarely overcome their reading difficulties by third grade. We as teachers are going to have to get our students reading well by first grade.  I have learned so much from these articles.  I have worked very hard over the years to make sure my students are where they need to be when they leave my class.  I feel this Kindergarten Literacy class has given me so many more tools to help me become more effective.

In the article it talks about how reading fosters phonemic awareness and writing facilitates it.  The invented spelling helping students become aware of phonological structure.  Teachers directing this activity with exaggerating gestures and sounds helps children learn and attach letters to sounds.  Juel refers to this as instruction that makes sense. Juel is right I think about this letting the children make the connection with exaggerated sounds by the teacher.  I found myself when I taught 6^th and 7^th grade reading that when I did a writing assignment and their story needed be spelled correctly and grammatically correct I would barely get two paragraphs from them.  However, when I removed the grammar and spelling restrictions from their writing I would get up to two pages.  Their stories would be so much more colorful and in-depth.  I enjoyed those papers so much better and so did the students because they would write and write. 

Phonics is an umbrella term that stands for many forms of instruction that links letters and sounds.

Phonics works only if the sounds produce a recognizable word.

Schools and teachers are going to have to start teaching correctly because it is our responsibility and job to teach children to read.  Yes, it is nice to have parent help and support but just as the research state that is not realistic in most cases.  We are going to have to be more effective developing the their vocabulary and knowledge along with decoding.  The blame for a child’s failure to read is left with the teachers and the school.

Summary:

Encouraging Young Children’s Language with Stories

McKeown and Beck

Two aspects of oral language: the amount of language heard in the home and children’s participation in conversational interaction.

Researchers who observed teacher student read aloud interactions identified talk-surrounding reading as the most valuable aspect of the activity for enhancing children’s language development

Dickinson and tabors found evidence that preschool children’s participation in talk about book reading enhances the growth of children’s literacy skills

Morrow and Frapping classrooms literature oriented and skills oriented classes. Concluded that talk surrounding the text or getting children to think about what was going on in the story were key to literacy growth.

Styles of Reading aloud:

Co-constructive

Didactic interactional

Performance.

Performance Teachers had higher vocabulary a year later as kindergarteners,

Found that interactions that occurred as the story was read that involved both children and teachers and that were analytic in nature led to positive effects on both vocabulary and story comprehension in kindergarten. (Analytic) require children to reflect on the story content or language

Harmful to learning:

Teacher telling too quickly

Children straying off topic

Most effective: encouragement of children’s responses involves focusing on important story ideas and allowing children opportunities to reflect rather than expectation a quickly retrieve answer.

Interactive style to be the most effective and the just reading less effective for vocabulary and comprehension

Learning requires attention to incoming informational connection of pieces of information and interaction of new information and prior knowledge

Whitehurst approach (1988) Dialogic reading where children are to become story-tellers over time. Adult role is to ask open-ended questions and expand the child’s verbalizations. Numerous studies indicated dialogic reading enhances expressive language and emergent literacy skills in children form all socioeconomic status groups even after relatively brief (4 week) interventions.

Talk

Interactional talk requiring attention and response from the children dovetails strongly wit other current understandings of the learning process make it clear that successful learning requires more than mere exposure to information. Rather learning requires attention to incoming information connection of pieces of informant and integration of new information and prior knowledge.

Risley

Children’s language depends on their exposure to and involvement in language with amount of talk being he key to higher language achievement.

In their home made profound differences in their language development at age 3 related to their accomplishment in literacy in school at age 9: positive tone and asking children and giving them choices rather than telling them.

Build Meaning

Interactional talk requiring attention and response from the children dovetails strongly with other current understandings about learning.

• Current understanding: learning requires attention to incoming information, connection of pieces of information, and integration of new information and prior knowledge.

Children’s language learning depends on their exposure to and involvement in language, with amount of talk being the key to higher language achievement.

• Number of words spoken in a home showed profound language development by age 3.
• Reciprocal conversational interaction between parent and child per hour was profoundly related to children’s verbal cognitive competence.

Conversations require each partner to say something related to the shared topic for a conversation to continue.

For children to continue the their role in conversation children need to listen for vocabulary content and attempt utterance forms so they can construct responses.

Being part of conversations familiarizes children to what might be said in the language and prompts them to practice selection what can be said appropriately in the immediate circumstances.

De-contextualized language underlies literacy competence; getting children involved in talking about the ideas in stories they hear. Promoted literacy growth.

Interactive co-constructive talk

Text talk was developed to scaffold children’s comprehension of a story as the events and ideas unfold. “What is happening now? What do we know so far about their family? How have things changed?” Talk text encourages children to articulate their thinking and put together ideas form the story.

Most often children parrot part of the text that has just been read.

Follow Up

Teachers need to follow up on questioning to ensure that children are in the lane and not just on the road of comprehension. Children understand the relationships and problems in a story.

Children need to be "coax" along at time to make connections to a story. They must go though a text piece by piece supporting the children allowing them to make the connections.

Principals Effective Interactions

Teachers need students to connect on more than surface level easy questions.

*Develop student’s abilities to construct meaning by interaction with story events and ideas through elaboration.

Repetition of ideas is a characteristic of real conversation. It is a way of letting our conversation partners know that they have been heard and lets them know where our next move in the conversation will go.

Modeling and Pursuing

Teacher gives opportunities to answer question but when the teacher does not get the correct responses she will then model how the question should be answered.

Even with sparse answers recasting (pursuing) the ideas in the question and eventually getting something to develop.

Reread Text as Often as Needed

Going back to text to re-read models for children that dealing with text is not a linear process, but that in the course of reading, a reader returns to the text as a resource for building meaning. (Thus creating readers that will look back checking the text and using that to develop their ideas.) Rereading portions of text helps children build the understanding that to successfully comprehend text a reader needs to deal with what is in the text rather than guess.

Comments:

The gap teachers and students have to overcome is huge considering so many children are behind by age 3 according to the amount language exposure and interactive language used in a child’s home.

Teachers will have to work harder to grow children’s langauage. It will take a great deal of introspective questioning and listening to answers and redirecting sparse responses to help children explain clearly their ideas and connections to a story.

One of the most important points I got from this article is that deep language learning comes from conversation where both partners are contributing in a meaningful manner. From an educational stance, it will require a teacher to question, model, and pursue students into deeper conversation about stories or topics. We can no longer settle for the short sparse surface answers to a question. We will have listen students and hold them to a higher level of participation during text conversation. Teachers will have to really listen in a active way to help children develop their comprehension and language skills.

I see many things in this article that I will have to work on in my own classroom. It is difficult to keep them from straying off topic especially in a book they can relate to their own lives and families. I don’t want them to feel like I am not interested in their lives and thoughts. It is like millions of things are running through their little minds and even the mention of a color will make them think of their dog and they are off chasing rabbits.

I do feel I have grown tremendously as a teacher in my questioning, pursuing, and modeling during my reading time. This year my students have grown and out perform all my classes in earlier years. I feel my students can answer questions in a deeper more meaningful way.

GUIDED READING: The Romance and the Reality

Irene C. Fountas, Gay Su Pinnell

Summary:

In Guided Reading Groups readers are actively engaged in the lesson as they learn how to take words apart, flexibly and efficiently, while attending to the meaning of a text. They begin thinking about the text before reading, attend to the meaning while reading, and are invited to share their thinking after reading. They deepen their understanding of a variety of texts through thoughtful conversation. The teachers have embraced guided reading, “an instructional context for supporting each reader’s development of effective strategies for processing novel texts at increasingly challenging levels of difficulty”.

Roots for Guided Reading came from New Zealand schools.

Differentiated Instruction

Many teachers have embraced small-group teaching as a way of effectively teaching the broad range of learners in their classrooms. Because readers engage with texts within their control (with supportive teaching), teachers have the opportunity to see students reading books with proficient processing every day. In addition, it is vital to support students in taking on more challenging texts so that they can grow as readers, using the text gradient as a “ladder of progress” (Clay, 1991, p. 215).

Leveled Books

Leveled books are one of the important changes in Guided Reading. Teachers have learned to collect short texts at the levels they need and to use the levels as a guide for putting the right book in the hands of students. The individual titles enable teachers to choose different books for different groups so that they can design a student’s literacy program and students can take “different paths to common outcomes” (Clay, 1998).

Benchmark Assessments

Teachers engage in authentic, text-based assessment conferences that involve students in reading real books as a measure of how they read. Administered during the first weeks of school, an assessment conference with a set of carefully leveled texts yields reliable data to guide teaching.

Running Records

They can code the students’ reading behaviors and score the records, noting accuracy levels. From that information, they make decisions about the level that is appropriate for students to read independently (independent level) and the level at which it would be productive to begin instruction.

Teachers have learned to avoid the daily struggle with very difficult material that will not permit smooth, proficient processing no matter how expert the teaching. Instead, they strive for text selection that will help students read proficiently and learn more as readers every day, always with the goal of reading at grade level or above.

Guided Reading attending to elements of proficient reading: decoding, comprehension, and fluency. Assessment of students’ reading levels and the teaching that grows out of it go beyond accurate word reading. In addition to the goal of effective word solving, teachers are concerned about comprehension of texts. 

The reality is that there will be more for everyone to learn as we move forward. The compelling benefits of guided reading for students may elude us unless we attend to the teaching decisions that assure that every student in our care climbs the ladder of success.

To change our practices in an enduring way, we need to change our understandings. If we bring our old thinking to a new practice, the rationales may not fit (Wollman, 2007). Teaching practice may often be enacted in a way that is inconsistent with or even contrary to the underlying theory that led to its development (Brown & Campione, 1996; Sperling

We address three big areas that offer new learning in the refinement of teaching in guided reading lessons, bringing together the romance in guided reading with the reality of its depth. These areas can be summarized as readers and the reading process, texts, and teaching.

Thinking Within the Text

The first six systems we categorize as “thinking within the text.” These activities are solving words, monitoring and correcting, searching for and using information, summarizing information in a way that the reader can remember it, adjusting reading for different purposes and genres, and sustaining fluency.

Thinking Beyond the Text

The next four systems call for “thinking beyond the text.” They are inferring, synthesizing, making connections, and predicting. Reading is a transaction between the text and the reader (Rosenblatt, 1994); that is, the reader constructs unique meanings through integrating background knowledge, emotions, attitudes, and expectations with the meaning the writer expresses. 

Thinking About the Text

The last two systems represent how the proficient reader analyzes and critiques the text. Readers hold up the text as an object that they can look back at and analyze. They notice aspects of the writer’s craft appreciate language, literary devices such as use of symbolism, how characters and their development are revealed, beginnings and endings.

Reading Fluency

Fluency means the efficient and effective processing of meaningful, connected, communicative language. According to Newkirk (2011), “the fluent reader is demonstrating comprehension, taking cues from the text, and taking pleasure in finding the right tempo for the text” (p. 1). He hastens to explain that he does not mean the laborious, word-to-word struggle to read something that is clearly too hard for the reader. And he says there is no ideal speed. The speed has to do with the relationship we have with what we read.

Oral Language

As readers grow more proficient, language still plays a strong role. The most obvious is the role of the oral vocabulary, which is extremely important. However, teachers also consider the reader’s grasp of sentence complexity and the speaker’s understanding of metaphor, simile, expression, idioms, and other nuances of speech.

Assessment

Good assessment is the foundation for effective teaching. Assessment in its simplest form means gaining information about the learners you will teach. The “noticing” teacher tunes in to the individual reader and observes how the reader works through a text and thinks about how the reading sounds.

The key to effective teaching is your ability to make different decisions for different students at different points in time, honoring the complexity of development. A key concept related to guided reading is that grouping is dynamic temporary, not static. Teachers group and regroup students as they gain behavioral evidence of their progress.

To make effective decisions for readers, you also need an efficient system for ongoing assessment using running records. A running record using yesterday’s instructional book takes the place of benchmark assessment with “unseen text.” The running record becomes a useful tool for assessing the effects of yesterday’s teaching on the reader.

Rather than teaching the level or the book, you notice and are able to use the behavioral evidence to guide your next teaching moves. We see this kind of teaching as the “precision teaching” that makes guided reading lessons powerful. Reading teachers are like scientists gathering precise data and using it to form hypotheses. For example, you can use running records or benchmark assessments to:

• Assess the accuracy level
• Assess fluency
• Observe and code oral reading behaviors systematically to note what students do at difficulty or at error and learn how students are solving problems with text

Leveled Text

The appropriate text allows the reader to expand her reading powers. To become proficient readers, students must experience successful processing daily. Not only should they be able to read books independently, building interest, stamina, and fluency; they also need to tackle harder books that provide the opportunity to grow more skillful as a reader.

When the entire class is reading the same book on the same level most of the readers will not be encountering text that, with teacher support, causes them to expand their reading powers. There are many reasons for whole-group instruction, and we recommend that it take place every day in interactive read-aloud or reading mini lessons.

It will be frustrating to select a book and begin to use it with a group, only to find it is too easy or too difficult to support learning. Second, when teachers understand the 10 text characteristics that are used to determine the level, they understand its demands on the reader and cause it in a more powerful way in teaching.

The ability to analyze texts represents important teacher knowledge that takes time to develop.

Many teachers of guided reading have spent a great deal of time analyzing and comparing texts using the 10 characteristics and have become “quick” analyzers of texts. They match up their understandings with their knowledge of the students in the group. When they teach a guided reading lesson, they can plan quickly what they need to say in the introduction and anticipate key understandings to talk about in the discussion. When you understand the inner workings of a text, you can introduce it well and guide a powerful discussion.

Guided reading is much more. It is an instructional context within which the precise teaching moves and language choices are related to the behaviors observed, moment by moment, and which guide the reader to engage in problem solving that expands his or her reading power.