Reading Fluency

The brief discussion about reading fluency in class today got me thinking about the habitual reading plays in developing classroom cultures of literacy. Dean Pearson mentioned sustained silent reading (SSR) and Drop Everything and Read (DEAR) in passing, but I think it’s worth exploring these common classroom practices a little further.
I don’t know specifically what the research suggests about SSR, but anecdotally it seems like an important component in any reading curriculum, be it phonics-based, whole language, or balanced. For one thing, it gives teachers the opportunity to work with small groups of students — or even individuals who need Reading Recovery or similar tutoring — while the rest of the class actively engages in a meaningful literacy activity. (By meaningful, I guess what I really mean is anything but mindless worksheets, wordfinds, or connect-the-dots activities.)  While a teacher works with a small group, the rest of the class can be preparing for their own small-group (“lit circle,” “gossip group,” whatever you choose to call it) time by gaining familiarity with a text, working at their own pace to derive meaning from their reading.  It hardly seemed a coincidence that in the video we watched of the NYC bilingual classroom, the children who were not currently part of the extraordinarily productive, articulate literature circle were sitting silently at their desks, engaged in a variety of picture books.

SSR may also be a valuable tool in helping readers develop fluency.  I’ve noticed that a lot of the younger students I work with during the school year spend a lot of their SSR time reading series fiction, like Goosebumps and Wiley and Grampa. While these series books sometimes get a bad rap from parents  (they’re often dismissed as “trashy” or “lacking literary merit”), they’re terrific for kids who need a bit of scaffolding to help them improve their reading comprehension or decoding skills.  With very similar and predictable plot structures, character names, and word choice from book to book, series books offer kids a chance to practice reading independently within an already familiar context.

language, dialect, and discord

Our recent readings and class discussions about heteroglossia, primary versus secondary discourse, and privileged versus non-privileged discourses started me thinking about languages such as Norwegian and Finnish, both of which have a much more formalized distinction between the spoken form of the language and its written form. Finnish speakers, for example, use abbreviated forms of numbers when speaking (1, 2, 3 — yksi, kaksi, kolme — becomes “yks, kaks, kol). The grammar and syntax of “book language” in Finnish varies significantly from spoken Finnish. Likewise, while spoken Norwegian is closer in sound to Swedish, the standard written form of Norwegian is based more closely on Danish.  These variances mean that in order to become literate, all Norwegian and Finnish schoolchildren must learn to express themselvesTe in a discourse different from their home language, or primary discourse.  In Norway (and I believe Finland as well, but since I can’t read Finnish I’m less knowledgeable about its language controversies), there has been considerable controversy over the past century over which direction “bokmål”  (book dialect) should be taken.   Recently some Norwegians have begun using “nynorsk” (new Norwegian), another written-only language that is theoretically closer to non-Danish influenced Norwegian dialects, and therefore distances the speaker from Norway’s past as a Danish territory.   The controversy over which version of written Norwegian should be taught in schools has become quite heated — literally, in fact.  In 2005, the conservative group Ungre Hoyre (Young Right) actually burned a nynorsk book as part of a political advertisement they were running.  There’s an article in Norwegian on the incident here, and you can read a more complete summary of the language controversies on Wikipedia, which seems to be the only place on the internet to find information about the controversy in English.

valuing multiple literacies

How do we promote literacy without creating the type of child versus family divide that Richard Rodriguez describes?

Rodriguez claims that his education separated him from his parents by initiating him into a literate culture that his parents, native Spanish speakers, did not share. I see this alienation primarily as a failure of Rodriguez’s school to reach out to all its students families and include them in the educational process. Moll et al.’s idea of exploring family “funds of knowledge” and connecting parents to classrooms is one way of addressing the gap between family an secondary discourses that Rodriguez describes. The instance of the teacher who, upon learning that a child’s mother knew a lot about candy-making, invited that parent to the classroom to teach a lesson in that subject provides a powerful example of how teachers can help parents share in their children’s educational experience. Asking parents to visit classrooms or assemblies to share songs in their native languages, or stories from their cultures is another way of demonstrating to children that their primary literacy is valued by the school.

Bakhtin on language

Bakhtin’s words about the non-neutrality of language brought to mind Ursula K. LeGuin’s book The Dispossessed, a novel featuring the anarchic society of Anarres.  In Anarres, there is neither concept of personal property or of working for economic reward.  The Anarran language both reflects and perpetuates this ideological stance, in that it does not distinguish between the words (and thus the concepts) “work” and “play.”  Furthermore, it eschews possessive pronouns.  For example, instead of “my handkerchief,” a character refers to “the handkerchief I use.”  This deceptively simple linguistic variance expresses concisely the ideological foundation upon which Anarran society is built.  Thus language in LeGuin’s fictional world is politically active: it structures the way her characters can think about and express themselves on the topics of wealth, property, and ownership.

In a different vein, Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia and the layers of social relations different discourses reveal started me thinking about the language young people use when texting or IMing.  For instance, were I to read the phrase “OK CU L8R,”  I would not only understand that the speaker/writer was planning on meeting someone later, but that the speaker/writer was probably under 25, and was in an equal social relationship with the recipient.  I would be very surprised were I to learn that this message was sent by a middle-aged man to his boss, or even from a child to her parent.

Vygotsky and teaching writing

In his chapter, “The Prehistory of Written Language,” Lev Vygotsky posits that during the preschool years, writing experiences should be directly relevant to the student’s life and are incorporated into a task that is necessary and meaningful to the child.  He also concurs with Montessori that writing skills should be cultivated through play, rather than imposed through assignments.

I work with elementary-school children, and not pre-schoolers, so I would hesitate to implement a full-scale Vygotsky/Montessori program with any of my classes.  Yet in looking back on some of the writing-related activities I did with my classes this past year, I have to admit that the most successful ones — the ones that the students enjoyed most and produced the best writing for — were activities that more or less followed the principle of creating an activity that fulfills a child-oriented need and relates directly to the child’s own experiences.  By the same token, the least successful assignments were ones that pushed students to stretch too far beyond their own realms of experience and interest.

One notable success was a 5th grade project that involved the kids creating interactive maps of San Francisco using Google Maps and writing blurbs about their favorite SF locations. The kids then posted these maps to a wiki shared by a school in New York City whose 5th-graders had completed a similar assignment using maps of New York. The students were thus able to share information about their home cities with students from across the country. Predictably, favorite locations included Yankee and Giants Stadiums, Dylan’s Candy Shop (on the upper east side of Manhattan), Nick’s Crispy Tacos in North Beach.  The kids also included hyperlinks to relevant websites and images of each location in their blurbs.   This project was a big hit.  My San Francisco students enjoyed writing for an audience of their peers and were excited about the opportunity to “sell” their city to a class of East Coasters.   When asked to edit their work, the students complied readily, developing simple ideas and sentences into complex, informative paragraphs. The project built directly on their own experiences and affinities, and as a result the students were able to demonstrate their full potential as writers.

On the other hand, a 4th-grade writing prompt I used as the critical-thinking portion of a research project on the United States didn’t work nearly so well.  After researching some basic (and admittedly kind of boring) facts about a given state, students were given the prompt: “You are in charge of an advertising campaign designed to convince people to move to your state.  Write one persuasive paragraph explaining why people should move to the great state of  _______.”  The kids were given appropriate paragraphing scaffolding to help them organize their ideas, and we spent a good portion of class time reviewing the directions and brainstorming possible persuasive sentences.  And yet the students’ written work was lackluster at best.  In retrospect, I realize that the prompt extended too far beyond the kids’ experience.  Most of them had never visited their assigned state, and most of them had great difficulty imagining their 9-year old selves in charge of any kind of adult advertising campaign.  All this, combined with the challenging task of arranging thoughts into paragraph form, proved too much for most of the students.  Their persuasive paragraphs, while generally well-organized, were weak on both ideas and enthusiasm.    Since the two 4th grade teachers with whom I cooperate will definitely want to repeat this project again, I guess I’d better start thinking about a better, more child-centered, writing prompt! Any suggestions?

Word of the Day: “Play”

A couple days ago I heard a podcast lecture by Marcy Guddemi, the director of the Gesell Institute of Human Development in New Haven, entitled “The Role of Play in an Overly Academic Curriculum.” In her talk, Guddemi addressed the worrisome trend among U.S. schools of cutting out recess time and free playtime from the early elementary grades, in particular kindergarten.  School administrators, she argued, are feeling increasing pressure from No Child Left Behind to prepare students for standardized state tests, and as a result they are mandating more hours of traditional seat work for younger and younger children.  Guddemi argues that this trend is deeply counterproductive, as young children learn best through kinesthetic experience and self-driven exploration – in other words, through play and play-like activities.

Guddemi’s talk really struck a chord with me, a chord that Ayodele Nzinga amplified in her explanation of learning through play at the Prescott Joseph Community Center.  I couldn’t help contrasting the experience I imagine children at Prescott Joseph get with the experiences Mike Rose describes in Lives on the Boundary.  Rose refers to his elementary school years as “one long, vague stretch of time,” punctuated by “the two things I couldn’t understand and over the years grew to hate: grammar lessons and mathematics.”  He remembers the deadly, play-free dullness of diagramming sentences, an activity that divorces grammar from any meaningful, narrative context (cf. Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind, on the importance of narrative in learning).  He also mentions how easy it was to disengage from this mode of learning: all he had to do was stare into space and daydream.   As a result, he ended up extremely poorly prepared for high school.

Rose contrasts these school experiences with the impressive amount of chemistry he learned at home, playing with the chemistry set his parents gave him for Christmas.  “I would sit before my laboratory and play for hours,” he reminisces.  It is perhaps unsurprising, given his early enthusiasm for science, that Rose’s rescue from his high school’s dead-end Voc. Ed. track came as a result of his success in sophomore biology, a subject area for which Rose had developed an affinity through his extensive self-directed, play-based learning at home.  As both Rose and Guddemi demonstrate (the one autobiographically, the other more quantitatively), both free and structured playtime are absolutely essential to learning.  I hope Guddemi’s message gets out to more school administrators and policymakers before kindergarten and the early elementary grades in many schools around the country become entirely devoted to rote preparation for meaningless standardized tests.

first post

Just a test.  Content coming soon, no doubt.