Sunday, January 27, 2013
Transportable and Transparent Strategies For Content Literacy Instruction
In chapter two of Creating Literacy-Rich Schools for Adolescents, Ivery and Fisher make an excellent point, stating, "A good rule of thumb is that if you want students to learn a particular concept, look for reading materials that students can read almost effortlessly or with little support" pg 50. This is something I saw a lot when working in high schools, especially in history and science. Often a well intentioned teacher will assign a supplemental reading either for an in-class project or homework to spark interest in a topic being studied in class. The problem occured, often at the very beginning of the unit when students do not know the background information required to understand the text, and shut down, either not completing the assignment or hating the subject for the rest of the unit. When I assigned primary sources for my high school history class I began by using middle school level sources then working our way up depending on the reading level of the class. The importance of these supplementary texts are to give students exposure to different types of writings, or applications of a certain subject, the students can still learn from these and improve their reading skills without having to run the dictionary every two lines.
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I agree with your post because I felt this way in some of my high school classes, mostly math. The teacher would be giving a lesson, assuming we already knew the prior knowledge behind the context. However, most of the time we did not. This was very frstrating because ultimately, this hurt some of our grades and it is not fair to the students. I agree with you. We need to make sure our students know the basics of what we are teaching them and then get into the details.
ReplyDeleteI love your description, "Without having to run the dictionary every two lines" because I think that really does frustrate kids when reading new texts, often especially with primary sources. I even feel sometimes in my classes that I know too little of the language to really get anything valuable from it. I think for some teachers that teach subjects other than Reading, they just aren't aware of the reading level of their students, which causes a miscommunication between the students and the teacher. I love what you are on to, if reading is going to be transportable between different subjects, teachers need to be aware of how to pick appropriate and exciting texts.
ReplyDeleteI think that it was definitely a good approach for you to start with the easier texts in your class to gauge how the students would respond. Especially in topics like science and history I know it was always intimidating for me to see a 30 page reading assignment of which I would probably only understand 10 pages. I know I would have benefitted greatly from getting some supplemental instruction or pre-reading.
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