Transcript Prepping for the Praxis

Prepping for the Praxis
…Reviewing Literacy Fundamentals
Maple Heights City Schools
April 19, 2016
Lisa Testa, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Kent State University
What is reading?
What is reading?

Reading is a constructive process of
creating meaning that involves the reader,
the text, and the purpose within social
and cultural contexts.
 --Gail Tompkins, Literacy for the 21st Century: A
Balanced Approach, 5th ed., 2010, p. 42
Comprehensive Literacy Instruction
Meaning-centered, part to whole
 Purpose driven
 Reading means to construct meaning and
to use everything you know to do so
(Weaver, 2003).
 Phonics is done in context and taught as a
strategy to aid in meaning-making

◦ Word identification not taught as an end to
itself
A sociopsycholinguistic process
from www.vivianmaier.com
Sociolinguistics

Stresses the importance of language and
social interaction in learning.

Believe that oral language provides the
foundation for learning to read and
write.
Key sociolinguist…

Lev Vygotsky
◦ Theorized that
language helps to
organize thought
◦ Students use language
to learn as well as
communicate.

Vygotsky suggested
that students don’t
learn by doing things
independently

Students need to be
stretched to work
outside of their
independent level with
the assistance of a
more experienced,
knowledgeable helper.
The 5 Pillars of the Reading Process
(National Reading Panel, 2000)

Phonemic awareness and phonics
◦ Word play with preschoolers to help them segment phonemes
◦ Systematic teaching of the sound-letter correspondence

Word Identification
◦ Students learn to recognize common or high-frequency words;
saves cognitive resources for comprehension

Fluency
◦ Independent reading at child’s “just right” level
◦ Can devote most of their cognitive resources to comprehension

Vocabulary
◦ The building blocks of meaning-making

Comprehension
◦ Gaining the strategic knowledge to make meaning from texts
Phonemic Awareness

“Phonemic awareness, phonological
awareness (or sound knowledge and
sound play) refers to a person’s
awareness of speech sounds smaller than
a syllable and the ability to manipulate
those sounds through such tasks as
blending and segmenting sounds in
words” (Rasinski & Padak, From Phonics to Fluency: Effective Teaching of
Decoding and Reading Fluency in the Elementary School, 2001, p. 31).
phoneme

smallest unit of sound
phonics

the knowledge of
letter-sound
correspondence

phoneme-grapheme
(letters or letter
combinations)
correspondence
The Cueing System
The 4 systems that “clue” us into making meaning!
Phonological (sound) system
Important for beginning readers & writers
 Learn to pronounce sounds as they learn
to talk
 Learn to associate sounds with letters as
they learn to read and write
 Students use phonics to decode words,
but phonics is not a complete reading
program b/c not all words can be
decoded easily and reading is more than
just decoding.

Phonological cueing system
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44 sounds in the English language, 26 letters
Phoneme=smallest unit of sound
Grapheme=written version of a phoneme
using one or more letters
Phonological awareness: being able to hear
the sounds (word play, rimes, onsets)
Phonemic awareness: being able to orally
manipulate phonemes in words (orally
segmenting)
Phonics: instruction about phonemegrapheme correspondence and spelling rules
Syntactic System
The grammar that regulates how words
are combined into sentences.
 Grammar literally means the rules for
governing how words are combined in
sentences, not parts of speech.
 Word order is important to making
meaning.

Syntactic System

“The horses galloped through the gate
and out into the field”

Student may not be able to read
“through” but could substitute with “out
of” or “past” because it makes sense in
the structure of the sentence.
Syntactic System
Morphemes=smallest unit of meaning
 “dog,” “cat,” “play” are all free morphemes
 “-s” and “-ed” are bound morphemes

◦ Plural marker or past-tense marker
◦ Change the meaning of the words they are
added onto.
Semantic (Meaning) System

Is the student using meaning cues in an
attempt to identify the word?
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Using context clues
Using picture cues
Using information from the passage
Attending to the meaning of words
Visual System

Does it look right?
◦ Sometimes a miscue may begin with the same
letter or letters, like: “toy” for “top,” or “sit”
for “sat.”
Pragmatic System
The social aspects of language use.
 Language varies across social classes,
ethnic groups and geographic regions

Cues and Miscues
Ken Goodman: in the late 1960s and early
1970s developed the practice of miscue
analysis
 Premise: Readers appropriate the cues in
growing levels of sophistication. A miscue
is an attempt to appropriate one of the
cueing systems. The teacher can
determine a student’s development
through analysis of their miscues.

Types of miscues:

What word identification strategies is the
student using?
 Semantic or Meaning Cues
 Ask, “Does this make sense?”
 Syntactic
 Ask, “Does it sound right?”
 Visual or grapho-phonemic?
 Ask, Does it look right?”
Basic assessment procedures
Assessing early literacy:
Concepts About Print
 Kid-watching (Goodman,Y, 1985)
 Observation Survey of Early Literacy
Achievement (K-2)
 Yopp-Singer Test of Phonemic
Segmentation (K)
Basic assessment procedures
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Assessing phonics and word identification:
Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills DIBELS (K-3)
The Names Test (3-8)
Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement (K-2)
The Tile Test (K-2)
High-frequency word lists (K-3)
Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement (K-2)
Writing Samples (K-3)
Developmental Reading Assessment (K-8)
The Names Test (3-8)
Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening (K-3)
Running Records (K-8)
Running Records (Marie Clay)
 Most useful with beginning readers up through 3rd grade
 Teacher records everything a child says during an oral reading
 Miscue analysis
 Kid-watching
Miscues Identified in Running
Records
Substitution
 Omission
 Insertion
 Repetition or one word or phrase
 Self-correction (no error)
 Intervention
 Beginning sound (no error)
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Reading teachers use assessment tools
to regularly monitor students’ reading
development and plan for instruction.
•Informal reading inventories (IRIs) are used to determine
students’ reading levels.
•Phonics and Other Skills: Teachers use phonemic awareness tests
•Clay’s Observational Survey to assess young children’s knowledge of phonics
•The Names Test to assess older, struggling readers’ decoding ability.
•They also use running records to analyze students’ word-identification
errors.
•Teachers use observation to monitor students’ use of reading and writing
strategies.
Assessments
On-going
 Linked to instruction
 Formative
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Evaluation
Summative
 Final
 Administered at the end of a unit or end
of the school year

See Annenberg video on assessments:
 http://www.learner.org/libraries/readingk2
/perez/first.html
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Test to determine reading levels
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Independent: 98-100%accuracy
◦ Can read these books for pleasure.
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Instructional: 90-97% accuracy; their ZPD
◦ Can read these books in guided reading.
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Frustration: Less than 90%
◦ Can hear these books read aloud by
teacher/parent
Students should be assessed regularly to
determine their reading levels and to
monitor their progress.
Types of assessments
Kits of leveled books to determine
students’ reading levels
 Informal procedures, such as observations
and conferences, to monitor student
progress
 Test to diagnose students’ strengths and
weaknesses in specific components of
reading and writing
 Collections of work samples to document
students’ learning
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“The effective reading teacher (a) knows
what skills one must learn and in what
order, (b) is able to figure out where a
student is in his or her reading
development (i.e., via classroom
assessment), and (c) knows which skills he
or she is able to learn next (i.e., his or her
ZPD).”
(Reutzel and Cooter , 2011, p. 6)
Break
What is emergent literacy?

Young children begin learning about
written language long before entering
school
◦ SHOW TALKING TWINS VIDEO
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Learn that print carries meaning
◦ Menus, postcards, birthday cards, traffic and
store signs
What emergent readers need?
Schema (Background knowledge)
 Access to literacy resources (books)
 Oral communication
 Be read to
 Models of literate behavior
 Phonological awareness (hearing)
 “Print Rich” environment
 Vocabulary through oral communication
 Strategies for unlocking meaning
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Schema
Learning is the
modification of
students’ schemas as
they actively interact
with their
environment.
 Analogous to a file
cabinet
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Assimilation
◦ When students add to
info they already know
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Accommodation
◦ Students create a
brand new file for this
brand new info
Concepts about Print
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Book-orientation concepts
◦ How to hold a book
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Directionality concepts
◦ Read left to right, front to back
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Letter and word concepts
◦ Directions of letters
◦ Understanding about meaning of words
Concepts about Words
Level 1: Don’t differentiate between words and
things
 Level 2: Describe words as labels for things (don’t
differentiate articles or prepositions because
these words don’t represent things)
 Level 3: Understand that words carry meaning
and that stories are built from words
 Level 4: More fluent readers and writers describe
words as autonomous elements having meanings
of their own. Understand that words can be
spoken, listened to, read, and written.
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Concepts about Words
Environmental print: At first, young children
depend on context to read familiar words
and memorized texts, i.e., can recognize the
golden arches as McDonald’s but cannot
read the word, “McDonald’s”
 Emergent Writing: develops lines, dots to 2-3
letters with no spacing to increasing
awareness of letter-sound relationship.
 Literacy play centers: additions of reading
and writing are made to play, i.e., as students
construct block buildings, children write
signs and tape them on the buildings.
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Concepts about Alphabet

Pinnell and Fountas (1998) identified these
components of letter knowledge:
◦ The letter’s name
◦ The formation of the letter in upper-and lowercase
manuscript
◦ The features of the letter that distinguish it from other
letters
◦ The direction the letter must be turned to distinguish it
from other letters
◦ The use of the letter in known words (e.g., names and
common words)
◦ The sound the letter represents in isolation
◦ The sound the letter represents in combination with
others
◦ The sound the letter represents in the context of a word
Learning letters…
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…requires many, many experiences with
meaningful written language
◦ Start with children’s names and environmental
print
◦ Teach the ABC song
◦ Provide games and activities to talk about and
manipulate letters
3 stages of learning to read
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Emergent
◦ Young children gain an understanding of the
communicative purpose of print
◦ Move from pretend reading to reading predictable books
◦ Move from scribbles to writing patterned sentences
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Beginning
◦ Focus on phonics…learning to “crack the alphabetic code”
◦ Learn to read high-frequency words
◦ Can write several sentences and develop a simple story
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Fluent
◦ Automatic, fluent readers
◦ Develop good handwriting skills, spell many high-frequency
words correctly
◦ Organize writing into multiple-paragraph compositions
First reading strategies…
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Cross-check
Predict
Connect
Monitor
Repair
Students learn these reading strategies as
they participate in shared and guided reading
activities and interactive read alouds.
Early literacy instructional
approaches
Morning message
 Shared reading/writing
 Predictable books
 Language Experience Approach
 Poems
 Word play activities
 Literacy-Rich envinronment
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Reading Strategies and Skills
Reading is a complex process involving both strategies
and skills.
 Strategies
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thinking that readers do as they read
Affect motivation: gives confidence
Deliberate, goal-directed actions
Cognitive/information processing theory
Skills
◦ quick automatic behaviors that don’t require any
thoughts
◦ Emphasis is on effortless and accurate use
◦ Automaticity
◦ Behaviorism
Types of Strategies
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Decoding strategies
◦ Using phonic and morphemic analysis
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Word-learning strategies
◦ Analyzing word parts
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Comprehension strategies
◦ Predicting, drawing inferences, visualizing
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Study strategies
◦ Taking notes and questioning
Types of Skills
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Decoding skills
◦ Use sound-symbol knowledge and phonics
rules
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Word-learning skills
◦ Identify synonyms, notice capitalization
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Comprehension skills
◦ Notice details, separate fact and opinion
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Study skills
◦ Consult an index, notice boldface terms,
locate and remember information
Mini-lessons
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Students need explicit instruction about
reading strategies
◦ Declarative knowledge: what the strategy
does
◦ Procedural knowledge: how to use the
strategy
◦ Conditional knowledge: when to use the
strategy
Cracking the Code
What does it mean to
“crack the code”?
English is an alphabetic language, and
children crack this code as they learn about
phonemes (sounds), graphemes (letters),
and graphophonemic (letter-sound)
relationships.
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Phonemic Awareness
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Children learn to notice and
manipulate the sounds of oral language.
◦ As students grow in this important aspect of
learning to read they can segment and blend
sounds in spoken words.
◦ Segment: children learn to break a word into
its beginning, middle and ending sounds.
◦ Blend: children learn to blend 2, 3, or 4
individual sounds to form a word
Why is this such a big deal?

Researchers have concluded that
phonemic awareness is a prerequisite for
learning to read.
◦ Once children learn that speech can be
segmented into smaller units they can build
on that knowledge to understand the soundsymbol correspondence.
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Phonemic awareness has been shown to
be the most powerful predictor of later
reading achievement.
Cunningham and Allington(2007)
Describe phonemic awareness as
children’s ability to “take words apart, put
them back together again, and change
them”
 Emphasis is on the spoken words, not on
reading letters or pronouncing letter
names.
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Phonemic awareness
Requires that children treat speech as an
object that they shift their attention away
from the meaning of words to the
linguistic features of speech.
 An abstract endeavor
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◦ Phonemes are not discrete units of speech
(not concrete and measurable)
◦ Often they are slurred and clipped in speech
(think tree, three, slurp)
Teaching Phonemic Awareness
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Begin with oral activities using objects and
pictures, but after children learn to identify the
letters of the alphabet, add reading and writing
components.
Read and reread wordplay books
Teach minilessons on manipulating words, moving
from easier to more-complex levels.
Emphasize blending and segmenting because
students need these two strategies for phonics
and spelling.
Use small-group activities (literacy centers) so
children can be more actively involved in
manipulating language.
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As you watch this video, consider:
◦ How was phonemic awareness taught in the clip?
◦ What emergent (or beginning)literacy behaviors
did you see in the video?
◦ How many instructional procedures (refer to
appendix) can you identify from this clip?

http://www.learner.org/libraries/readingk2/wi
lson/index.html?pop=yes&pid=1726
Phonics
Children learn to convert letters into
sounds and blend them to recognize
words.
 Student apply phonics concepts to figure
out unfamiliar written words by applying
their growing understanding of the soundsymbol correspondences in English.
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Why is this such a big deal?
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An integral part of the balanced literacy
approach includes:
◦ Students being explicitly taught—intentionally,
systematically, and routinely—letter-sound
relationships.
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Teaching phonics alone is not a balanced
approach, but the teaching of phonics is a
central part of a meaning-centered
approach.
Phonics defined:
Phonics is the set of relationships
between phonology (the sounds in
speech) and orthography (the spelling
patterns of written language).
 Emphasis on spelling patterns because
there isn’t a 1-to-1 correspondence
between phonemes and graphemes in
English.
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Why doesn’t English have 1-to-1 correspondence
between phonemes and graphemes?
Sounds vary according to their location in
the word (ex.: go-got)
 Adjacent letters influence spelling (ex.:
bed-bead)
 Vowel markers such as the final e (ex.: bitbite)
 Etymology: what was the original language
(ex.: ch digraph can be pronounces 3
ways)
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Phonics concepts
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44 phonemes can be graphically represented
more than 500 ways!
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Start with consonants.
◦ Most consonants represent a single sound
consistently, with a few exceptions (c,g, w, x, and y)
◦ Two combination consonants: blends and digraphs
◦ Blends=2-3 consonants appearing next to each
other and their individual sounds are intact
◦ Digraphs=letter combos representing single
sounds that are not tied to either letter (ch, sh, th,
wh, ph)
Vowels
a, e, i, o, u and sometimes w and y
 Often represent several sounds
 Short sound and long sound
 Long vowel sounds often spelled with two
vowels or the VC-e combination
 Vowel sounds are more complicated than
consonant sounds because of the variety
of combinations that yield the long vowel
sounds.
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Vowels
Vowel digraphs: when two vowels
represent a single sound (ex. nail, snow)
 Vowel diphthongs: when two vowels
represent a glide from one sound to
another (ex. oi and oy; see page 158 for
others).
 R-controlled vowels: when one or more
vowels in a word are followed by an r.
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◦ ar and or are more consistent; er, ir, and ur not
so much
Vowels
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What the heck is a schwa?
◦ Schwa: vowels in the unaccented syllables of
multisyllabic words are often softened and
pronounced “uh”
 About and machine
 Represented as an upside down e
Phonograms
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One-syllable words and syllables in longer
words can be divided into two parts…onset
and rime
Onset=consonant sound that precedes the
vowel
Rime=the vowel and any consonant sounds
that follow it
◦ Research has shown that children make more
errors decoding and spelling the rime than the
onset and more errors on spelling the vowels
than on the consonants (Caldwell & Leslie 2005).
decoding by analogy
37 rimes (phonograms or word families)
Here’s a link to a Pinterest board for
phonograms
 Knowing these rimes and recognizing
common words made from them are very
helpful for beginning readers because they
can use this knowledge to decode longer
words.
 Strategy is called decoding by analogy
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Phonics Rules
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Linguists have tried to ID rules to clarify
English spelling patterns; trouble is that there
are plenty of exceptions to the rules
Good rules…
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Two sounds of C
Two sounds of G
CVC pattern
Final e or CVCe pattern
CV pattern
R-controlled vowels
-igh
kn- and wr-
Phonics strategies
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Three most useful
◦ Sounding out words
◦ Decoding by analogy
◦ Applying phonics rules
Guidelines for teaching phonics
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Teach high-utility phonics concepts
Follow a developmental continuum for systematic
phonics instruction, beginning with rhyming and
ending with phonics rules
Provide explicit instruction to teach phonics
strategies and skills
Provide application opportunities, such as word
sorts, making words, interactive writing
Use oral activities to reinforce phonemic
awareness strategies, i.e., blending and segmenting
Review phonics as a part of spelling in the upper
grades
Assessing phonics
Use a combination of tests, observation,
and reading and writing samples
 Test to screen at beginning, middle, and
end of year.
 DIBELS: Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early
Literacy Skills
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◦ Students ability to apply phonics concepts to
read two- and three-letter nonsense words
(i.e., ap, jid)
Names Test
measures older students’ ability to
decode words.
 List of names that illustrate phonemegrapheme correspondences and phonics
rules.
 As student reads the names, teachers
mark incorrect reading.
 Then teachers analyze the errors to
determine which phonics concepts the
students haven’t learned.
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Spelling
As children learn about phonics, they
apply what they’re learning through both
reading and writing.
 Children’s early spellings reflect what they
know about phoneme-grapheme
relationships, phonics rules, and spelling
patterns.
 Students need to learn to spell words
conventionally so they can communicate
effectively through writing.
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Stages of spelling development
As young children begin to write, they
create unique spellings, called invented
spelling, based on their knowledge of
phonology (Read, 1975).
 U=you; R=are; GRL=girl; TIGR=tiger
 CHRIBLES=troubles; MI (my).; LADE=lady
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Stage 1: Emergent Spelling
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Children string scribbles, letter, and letter
like forms together, but they don’t
associate the marks they make with any
specific phonemes. This stage is typical of
3- to 5-year olds. Children learn these
concepts:
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The distinction between drawing and writing.
How to make letters
The direction of writing on a page
Some letter-sound matches
Stage 2: Letter Name-Alphabetic
Spelling
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Children learn to represent phonemes in
words with letters. At first, their spellings are
quite abbreviated, but they learn to use
consonant blends and digraphs and shortvowel patterns to spell many short-vowel
words. Spellers are 5- to 7-year-olds.
Children learn these concepts:
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The alphabetic principle
Consonant sounds
Short vowel sounds
Consonant blends and digraphs
Stage 3:Within-Word Pattern
Spelling
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Students learn long-vowel patterns and rcontrolled vowels, but they may confuse
spelling patterns and spell meet as mete, and
they reverse the order of letters, such as
form for from and gril for girl. Spellers are 7to 9-year olds., and they learn these
concepts:
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Long-vowel spelling patterns
R-controlled vowels
More complex consonant patterns
Diphthongs and other less common vowel
patterns
Stage 4: Syllables and Affixes Spelling
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Students apply what they have learned about
one-syllable words to spell longer words,
and they learn to break words into syllables.
They also learn to add inflectional endings
(e.g., -es, -ed, -ing) and to differentiate
between homophones, such as your-you’re.
Spellers are often 9- to 11-year-olds, and
they learn these concepts:
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Inflectional endings
Rules for adding inflectional endings
Syllabication
Homophones
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Children’s spelling provides evidence of
their growing understanding of English
orthography. The words they spell
correctly show which phonics concepts,
spelling patterns, and other language
features they’ve learned to apply, and the
words they invent and misspell show what
they’re still learning to use and those
features of spelling that they haven’t
noticed or learned about.
Strategies for teaching spelling
Segmenting the word and spelling each
sound; often called “sound it out” but
should be called “think it out”
 Spelling unknown words by analogy to
familiar words
 Applying affixes to root words
 Proofreading to locate spelling errors in a
rough draft
 Locating the spelling of unfamiliar words
in a dictionary
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Why word
identification
matters…
Automaticity
foundational to
fluency
What is fluency
Children move from word-by-word reading
with little or not expression to fluent
reading.
 Fluency is the ability to read quickly,
accurately and with expression.
 To read fluently, students must recognize
most words automatically and identify
unfamiliar words easily.
Why is fluency important?

Researcher have found that fluent readers
comprehend what they’re reading better
than less fluent readers do (National
Reading Panel, 2000).
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Pilulski and Chard (2005) describe fluency
as the bridge between decoding and
comprehension.
Components of fluency
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Accuracy
◦ Allington (2009) suggests 98-99% accuracy
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Reading speed
◦ Should be at a speed that matches speech
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Prosody
◦ Should be appropriately phrased and
rhythmically regular
How do students become fluent
readers and writers?
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Through a combination of instruction and
lots of reading experiences.
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Teachers have two goals as they teach
children to read and write:
◦ 1. teach them to instantly recognize several
hundred high-frequency sight words.
◦ 2. Equip them with strategies they can use to
identify unfamiliar words.
Important components of fluency
instruction

Word Recognition=the large stock of
words children automatically recognize
because of repeated reading and writing
using these sight words.
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Word Identification=Students use wordidentification strategies to puzzle out
unknown words.
What to teach and ways to teach
Word Recognition
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Explicitly teach high-frequency words
through repeated reading and writing
experiences with the goal to develop
automaticity
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24=kindergarten
100=1st grade
Next 100=second grade
300 total=by end of third grade
Word Walls
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Alphabetically display the high-frequency
words of the grade prominently in the
classroom

Help struggling readers by giving them
their own word set…either by flashcards,
or a page in their journal.
What to teach and ways to teach
Word Identification

Phonic Analysis
◦ Students apply their knowledge of soundsymbol correspondences, phonics rules, and
spelling patterns to read or write a word.
 Research found that students who ID words
effectively survey the letters in the words and
analyze the interior components.
 Less proficient students at word ID look only at the
first letter then guess.

Decoding by analogy
◦ Teach word families and model using these
phonograms to help decode unfamiliar words
 -ill
 Bill, chill, fill, hill, kill, mill, pill, quill, spill
 Expand to: chilly, filling, killer, refill, hilltop

Syllabic Analysis
◦ Teach how to divide a word into Practice
looking for familiar pattern (CVC, CV) within
the syllables
 Practice looking for phonograms within the
syllables
 In-con-ve-ni-ence

Morphemic Analysis
◦ Students examine the root word and affixes
of longer unfamiliar words in order to identify
them.
Dysfluent readers
These readers do not read books at their
independent level
 Do very little actual reading
 Teachers interfere by asking dysfluent
readers to read aloud, then interrupt
them with corrections.

How to promote fluency

Have them read independently daily at
their independent level reading highinterest material
◦ Model fluent reading
◦ Encourage students
◦ Conduct repeated readings with brief texts
 Readers’ theatre
◦ Focus students attention on chunking words
into meaningful phrases
Expanding Students’ Knowledge
of Words:Vocabulary
Quick Write:

Think of someone with a good vocabulary.
Jot down what you have observed about
their use of language.
Is there a list of words learned
people should learn?

No. A good vocabulary is not tied to a
specific list.

There are between 1,200,000 and
2,000,000 words in English.

Research shows a person can only learn
8-10 words per week
◦ This is across all content areas
Reading vocabulary
In 1950, the reading vocabulary of the
average American 14-year-old equaled
around 25,000 words
 In 2001, the same study showed that the
average reading vocabulary equaled
10,000.

Why the seriously diminished level of
word knowledge?
How do you learn new words

Immersion
◦ Students learn the meanings of words
 in a word-rich environment
 Through lots of independent reading
 Through explicit instruction

Strategies
◦ Students learn the meanings of unfamiliar
words
 Through practicing explicitly taught word learning
strategies.
Why is vocab learning a big deal?
Students’ word knowledge affects
comprehension
 Students from lower income homes have
less than half of the vocabulary that more
affluent children possess, and some
research posits it may be 1/5 to ¼
(Cunningham, 2009).
 Important that teachers assess all their
students word knowledge and help those
with less catch up.

How do Students learn vocab
words?

Gradually, through repeated experiences
with words (orally and in writing)

4 levels of word knowledge:
◦
◦
◦
◦
Unknown word
Initial recognition
Partial word knowledge
Full word knowledge
Incidental word learning


On their own, without explicit instruction,
students learn most of their words
Independent reading, best way
◦ Matthew Effect (Stanovich, 1986)
 Capable readers learn more vocabulary because they
read more, therefore, widening the knowledge gap
between them and their peer who do not read as well.



Read Aloud
Conversation
Television
Keys to teaching vocabulary
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

Break
Comprehension is…

…the goal of
reading!

Incredibly complex
task involving
different levels of
thinking, from literal
to inferential, to
critical, to evaluative
Quick write: examine the key words in
the following definition. Pair-Share.

“Comprehension is a creative,
multifaceted thinking process in which
students engage with the text.” (Tierney,
1990 qtd. in Tompkins, p. 258).

Key words:

Importance of key words:
Reader Factors in Comprehension

Certain qualities of the reader affect
comprehension. These include:
◦
◦
◦
◦
Background knowledge
Vocabulary
Fluency
Comprehension strategies: the critical thinking that
involves problem-solving (where, when, how, to what
extent to use a strategy)
◦ Comprehension skills: the steps to use a
comprehension strategy; the goal is to achieve
automaticity with these steps
◦ Motivation

Top 3 are prerequisites for comprehension
Keys to strategy instruction
Explicitly model
 Provide guided practice
 Provide many instances of independent
practice

Gradual Release of Responsibility
Comprehension strategies












Activating background knowledge
Connecting
Determining importance
Drawing inferences
Evaluating
Monitoring
Predicting
Questioning
Repairing
Setting a Purpose
Summarizing
Visualizing
How Effective Teachers Focus on
Text Factors

Teachers teach students that stories have unique text factors:
◦ narrative genres, story elements, and narrative devices.

Teachers teach students that informational books have
unique text factors:
◦ nonfiction genres, expository text structures, and nonfiction
features.

Teachers teach students that poems have unique text factors:
◦ book formats, poetic forms, and poetic devices.

Teachers encourage students to apply their knowledge of
text factors when they’re reading and writing.
Three most common text factors:
Genre: three broad categories of
literature are stories, informational books
or non-fiction, and poetry
 Text Structures: devices authors use to
organize their writing and to emphasize
important ideas.
 Text Features: Authors use these to
achieve a particular effect in their writing

Text Factors of Stories

Formats of stories:
◦ Picture books and chapter books
Narrative Genres
◦ Folklore: stories that began hundreds of years ago
and were passed down from generation to
generation
 Include fables (brief narratives that teach a lesson),
 folktales (began as oral stories told as storytellers
travelled from town to town)
 Myths (stories created to explain natural phenomena)
 Legends (hero tales and tall tales)
◦ Fantasy
◦ Realistic Fiction
 Contemporary stories
 Historical stories
Elements of story structure:

Plot: sequence of events involving the
characters and the conflict(s).
◦ Types of conflict include…Character vs. nature,
Character vs. society, Character vs. character, and
Within a character
Characters: authors develop characters
through…appearance, action, dialogue,
monologue
 Setting: location, weather, time period, time
 Point of view: 1st person, omniscient,
limited omniscient, objective
 Theme: the underlying meaning of the story

Narrative devices
Dialogue
 Flashback
 Foreshadowing
 Imagery
 Suspense
 Symbolism
 Tone

Text Factors of informational books

Non-fiction genres
◦ Alphabet books
◦ Biographies

Expository text structures
◦
◦
◦
◦
◦
Description
Sequence
Comparison
Cause and Effect
Problem and Solution
Non-Fiction features
Headings and subheadings
 Photographs and drawings
 Figures, maps, and tables
 Margin notes
 Highlighted vocabulary
 A glossary
 Review sections and charts
 An index

Connecting
reading and writing



Tierney & Shanahan, 1996: Reading and
writing should be connected because reading
has powerful impact on writing, and vice
versa.
When students read about a topic before
writing, their writing is enhanced because of
what they learn about the topic.
When they write about the ideas in a book
they’re reading, their comprehension is
deepened because they are exploring big
ideas and relationships among ideas.
Tools for the connections:

Trade books
◦ Collecting text sets of as many
different types of materials




•
Many types of genre
Many types of media
Varying reading levels
Multiple cultural perspectives
Mentor texts
• Use as a model of quality writing
Writing as a
learning tool:

How does a student use
writing as a tool for
learning…
◦
◦
◦
◦
Taking notes
Categorizing ideas
Completing graphic organizers
Writing summaries
 Emphasis
on using writing to
clarify ideas not to spell things
correctly!
Writing-to-learn activities

Learning logs
◦ Place to record and react to the
reading

Double-entry journal
◦ Divide journal page into two
parts
◦ Write different types of
information in each part
 Facts/reactions
 Questions/answers
 Main ideas/questions

Simulated journal
◦ a series of diary entries

Quickwriting
◦ Activate background knowledge,
monitor learning, review big
ideas
The Writing Process

Stage 1: Prewriting
◦ Murray (1982) believes 70% of writing time
should be spent in pre-writing
◦ Choosing a topic
◦ Considering purpose and form
◦ Gathering ideas (this is the time-consuming
part)
 Draw pictures, brainstorm lists of words, read
books, do Internet searches, talk about ideas with
someone
The Writing Process

Stage 2: Drafting
◦ Begin tentatively with the ideas developed
during prewriting
◦ Write quickly to get it down; not worried
about handwriting or correct
spelling/grammar
◦ Write every other line and label in large
letters in upper right, “ROUGH DRAFT”
The Writing Process

Stage 3: Revising
◦ Revision is MORE than just polishing; it is
meeting the needs readers by:




Adding
Substituting
Deleting
Rearranging material
◦ 3 main activities
 Rereading the rough draft
 Sharing the rough draft in a writing group
 Revising on basis of feedback
The Writing Process

Stage 4: Editing
◦ Putting the piece into its final form
◦ Focus on polishing: correcting spelling and
grammar
 Proofreading: Unique type of reading in which
students read word by word, hunting for errors
rather than reading for meaning
 Correct errors: after errors are found, students
work on fixing the errors using a colored pen.
The Writing Process

Stage 5: Publishing
◦ Making books
◦ Author’s chair
What is differentiated instruction?

Based on the
assumption that
students learn in
different ways
Multiple intelligences
 Learning styles

Characteristics of differentiated
instruction:
Rigorous
 Relevant
 Flexible
 Complex









High standards
AssessmentInstruction link
Flexible Grouping
Reading Materials
Varied Instructional
Activities
Modifications
Respect
Academic achievement
Teachers modify instruction 3 ways:

Differentiating
content
◦ The “what” of teaching

Differentiating the
process
◦ The “how” of teaching

Differentiating the
product
◦ The end result
R-E-S-P-E-C-T!

Teachers create a
classroom culture that
promotes acceptance
of individual
differences and is
conducive to matching
instruction to
individual students.
Independent reading…authentic
reading and natural differentiating
Reading Counts
 Accelerated Reader

◦ Two K-12 computerbased reading
programs that manage
students’ daily reading
practice
Flexible Grouping

Whole class

Small groups

Individuals
Guided Reading

Was developed to use
with beginning readers,
but teachers also use it
with older students,
especially ESL and
struggling readers who
need more teacher
support to decode and
comprehend books
they’re reading, learn
reading strategies, and
become independent
readers.
Text Sets
To differentiate effectively,
teachers need to compile
sets of texts representing
multiple reading levels and
genres
 These sets can be used
during literature focus
units and during thematic
units.
 Look at Scholastic
 http://www.townsendpress.
com/our-books/tp-libraryamp-blufordseries/productpanel_page/4

Tiered Activities
Designed to match
students’ needs
 Teachers create
several tiered or
related activities that
focus on the same
essential knowledge
but vary in
complexity (Robb,
2008)

Tomlinson (2001) suggests the following
plan to design tiered activities:
1.
Design an activity.
2.
Visualize a ladder.
3.
Create other
versions of the
activity.
4.
Match activities to
students.
Literacy Centers





Contain meaningful,
purposeful literacy
activities that students
can work at in small
groups.
Can be used at all grade
levels.
Relate to concepts,
strategies, skills that the
teacher recently taught in
minilessons
Vary in complexity
See page 370 for list
Differentiated projects


Important part of
differentiated
instruction because
students follow their
interests, demonstrate
what they’ve learned in
authentic ways, and
feel successful.
Especially important
for advanced and
struggling students.
Struggling readers and writers


Crucial to ID students
at risk for reading (and
writing) problems
early so as not to
compound them.
Clues that a student
struggles:
◦ Difficulty with concepts
of print, phonemic
awareness, letter names,
sound-symbol
correspondences
◦ Slower responses
◦ Behavior issues
Interventions

Help students catch
up by providing:
high-quality
classroom
instruction and
 additional one-toone or very small
group interventions.

Response to Intervention (RtI)






High quality instruction for all students
High quality teachers
Ongoing student assessment
A coherent instructional plan that provides
coordinated reading lessons every day for
every student at every level of intervention.
Interventions to help students learn how to
read
Special education placement on basis of
ability to learn