ut when, for whom, and for what the value of a whole-word or phonics-based approach can be substantiated.

little regard for motivation in the form of readers’goals, interests, and involvement in the learning experience

id not focus on identifying and eradicating thesource of readers’ errors. Rather, the goal was to ascertain how the unexpected re-sponses readers produced were reflective of their attempts at meaning-making

e learner was cast in the role of an active par-ticipant, a constructor of meaning who used many forms of information to arriveat comprehension (Halliday, 1969). Learning to read was not so much a matter ofbeing taught, but a matter of arriving at facility as a result of a predisposition toseek understanding within a language-rich environment

reading during this period was conceptualized as conditionedbehavior, and just another process susceptible to programming

work together to protect the open Web

You cannot learn Web lit-eracy by separating the competencies contained in these strands from the act of doing (I

Learning, especially build-ing the Web, involves constructing new content.

Educators and students need the latitude to play, ex-periment, fail, and have fun as they learn these Web literacies

So long as enough people are contributing to the project, it does not require any one organization or person to be sustainable.

This requires collaborating as both a mentor and an apprentice while sharing and creating resources in different spaces

everyone is invited to join Mozilla ’ s #teachtheWeb community to help shape, teach, and make current and future versions of the Web Literacy Map

prior work in other areas did not al-ways allow for the multiple perspectives

watches others

Seasoned webmakers learn to design accessible online spaces, code web-sites, script programs, and support the open Web infrastructure.

The Web Literacy Map attempts not to merely understand, but to builda better Web

He was also asked how teach-ers could bring this into classrooms; how do teach-ers deal with students who learn openly on the Web?

For Garth, these connections formulate how he prefers to teach, learn, and social-ize. He also indicated that he did not find value in the reading and writing activities teachers assigned.

The skills, strategies, practices, and dispositions students need to locate, evaluate, and synthesize in-formation during problem-based inquiry tasks

literacy as a cultur-ally defined social act

However, these frame-works have attempted to make sense of the Web us-ing previous metaphors, rather than understanding the explicit affordances of the Web as a networked medium.

“Let us play, but guide us.”

The Web Literacy Map provides a sense- check as well as a global plat-form upon which to build learning pathways. This allows educators to move beyond everyday experi-ence of siloed practice and provides a common lan-guage across time and space. It is an open- source project, meaning that it can be sustained and forked without the permission of the owner.

Sharing is essential to creating the many small pieces of the Web (Alexander, 2006 )

The core belief uniting the community is that exploring, building, and connecting online can never be taught in isolation.

The goal is to encourage mentors to align their materials regardless of theory, perspectives, goals, or geography.

Many frameworks, such as digital literacy, media literacy, and information literacy have considered the skills required for the Web.

A process by which students construct and redesign knowledge by actively encoding and decoding meaning through the use of ever-shifting mul-timodal tools.

A group of lo-cal or global learners who arrive at a common outcome via multiple pathways of knowledge.

The three strands of the Web Literacy Map are intertwined.

The community of volunteers, teachers, and industry leaders continue to define and sustain the Map construction and development in the open. In fact, work of the next version has begun, and the com-munity will continue to openly iterate on the map.

In school he was often dismissed for his creative mind.

His teachers did not see the value Garth found in exploring, building, and connecting online.

“always connected”

tudents are often not provided with opportunities in school to practice the web literacies necessary to read, write, and participate on the web.

history’s first generation of “always connected” individuals do not have the knowledge and skills to critically explore, build, and connect online

unlimited amount of online information

In classrooms students are segregated by things like grade level, ability, and skills more often than they are mixed together across the whole continuum of these. E

eaders are resources

not necessarily always fit classrooms,

What all this means is that the player learns in the tutorial just enough to move on to learn more—and more subtle things—by actually playing the game, but playing it in a protected way so that deeper learning can occur through playing. T

earners need to see this type of thing in action, not to be given static rules, if they are really to understand. I

We see clearly how each piece of information we are given and each skill we are learning (and doing) is interconnected to everything else we are learning and doing. W

earning differs from individual to individual, so we need to base our discussions of learning around actual cases of actual people learning. Thi

ith the current return in our schools to skill-and-drill and curricula driven by standardized tests, good learning principles have, more and more, been left on the cognitive scientist’s laboratory bench and, I will argue, inside good computer and video games

ther it is about communicating perspectives on experience and action in the world,

or humans, language, perception (including emotion), and action in the world are all tightly connected together.

I am playing a game when I am being an academic, because I need to make certain sorts of moves to get recognized as being an academic, For example, I have to write and talk in a certain way. I

But once you have one set of links relating various items and actions in your mind, another drops out just as you need it and you’re back to turning pages.

he only realistic chance students with poor vocabularies have to catch up to their peers with rich vocabularies requires that they engage in extraordinary amounts of independent reading. F

ultural learning always involves having specific experiences that facilitate learning, not just memorizing words.

In an affinity space no one is stopped from gaining intensive knowledge because someone else thinks they are “my low students” or “struggling.”

Furthermore, rarely is the core generator (e.g. the textbook or the curriculum guide) modified (“patched”) in an ongoing way based on student desires, pleasures, displeasures, actions, and interactions.

pick up these practices through joint action with more advanced peers, and advance their abilities to engage and work with others in carrying out such practices

Computer and video games have a built-in advantage in the creation of motivation for an extended engagemen

Shortening and dumbing games down is not an option, since most avid players don’t want short or easy games.

There are spaces that are mixtures of the real and the virtual, such as a meeting in which some people are physically together in a room and others are interacting with the group via the Internet or over a video conferencing system.

let me collect together here in a list some of the learning principles that are built into RoN and reflected in my interaction with the game.

Children play games early in life to prepare themselves for real life.

Research has long shown that people with poor vocabularies are poor readers.

they learn through action and talk with others, not by memorizing words outside their contexts of application

extensive and not intensive

he best-known efforts here perhaps were Ann Brown and Joseph Campione’s classroom “learning communities” (see Brown 1994 for an overview)

If we start by talking about spaces rather than “communities,” we can then go on and ask to what extent the people interacting within a space, or some subgroup of them, do or do not actually form a community.

i.e. what they do there and what they get from that space (e.g. import or export from it).

At the very least they may demand an argument for “Why school?”

In an affinity space no one is stopped from gaining intensive knowledge because someone else thinks they are “my low students” or “struggling.”

and race, class, gender, and disability are often much more foregrounded than they are in an affinity space

They involved the use of multiple sorts of mediating devices (computers and email to outside experts), distributed knowledge as students worked in teams with those mediating devices, dispersed knowledge as students drew on expertise outside the classroom, intensive knowledge as individual students chose to “major” in some aspect of the curriculum and help other students in that respect, and extensive shared knowledge as the students taught each other different parts of a common curriculum (via the jigsaw method, Aronson 1978).

Businesses in the new capitalist era (Gee et al. 1996) of cross-functional, dispersed, networked teams and project-based work often seek to create affinity spaces to motivate, organize, and resource their “partners” (they seek to avoid the term “worker” which implies a traditional boss-worker relationship in which one party “bosses” the other).

This feeling of the game being highly challenging, but ultimately doable, gives rise to a feeling of pleasurable frustration, one of the great joys of both deep learning and good gaming.

The Quick Start tutorial is a sandbox. The sandbox feels like the real world to a child, but is guaranteed not to destroy the child’s trust and ego before he or she is strong enough to face more significant challenges.

This is all “at risk” needs to mean in schools too, though there it often means giving “at-risk” learners a special dumbed-down curriculum meant to catch them up on “basic skills”—a curriculum that all too often is a bad learning experience for these students.

So when I say it was “too hard,” what I really mean is that I failed to engage with it in a way that fully recruited its solid design and learning principles.

In the end, I hope to convince you that today’s young people often see deeper and better forms of learning going on in the games they play than in the schools they attend.

How do children learn how words and grammar line up to express particular perspectives on experience? Here, interactive, intersubjective dialogue with more advanced peers and adults appears to be crucial.

Even words that seem so clearly to have clear definitions, like the word “bachelor” that we used as an example at the beginning of this section, do not. Meaning is not about definitions, it is about simulations of experience.

If the player waits, the tutorial prints a hint about what to do on the top left of the screen and says the hint orally and explains what it means. There are also, from time to time, remarks about how the game works: for example, the remark above about how to see more of the map. The tutorial is a nice dance of the player’s actions and designers’ guidance and instructions

“winners”, i.e. people who can repeat back verbal details they remember well when they don’t fully understand them in any practical way.

Such literal understandings are precisely what kids who fuel the fourth-grade slump have.

knowing the general meaning is nearly worthless, unless you can recognize the word’s applications in specific cases.

So, poor readers cannot become good ones unless they improve their vocabularies. They can’t improve their vocabularies unless they read a lot, but reading a lot is not a particularly effective way to increase one’s vocabulary. So what, for heaven’s sake, can be done? Are poor readers just fated to stay poor readers?

production of cakes within the family,

rganization in Leona’s story

hese new technologies and media may well recruit forms of thinking, interacting, and valuing that are quite different from—and, again, more compelling and motivating than—those children find in today’s schools.

is just such texts that children who experience the fourth-grade slump have trouble reading, fo

Second, she adopts a frame that mimics story book reading as it is often done by teachers and other teacherly adults: “

nteractive slot-and-filler activity centered around adding more and more descriptive and lexically explicit detail around a single topic.

Any variety of a language uses certain patterns of resources, and to know the language you have to be able to recognize and use these patterns. T

ways with words” th

He is at the beginning of an apprenticeship that some children don’t seriously start until the later grades, when the academic-like demands made on their reading, writing, and listening skills swamp them

sters (physicists) allow learners to collaborate with them on projects that the learners could not carry out on their own.

instructed process.”

we need to spend billions of dollars on government-sponsored reading initiatives (l

f some of the students are already making well-founded predictions regularly, they do not need this instruction.

found that an interactional read-aloud style resulted in greater gains in amount of vocabulary and reading compre-hension across both grade levels.

present information again.

graphic organizers,

ecome set in stone.

who provide explicit teaching but expect students to independently apply strategies too soon.

will ask each of you to stop and make a prediction. We will talk about your predictions and then read on to see if they come true.”

o accomplish this goal, students are engaged in reading and writing daily, all in the service of learning about the con-ceptual theme

didn’t do this using interesting texts alone.

qually as important are informational genres, whose primary purpose is to convey information about the natural or social world (

In addition to volume as an influencing factor, the quality and range of books to which students are exposed (e.g., electronic texts, leveled books, student/teacher published work) has a strong relationship with students’ reading comprehension

Thus, skilled readers are more readily able to integrate broader arrays of relevant elements from the text base and bring wider and deeper knowl-edge to the task of constructing a situation model.

These new constructs will modify or replace those currently in long-term memory.

read closely to determine what the text says explicitly”

Engage students in discussion.

trong teach-ers of reading comprehension for two consecutive years.

If learning to read effectively is a journey toward ever-increasing ability to comprehend texts, then teachers are the tour guides, ensuring that students stay on course, pausing to make sure they appreciate the landscape of understanding, and encouraging the occasional diversion down an inviting and interesting cul-de-sac or byway.

comprehension instruc-tion be conducted in small groups or individually based on students’ needs

The model we recommend for teaching any comprehension strategy is the gradual release of responsibility

teachers were assigned at random to introduce a set of strategies briefly and then quickly move students to applying or juggling multiple strategies simultaneously, which resulted in students with stronger performance on some measures.

For example, it is a rare day when a book about shark attacks or one by Steven Jenkins does not garner great interest in many students.

teachers will have to employ a variety of instructional strategies, such as partner reading and collaborative strategy use, to pro-vide the extra measure of scaffolding needed to support students’ com-prehension of more challenging text

In providing exposure to a range of texts, one important dimension to consider is the genre of the text, particularly its communicative purpose.

replaces literacy instruction with a two-hour block of inte-grated science–literacy instruction.

comprehension of the expository text, in contrast to the narrative text, was significantly related to the student’s amount of world knowledge

Skilled readers are also more motivated and engaged readers, reading more actively and more voluminously, thus further developing their knowledge and skill

integration of the text base with relevant prior knowledge from readers’ store of knowledge in long-term memory.

We use our knowledge of the world, along with our knowledge of how language and text work, to make all the local inferences required to connect the sentences to one another—to build, if you will, a coherent representation of what the text says.

A Tool for Evaluating Your Fostering and Teaching of Reading Comprehension

1) when, why, and how to apply strategies, and (2) that by being able to pull out just the right tool to get over a hurdle at just the right moment, students become smarter, more effective, and more strategic readers.

We certainly want readers to have opportunities to read texts that are not difficult for them, but we also want readers to have access to texts that challenge them.

n providing exposure to a range of texts, one important dimension to consider is the genre of the text, particularly its communicative purpose.

Figure 3.3. A Tool for Evaluating Your Fostering and Teaching of Reading Comprehension

Results showed that students in classrooms in which teachers administered the assessment showed greater growth as measured by the comprehension assessment as well as by an assessment of informational writing; this transfer effect is important because it sug-gests that what students learned was not driven by narrowly teaching to the test.

Vocabulary impacts comprehension.• It is learned incidentally while reading and listening to books.• Repeated exposure, especially in different contexts, is the key to learning word meanings.• Prereading instruction of keywords can be helpful.• Computerized programs seem to increase vocabulary knowledge

one reader might have strong prior knowledge related to a text that compensates for relatively poor clarifying and fix-up strategies, whereas another reader might have weak prior knowledge related to a text but make up for it by using a variety of strategies that help build meaning in such circumstances.

Provide Exposure to a Volume and Range of Texts

we use our knowledge along with our perceptions of what we think the text says to literally build, or construct, mental representations of what the text means.

When phonics rules or strategies become their own goals, the system runs amok.

if taught, they improve reading comprehension

Think of interest as a compensatory factor, one that can get the job done when the text is extra challenging or the stu-dent’s skill level is not quite up to the task

When stu-dents read on the topic of reported interest to them, whether working animals or robotics, they employed a greater number and range of com-prehension processes. This tells us that if our goal is to stretch students’ comprehension muscles, we should provide them with texts of interest.

Reading motivation is fostered by complex interactions of text topics and text characteristics, classroom social norms, and instruc-tional practices (

nasals.

Given that fis a much more familiar letter, stu-dents often choose it to represent the /v/ sound. Ne

Students need hands-on experience comparing and contrasting words by soundso that they can categorize similar sounds and associate them consistently with let-ters and letter combinations. T

eated practice. Un

Even more words areacquired when they are explicitly examined to discover the orthographic relationshipsamong words—their sounds, spelling patterns, and meaning

synchronyof reading, writing, andspelling development

Knowing the stage of spelling of each of your students will determine your choices of ap-propriate word study activities.

Sim-ply put, we must teach to where a child “is at.”

One unique quality of word study as we describe it lies in what we believeis the critical role of differentiating instruction for different levels of word knowledge.

The purpose of word study, then, is to examine words in order to reveal consistencieswithin our written language system and to help students master the recognition,spelling, and meaning of specific words.

The most effective instruction in phonics, spelling, and vo-cabulary links word study to the texts being read, provides a systematic scope and se-quence of word-level skills, and provides multiple opportunities for hands-on practiceand application.

Designing a word studyprogram that explicitly teaches students necessary skills and engages their interest andmotivation to learn about how words work is a vital aspect of any literacy program.

differentiate

During word study, words and pictures are sorted in routines that re-quire children to examine, discriminate, and make critical judgmentsabout speech sounds, word structures, spelling patterns, and meanings.

We believethat this word study is well worth the 10 to 15 minutes of time daily.

students expand their vocabularies by comparing one concept with another.

Students need hands-on opportunities to manipulate word features in a way that al-lows them to generalize beyond isolated, individual examples to entire groups of wordsthat are spelled the same way

One key reason for this failure is linguistic. In school, words often take on meaning only in terms of yet other words.

ore advantaged learners have a problem as well (B

ll children,

he literacy skills now necessary to succeed in the 21st century must go beyond decoding and literal meaning to the ability to draw inferences from complex academic texts and use such texts as resources to solve problems,

The young girl becomes a “prosumer

The most important issues are how this time is spent, how the technology is or is not built into a good learning system, whether good mentors are involved, and how the technology is being related to other technologies and other areas of learning.

his can transform our traditional notions of assessment. W

What exactly is the connection between digital media, on the one hand, and literacy, content learning, and complex academic language, on the other?

he old reading gap can only worsen as the high-tech digital world makes larger and more complex demands on literacy and content learning. A

digital gap, between those students who can leverage technical skills and technological “know-how” to learn content, produce knowledge, and develop high-level expertise, and those who cannot (

Many students today, especially from low-income families, do not get the sorts of early language-based preparation for schooling that we have just discussed.

oundations are laid for meeting the demands of comprehending and using academic language connected to content. If

ot just to settle for the ability “to read to learn” s

If children cannot read well, they can hardly master new digital tools to innovate in knowledge domains —

any of our schools into test-prep academies focused on assessing standardized skill sets

Today that proportion has fallen to 14 percent and is continuing to fall (

en today’s U.S. students enter tomorrow’s workforce they will face intense international competition for jobs at every skill lev

it also requires the ability to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words and, eventually, to infer meaning from patterns of information

We must more proactively integrate language, literacy, and content learning in the early grades and, indeed, later on, as well.

Let them, beginning at an early age, play the game of one or more of these professions.

Indeed, the Internet requires a good deal of technical reading for a student to fully leverage its possibilities for learning and knowledge production, or even to access, assess, and modify the plethora of information it makes available

But such “catch-up” interventions, which immerse children in school-based language as it applies to the world and to problem-solving, must continue from kindergarten through middle school to be effective

It means being able to use such facts and information, as well as various technologies and practices, to solve problems.

“Tier 2 words”

This breadth of vocabulary is created by parents talking to children, answering their questions, reading to them, modeling their own pleasure in reading, and offering their children a wide variety of experiences in the world.

Although reading had long been a basic com-ponent of formal schooling in the United States, there was little concerted effort tomarry research knowledge and instructional practice until much later in the 20thcentury.

reading has periodically responded to internal and externalforces resulting in both gradual and dramatic transformations to the domain—transformations that have altered reading study and practice

Activities with onset-rime manipulation

ow Many Syllables in a Name?

users of an alphabetic written systemrecord the smallest units of sound of their spokenlanguage in print