he “fourth-grade slump” (Chall et al. 1990) is the phenomenon where some children seem to acquire reading (i.e. pass reading tests) fine in the early grades, but fail to be able to use reading to learn school content in the later grades, when the language demands of that content (e.g. science) get more and more complex
Here's a phrase I've heard a lot regarding this phenomenom: "move students from 'learning to read' to 'reading to learn'"
Typically a majority of the trained children narrow the gap between themselves and initially more advanced students in phonological awareness and word reading skills, but few are brought completely up to speed through training, and a few fail to show any gains at all.
Explicit instruction in isolated skills is not enough
The process involves “masters” (adults, more masterful peers) creating an environment rich in support for learners.
Reminds me of Vygotsky: scaffolding, ZPD, social-learning
Teacher, May We?
I always appreciate an activity that taps into the kintetic needs of young children. The integration of literacy and movement makes for a meaningful experience.
Ask the children how they made theirguesses. “Why did you guess wigs/twigs/figs?”
It is so important for children to be able to think about their own thought processes.
The Hungry Thing
I love this book! I used it this summer with a group of four-year olds to teach rhyming. They appreciate the humor and predictibility, and were able to the apply the concepts in other situations (when playing in the kitchen, outside on the playground).
phonemicawareness activities will not be helpful unlessthey can be placed in a context of real readingand writing.
like we read in the first module, context is vital to making meaning. Skills taught in isolation do not have the long lasting qualities as those that are taught as part of a braoder context.
activities that arechild appropriate
although there is much debate over what "appropriate" looks like
manystates in the U.S. are addressing phonemicawareness in standards documents
There is heavy emphasis on phonemic awareness in many early childhood curriculum products. Publications meant for children as young as three place great value on children being able to isolate and represent individual sounds in words. This doesn't start in kindergarten anymore.
Such perceptual activities included the identification of visualsignals; the translation of these signals into sounds; and assembly of these soundsinto words, phrases, and sentences
No fluency, vocabulary, comprehension yet?
developingand validating diagnostic instruments and remedial techniques
So important for individual student success.
effectiveness of phonics-based techniques over those that relied on a whole-word approach
This was a critical shift. It was realized that reading instruction needed to be more explicit.
often linked with theapplication of carefully chosen rewards and punishments,
I wonder if this presented a problem for struggling readers. Being "punished" for having difficulty surely would have made them dislike reading.
“learning to read” and “reading to learn” stages (Chall, 1995) is shifting to a moreintegrated and developmental perspective.
I still hear this phrase learning to read and reading to learn very often. Especially being involved in the Third Grade Promise Program.
teachers played the essential role of facilitator or guide (Rogoff &Gauvain, 1986; Vygotsky, 1934/1986), with the scaffolding provided by theteacher diminishing in proportion to the students’ increasing knowledge, interest,and strategic abilities in a particular area (e.g., Alexander, 1997b; Brown &Palincsar, 1989), so that students could develop self-direction and autonomy(Deci & Ryan, 1991)
I have been doing a lot of research on classroom discourse, about how this was the "old" way of teaching but it should now be a community discussion of teacher and student.
schooling, at least, was a social and cultural phenomenon,
!!
multitude of “knowledges.”
aka multiple intelligences
Depending on how strictly the behaviorist paradigm was followed, hypotheses andconclusions were more or less restricted to discussion of observable behaviors andthe environmental stimuli that preceded them (Strike, 1974)
Many students failed to benefit from the explicit instruction in strategies or com-ponents of reading that was intended to improve their text-based learning. Forsome students, there were no improvements produced by this instruction, whilefor others, the benefits did not endure or transfer
The strategies that were projected to be beneficial failed. I can feel the discussion of differentiated instruction approaching! (I hope)
Rosenblatt contended that, depending on the goal of the learner and theinstructor, an individual’s response to a literary work falls along a continuumfrom an efferent to an aesthetic stance. Those assuming a more efferent stanceseek to uncover the “truths” voiced by some invisible or anonymous author
http://composing.org/digitalmedia/efferent-vs-aesthetic-reading/ This link has somewhat the same definition but gives an example of each type of reading for those who are like me and needed some clarification.
the focus was more on how those process-es and procedures could be best represented symbolically and transferred intocomputer programs that could approximate human performance (Fodor, 2001).In effect, these individuals were interested in creating “intelligent machines” thatmimicked the problem solving of intelligent humans
IQ testing? or beginning stages of it?
did 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
The goal wasn't to get rid of the error, rather figure out why they are making the error in their attempts at comprehension.
Language, as with other innatehuman capacities, was to be developed through meaningful use, not practiced tothe point of mindless reaction, as behaviorists proposed.
This is a great point!
Knowledge was not a singular construct, but existed in diverse forms and inter-active dimensions
Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences!
From detection of the universal laws of learning, the goal became the de-scription of the “ways of knowing” unique to particular social, cultural, and ed-ucational groups
This seems to be an important moment in the history of literacy research.
One of the qualitative changes was a seeming rise in the number of children expe-riencing difficulties in learning to read. Such reading problems, although nothingnew to teachers, took on particular significance in the age of Sputnik, as America’sability to compete globally became a defining issue
So before this competitiveness students who were struggling were not payed attention to?
his shift in the view of language acqui-sition from conditioned behavior to natural process inevitably reverberated in thereading research community in the form of psycholinguistics (Goodman, 1965
This gave rise to the whole language movement
The top-down perspective of the ho-listic Gestalt modality was evident in the orientation to reading development heldby those Chall (1967) identified as “linguistic” proponents, who emphasizedwhole-word recognition, the importance of context in comprehension and wordidentification, and the consideration of reading as a unique human activity withits own definitive characteristics.
Whole-word recognition and the importance of context in comprehension and word identification are both essential to a person's ability to read and more importantly understand what they are reading.
Moreover, de-spite the claims of some within the reading research community that little ofsignificance occurred in reading until the 1960s (Weaver & Kintsch, 1991), the con-tinued influence of behaviorism on educational practice remains evident today
As a former psychology teacher, I definitely believe behaviorism plays a huge role in education today. I think it is most evident in the field of special education as well as with students in the elementary grades.
With this analyticview, there was a growing tendency for problems in the reading act to be looked onas deficiencies in need of remediation, just as physical ailments require medicalremedies. Indeed, it was a medical metaphor of reading, with its diagnosis, pre-scription, and remediation, that came to the foreground in the 1950s.
I enjoy how the author compares reading deficiencies to physical ailments. When a student is having difficulty reading a teacher must "diagnose" the problem, "prescribe" a solution and "remediate" until the student has grasped the concept (or gotten better at it) just as a doctor would when treating a patient.
Skinnerian behav-iorism
condition-ality of knowledge
knowing the context in which specific knowledge would be useful
he learner was cast in the role of an active par-ticipant, a constructor of meaning who used many forms of information to arriveat comprehension
similar to constructivist learning thoery
learning to read, the written counterpart of acquiring an oral language, came tobe viewed as an inherent ability, rather than a reflective act involving the labori-ous acquisition of a set of skills (Harste, Burke, & Woodward, 1984). Just aschildren came to understand the spoken language of their surrounding communi-ty (Halliday, 1969), they would come to understand its written language givenenough exposure in meaningful situations (Goodman & Goodman, 1980).
important to the psycholingusits is the idea that oral and written language need to be meaningful, not rote or cursory
humans emerge from the womb with a preexisting template that guides languageuse. “Languaging” was thus perceived to unfold naturally, to follow a develop-mental trajectory, and to involve not just the action of the environment on the in-dividual but also the individual’s contribution in the form of a predisposition orinnate capacity
nature and nurture - language acquisition is influenced universal human development, individual predispositions and abilities, and the environment
coherence and sensecould not be achieved by assembly alone
the whole is more than the sum of its parts
One of the qualitative changes was a seeming rise in the number of children expe-riencing difficulties in learning to read. Such reading problems, although nothingnew to teachers, took on particular significance in the age of Sputnik, as America’sability to compete globally became a defining issue
Being able to compete in a global market continues to be the justification for much of education policy and practice
The efforts of researchers during this periodgave rise to extensive literature on learners and the learning process that re-mains an enduring legacy for the domain of reading.
I wonder if this had to do with the space race? It was the start of the "schoola are failing" trope.
Children are not encouraged to move their understanding of books into other situational contexts or to apply it in their general knowledge of the world abour them,
This is one of the reasons why these children may fall behind in school.
in Traekton especially, children have a keen sense thM reading is something one does to learn something one needs to know
As opposed to the children from the Maintown who viewed reading as more of a fun activity.