Chapter 3:Vocabulary- Illiterate or Wise!!!

Vocabulary is one of those things we all need to develop in life.  If your vocabulary is weak, people think you are illiterate, and don’t look for good to come from you. Same as if your vocabulary is strong, people think you are just the best and then put you on a pedestal and hold you to high esteem. Did anybody ever think that vocabulary is not just a tool you “pick” up? Instead it needs to be taught and built upon to get better over time. In our textbook, it is stated that students acquire word knowledge through the wide reading they do and from their teacher’s read alouds and shared readings.  Did it occur that the student is not illiterate, but his parent didn’t read to him and since he grew up in the projects his teacher said that teaching was just a job and not her mission in life?  The child whose vocabulary is not the best has the ability to be just like the student whose vocabulary is outstanding with the touch of someone’s help. 

Word knowledge impacts content learning and reading comprehension therefore, the student would have to get help at a young age with vocabulary so that he will be ok in the end.  I grew up in the middle of the student who did exceptionally well and the student who everyone thought was illiterate.  I made good grades, could read well, and write well, but no one ever thought to think of a great way to teach vocabulary. I could spell, spell, and spell more.  Even was in the Spelling Bee! I knew I could sound out the words to spell them but I didn’t know what they meant.  My teachers always wanted us to look up 20 words each week and write the definitions down so we could learn them.  Since when does copying words directly from a book teach a lifetime concept? Answer: NEVER! Still doesn’t work to this day.   One of my endorsement areas is Social Studies and I like the method the book states for learning vocabulary.  It mentions to have students act out the vocabulary, which helps the student remember the word better.  The students then can associate gestures and certain enthusiastic measures used to quote to memory for the vocabulary.

Chapter 5

 “If questions are not asked, then expected application to meaningful context will be limited.” I like this quote because it is so true to me.  How else will you know the student learned the concept if you don’t have them to apply it in context?  Not only just context, but actually meaningful context will let you know if they truly understand it, this could easily be a way to assess students.  Questioning is used more than any other method for developing comprehension.  Questions help the teacher assess whether students understand the text.  Classroom instruction is dominated by a particular cycle of questioning known as IRE: initiate, respond, and evaluate. The downfall to IREs is that the teacher will be the only person talking, as in a mediator. 

When questions are proposed they should lead to a class discussion because then the teacher can hear all the student’s responses and evaluate them as well.  In discussions it is slightly better to evaluate then because other students won’t learn the wrong answers. When one student is asked to answer a question and gets it wrong then that student may suffer embarrassment, but if it’s in a discussion then the “blow” will not be so hard. 

Questions should also be based on the student’s rhetorical style. There are 3 forms of rhetorical style appeals: ethos, logos, and pathos.    Ethos relates to questions about the author.  Logos relates to questions about logic; pathos relates to questions about emotions.  All of these are ways to help students develop their rhetorical thinking.  Another form of questioning is using “Higher- Order” thinking questions, which capture each level of Bloom’s taxonomy, a system similar to the DOK (Depth of Knowledge).Other types of questioning would be ReQuest, QtA (Question the Author), and Question-Answer Relationship (QAR) charts.

 

Chapter 7 Getting it Down: Making and Taking Notes

     In this chapter it discusses note taking versus note making.  As a student for many years, I never thought that "copying everything from the board" was considered note making.  To myself I was taking notes the only way I knew.  I have always enjoyed note taking because it allows me to stay awake and alert so that I can keep up with the class.  I have always enjoyed writing so note taking didn't bother me.  As a child and even  now I find myself repeating what the instructor is saying right after they say it so that I won't miss out.  When I was younger I even read it back aloud, which in return didn't work out for me because I was distracting other students.  In my opinion I believe that taking notes is very important for auditory learners.  I believe that note making would be better for visual learners because that way they can see the material first and only write down what they can't remember from reading the board.  I do believe that teachers should show students how to properly take notes because you have to take them all the way through college. Teachers should not tell students how to take notes verbally but model it for students.  I believe my earliest knowledge of note taking was at church.  I always was wondering what my mom would be writing plus I loved to write so I begin to take notes at church.  At just about any service that I go to I take notes from the sermon, it keeps me alert and when I get in a bind and need some spiritual advice I can go back to my notes.  I think note taking should be taken serious, although some students may do fine just listening in class. Do you feel that note taking is as important to have a mini class session taught in middle school on note taking? Are there other strategies other than charts or writing a report? Not many people like to write papers; I can witness to that.

Chapter 4 & Text Talk

            Chapter 4 discusses read alouds and shared reading in great detail.  I enjoyed reading and learning more about them and their differences.  The article persay I did not enjoy as well as the textbook because the textbook always explains their focus and are more convincing, in my opinion.  A read aloud is a passage selected by the teacher to read publicly to a large or small group of students with the purpose of pulling out the content of the text whereas shared reading is a passage jointly shared by the student and the teacher focusing on a specific text feature or comprehension strategy.  In both, the reading is done by the teacher; therefore the teacher should read using prosody, modeling reading as interesting even if it is expository text.  The difference in the two is when and how they are used because their focuses are different as mentioned earlier.  In the article it mentioned that the text chosen for read alouds play an important part because for one, it aids in developing literacy, and two it needs to be challenging enough to make students use their schema to perform metacognition.  Also in the article it mentions how students are able to think and reason before or when they come to school but we have to scaffold how to think and reason while reading other texts. Scaffold instruction in shared reading extends students’ learning because the learner receives immediate feedback and further prompts to arrive at solutions.  Shared reading allows teachers to address comprehension strategies through modeling with each student.  After each shared reading is it also important that teachers allow a think- aloud because you want to make sure that students not only know the concepts but understand them and can manipulate them correctly.

Writing to Learn!!!

            In reading the article by Knipper and Duggan they specifically discussed writing to learn in content area classes, but in the text Fisher and Frey discussed writing to learn in general, for content area classes, and more.  I better understood Fisher and Frey than Knipper and Duggan.  I especially liked the point made when they mentioned, “writing to learn is an opportunity for students to recall, clarify, and question what they know and what they still wonder about.” I believe in allowing the student to write and tell me what they are thinking other than molding them to say what you want them to. You can ask a student questions all day and they answer them right or wrong, but if you allow the student to write what he or she is thinking and give it support to why they are thinking the way they are, you will be able to determine why the student thinks the way they do versus that is just what they think.  I like one of the definitions given for writing to learn because it states that writing to learn involves getting students to think about and to find the words to explain what they are learning, how they understand that learning, and what their own processes of learning involve. I encountered an instructor who did not like the way I wrote my paper and therefore “nick-picked” the whole paper and I got a low score.  She said it did not make sense of what I was writing, but if the paper is written on my thoughts and point of view on education, what gives her the right to say it is wrong? When I based it off my schema, gained from information taught by her colleagues. Fisher and Frey also mentioned that writing to learn can help students learn, understand, remember, and figure out what don’t know.  I like the prompts listed to encourage writing to learn such as: admit slips, found poems, crystal ball, exit slips and especially “What if” scenarios.

Response to Content Area Literacy Instruction Article by: Barbara Moss

            The author’s argument or persuasive point throughout this article is that she believes content area literacy should not be set aside for just middle and high school leveled students, but should start at the elementary level.

            I believe the author brought out some really good points to look at concerning the issue of students not being able to be on the set reading level for each grade when it comes to expository text.  Some technologies in our society are helping students to become more interested in reading for informational purposes such as: LeapFrog activities, various apps on IPods and IPhones, and computer programs, PBSkids.org.  It’s important that students enjoy reading as much as they would enjoy a videogame for the simple fact that they need to know and understand before there was media there was literature (textbooks, newspapers, almanacs, dictionaries, thesauruses, etc.,). My church’s motto: “Together we stand, divided we fall” is very appropriate for this situation because not many people are trying to inform others on this issue.  In the article Moss reported that Armbruster only found 24 full-length articles in the years 1969 to 1991 related to this topic.  Why is that when it was emphasized back in 1925 by William S. Gray? I believe it is because society is more hung up on making new things for students to enjoy than to actually help them grow up and be professional, well organized equipped adults. 

            I honestly can say that I probably would enjoy expository text more now if I was exposed to it earlier.  The thing is with expository text is that many students cannot read it once they get to fourth grade because words that they have never been exposed to or that are on a sixth or seventh grade level are used and after they try to read it some they give up because they are not encouraged to read it, something that will help them, but are more encouraged to read maybe contemporary realism.  I do not think that everything presented to a student should be for informational purposes because then students would be “zoned” out more than you would want them, but that they should be presented with both in one together. I think concepts can be presented in a way that students will not even know that they are learning when they are, but as they are reading knowledge is gained.

            Through an activity with Dr. Ramp I was enlightened by the fact that a basal reader was around the grade level, if not on it, but the basal textbook for science content was on a 7^th grade level when the book was for 3^rd graders according to Fry’s method. This puzzles me to ask: How do we expect students to appreciate informational text when it’s not on an appropriate level? Sure advanced students would be able to work through it, but as educators we have to think about all our students.  When is society going to see that it’s an issue when college level students can only read on a 9^th grade level in expository text and work together to better our students? We have to remember they are the today, tomorrow, and the future, but it all depends on what we do today to get them there.