Reading

Welcome to the 2006 Library Development Day from the School Library System of Genesee Valley BOCES. Today we are talking about reading. Sure, I may be seen as a technology person in the library world, but never forget that anytime I talk about blogging, podcasting, wikis, or any other technology – I am talking about reading! We can discuss print books, electronic books, audio books, or blogs as the new book…but we are always talking about reading.
Dr. Naomi Erdmann, Director of the Graduate Literacy Program at Nazereth College in Rochester, NY, is speaking this morning about reading theory. We are looking at reading, reading instruction, and reading programs. She started by talking about three ways of looking at reading. We can read the lines (and sadly this is the focus of too many reading programs), we can read between the lines for comprehension, or we can read beyond the lines for ownership of text.
Decoding – Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Sight words
Be cautious about sounding it out and phonics as a primary focus. Phonics is important in early reading, but it needs to stop by the end of second grade. After that, we need to use context and other interactions with the text as a whole to decode words.
Comprehension – Checking short term, or working, memory against long term memory, our schema, to create understanding. The human brain can, at the most, carry seven items in the working memory. If students are decoding text from word-to-word, or worse from phenome-to-phenome, there is no possibility for larger comprehension.
Schema Theory – The foundation of modern reading research. Reading is a conversation with the author – the author brought his or her schema to the authoring, I bring mine to the reading. The schema is the sum of my experiences and being – everywhere I have been and everything I have seen. Your schema is so powerful that you will read to match your schema. Don’t bet your schema!
Librarians and Schema – Sometimes you have to create a schema from scratch. When you are reading something where you have no background knowledge, comprehension is much more difficult. We, as librarians, can help teachers pre-load schema with different books about future topics. If you are just adding to your schema, it is much easier to build an association off of a current node in your schema. Fine-tuning your schema is the easiest to do. The hardest, much harder than building from scratch, is re-building a schema that has been mis-constructed. It is incredibly difficult to un-learn something from your schema.
Naive Theories – A second grader proudly told her teacher that earthworms come from the sky. When asked where this came from, the student explained that she noticed all the icky earthworms on the driveway in the morning and had asked her mother where they came from. The mother said “It rained last night.” The second grader couldn’t make a connection to her schema from that general statement, and so she attached the idea of earthworms to the action of them falling from the sky like rain.
Developmental Reading Lesson – Reading is comprehension and comprehension is reading. It is all about the conversation between reader and author. There are four additional components that need to be a part of this:
1) Linguistic Understandings: Text goes from left to right. Different people speak and write in different dialogues. Oral language changes more quickly than written languages.
2) Literary Appreciation: Reading aloud on a daily basis is critical. Students need to learn to love reading. Students need to learn the authors’ craft – how the author can twist your emotions around and control who you like and dislike.
3) Study Strategies: The approach to the text and skills for interpreting reading.
4) Decoding: Students learn phonics and decoding for the express purpose of allowing comprehension.
Zones of Vocabulary – There are three areas of vocabulary. First is the zone of known words – we know a definition, synonyms, antonyms, and can use it in expressive speech. Last is the zone of unknown words – we have no clue that the word even exists. In the middle is the twilight zone or frontier zone – we have some clue that there might be a word because we might have heard it somewhere, but we aren’t really sure what it means. We may use words in our twilight zone, but the use may be inappropriate or awkward. Reading aloud may not move words from the zone of unknown words to the zone of known words, but it can introduce a plethora of words into the twilight zone. We are in a crisis of vocabulary, not because of our zone of known words, but because of a lack of words in our twilight zone that can move forward into the zone of known words.
Impediments to Comprehension
-Lack of word attack strategies
-Reading haltingly / Lack of automaticity
-Lack of vocabulary knowledge
-Lack of prior knowledge
-Inability to recall and apply prior knowledge
-Lack of familiarity with rhetorical and syntactical structures
Schall’s Stages of Reading
Birth to Age 6: Start reading during the pregnancy and never stop. When we read, our voice sounds different than when we talk. We need them to become acquainted with books and print as the carrier of meaning. Hold the book towards you and read from the book to help kids understand that it is the book that holds the story. With the reading also comes the development of a sense of story. Children need to know how stories flow. They also need to learn mechanics like pages, chapters, left-to-right, etc. Also visual and auditory discrimination and some phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is developed, it cannot be taught.
One of the best ways to help develop phonemic awareness while preparing students for reading is through nursery rhymes, poetry and chants.
READ NURSERY RHYMES!!!
First Grade – Middle of Second Grade: The glue to print stage teaches kids that understanding comes from decoding of print. Focus on the mechanics of phonics and punctuation.
Middle of Second Grade – Third Grade: Now we can unglue them from print and re-focus them on the joy of reading. We can help them become confirmed as readers so they self-identify as a reader by reading many, many books. A critical part of this stage is independently reading books that were previously read to them. This reinforces and confirms their new-found abilities. The message needs to be familiar because the process is not. It is good for them to read known books and re-read books. The reader needs to read about experiences that he or she has already experienced. The process is unfamiliar, so the message needs to be familiar.
Fourth Grade – Eighth Grade: The process is now familiar, so the message can expand… This is where the student learns about reading in content areas. They also need to learn all of their study strategies. Things like if you don’t comprehend, re-read. This is why it is so critical that middle schools have librarians to teach library and information literacy skills (which include study strategies!). We need to make sure that our information is precise and accurate.
Ninth Grade – Twelfth Grade: With the development of formal thought, we can begin to teach points of view.
College and Beyond: Here we have to construct and reconstruct. We can spot what we know and reconfirm what we already knew while slowing down to absorb new information. We can skim and skip, but also slow down and take note.

[Edited for spelling]

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