Module 3: Activity 2

I think that reading nonsense words can help struggling students to learn to crack the code of reading. Reading these words where they can just make the sound of the letters instead of having to worry if the letter makes that sound in the word or if it makes another sound. The nonsense words can let the students sound out the word. This also words good with constant vowel constant words. Sometimes they are not really words but learning to put those sounds together is a vital skill that students need to learn.  I think that readers once they have grasped the idea of phonemic awareness they need to be taught the basic rules of English and the sounds that letters make in real words. But as I said I think that using nonsense words during the time that students are learning how to blend is beneficial to the students. 

Module 3: Mock Memo from a Reading Specialist

Module 3: Mock Memo from a Reading Specialist

    Dear teacher,

                I see that some of the students in your classroom are struggling with reading comprehension. I see that they are reading on grade level for fluency but I see they are having a little trouble with there comprehension.

                I believe that your students are reading just to read words they are not actually reading for meaning. You can help to solve this problem by working with the students in a small group. You need to explain to them that we read for meaning and that it does not matter how fast you read if you do not understand what you are reading then it does you no good to read words. Tell the student that it is important to slow down with their reading. Have them read a short passage to you aloud. Then have them to tell you what happened in the story. If they are not able to tell you what is happening then you may need to read it with them. Model reading slower and with expression. When you read an important part in the story stop and discuss it with the students. You may have to work with some students individually. They may not be able to read out loud in a group setting. I think that you will find if you tell the students to slow down and you practice with them reading for meaning and not just to read words their comprehension rate will improve.

Mallory Johnson

James Gee

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PT_qPqMnq33EVfEDYj6UMHeISfMaNHVYNGGnbgYZfjA/edit?usp=sharing

James Gee- A Prominent Literary Researcher

Module 3 Reading Reflection

Do you agree with Marilyn Adams (1990, p. 108) who argued that rather than relying on context, Skillful readers of English thoroughly process the individual letters of words in their texts? Why or why not?

                 I do not agree with the idea of Marilyn Adams. I do not think that skillful readers have to process each individual letter in order to read.  The textbook states that good readers do not read word by word instead they use context to perceive and identify words. Many times a word can be identified without someone looking at each individual word. When adults and children encounter words that they are unfamiliar with the reader decodes the word by looking at word parts, particularly syllables and then units within them onsets and rhymes. According to Venezky if a person attempted to scan left to right, letter by letter, pronouncing as he goes could not correctly read most English words. The mutilated word activity was very interesting to me. It is interesting how I could read those words with parts of the word missing. I think that this is what proves that to be a skillful reader you do not have to process individual letters. 

Module 2 Activity 1 and 2

Activity 1:

#3c

Creech- creep or move very slow

Droogs- dogs

Glazzies- glazing

Goloss- gloss

Malenky- lanky or skinny.

Messel- a vessel

Millicents- million            

Poogly- puggy

Razrez- reminded

Skorry- scurry

Spatted- this reminds me of the word splattered so I would think it means about the same thing.

Zoobies- animals that live at the zoo

I have to admit that this was a very hard exercise for me to complete. This took a lot of thinking on my part. I first had to think about what part of speech that each word sounded to be and then think of a meaning for it. Many of the words I based on my knowledge of other words that I know in the English language. I don’t think that I got many of the words right but this was a hard thing to do is find the definitions of these words with no context to go along with it.

After reading the chapter in A Clockwork Orange I was able to find the definitions to the words by looking at the context in which the words are used. This was not an easy read.  This was a lot easier to do than just looking at a list of words and writing a definition for it.

Droogs- friends

Glazzies- eyes

Melanky- old

Millicents- police

Zoobies- teeth

Skoory- quick

Activity 2:

I did not try to read these words letter by letter. That would have taken too long. Trying to sound out these words letter by letter would not be an effective way to read the words. Instead of trying to read them letter by letter I tried to read the words by chunking them into syllables. This is the way that I try to read unknown words when I am reading something on my own. This is the most common way that people read unknown words. In my opinion this is much easier than sounding out letter by letter. You would put together the word parts that you know.

I was not familiar with any of these words at the time of reading. There were some of the parts of the words that I knew so I was able to make out what parts of the words so I could determine what parts of the word meant but I would have had to look up the root words to find out the whole meaning of the words. As I was pronouncing the words some of them sounded familiar and that made me think that I may have known some of the meaning.

When I am reading and I encounter an unknown word I like to read all the sentences around it and try to use context clues to find out the meaning of the word. This is the best way that I have found to deal with unknown words. This is a strategy that I could use to help my students to be able to read unknown words when they encounter them in text. 

Module 2 Instructional Challenge

Take a look at the following examples of children's dialect-based miscues while reading and the difference between the child's original response (OR) and expected reponse (ER). Then answer the questions that follow.

OR: It my little monkey here.	ER: Is my little monkey here?
OR: We got to tell.	ER: We've got to tell.
OR: Frog look at Toad calendar.	ER: Frog looked at Toad's calendar.
OR: A word what sounded good.	ER: A word that sounded good.
OR: hisself	ER: himself
OR: I can come to your party?	ER: Can I come to your party?

Are these children's miscues evidence of proficient or non-proficient reading? Explain. If you were teaching children who made these miscues, what, if any, assistance or teaching would you offer? Post your thoughts to your blog. Name this blog posting "Module 2: Instructional Challenge."

            I do not think that the miscues that these children are making make them any less of a proficient reader. I think that they are just reading in a way that they would talk. These students are just used to the dialect that they talk in. Thinking about the reading from this module we read that students in order to be a proficient reader do not necessarily have to read every single word on the page just right. They just have to gain meaning from what they read. If I am talking to a child in proper English it is possible that they may not understand what I am talking about if they are used to another dialect. 

             When I think about teaching students that may make miscues like this I do not think that we as teachers should stop them in the middle of the reading just to correct something that is in their dialect  If they understand what they are reading and they are comprehending it then I do not see a problem with it. 

             At the school that I work at we have a large number of Hispanic children. Many times when they are reading they will reverse words. They sometimes put the adjective last. They may read a sentence "She has a car red." The student will gain meaning that she has a red car but it may come out in a different way but I do not think it makes them a non-proficient reader. 

          I think that reading the way that they speak will go away as the students grow and I do not think that it is something that we need to dwell on in the early years. I think with experience they will read what is on the page and not what they would say themselves. 

Module 2: Reading Reflection

"The major folklore (belief/study) of reading instruction relates to the “theory” that reading is considered an exact process.  In other words, the reader is expected to read everything exactly as printed on the page in order to understand the message of the author. In general the consuming public, legislatures, courts and too many educators hold to this theory. It is like the theory of the world being flat during the time of Columbus. “ –Robert Harper and Gart Kilarr

**Do you agree or disagree? Explain why or why not using evidence from text to support assertions.

        I disagree with the authors views about the processes of reading. Students do not have to read every single word in a passage to gain meaning and comprehend what they have read. Many good readers can not read every word in the English Language. There are words that I come to when I am reading that I do not know. That is where I use the strategy that the assigned reading chapters focused on reading words in context. Readers can use the context in which words are written to make a meaning out of them. The reader that is encountering an unknown word can either look ahead into the text or skip the word and see the context that follows it. Using syntactic or semantic context are two types of context within the sentence that readers can use when trying to figure out an unknown word. (49) 

       In chapter four the authors discussed miscues and what they mean to readers. According to Kenneth Goodman miscue research has led us away from a word focus to a comprehension focus. (61) Just being a good reader does not mean that you get all of the words right. Good readers who generally make less miscues than average readers may make many more miscues involving pronouns and simple function words. (63) If they are reading for meaning they may make some miscues that do not change the meaning of the text such as an error like the one in the following sentence. White men came from the cities. The reader would change the word the to their.(63) That does not change the meaning of the sentence and it is an error but that does not make them a poor reader. Reading is not an exact process and being able to read every single word in the English Language does not make you a proficient reader. Reading is a process that requires taking in meaning of the words that are being read. 

Module 1 Instructional Challenge:

Module 1 Instructional Challenge:

Hocked gems financing him, our hero defied the scornful laughter. Think of it as an egg, not a table, he said. Then three sturdy sisters sought proof, forging over vast calmness, and sometimes over turbulent peaks and valleys, until at last welcome winged creatures appeared, signifying monumental success.

Answer these questions about the passage:

1. What are the hocked gems? money

2. What should we think of as an egg and not a table? Hocked gems

3. Who are the three sturdy sisters? People who were going to help him

4. What kind of winged creatures appeared? Welcomed winged creatures

If you were to use this passage with students, you would need to make sure that the students had a prior knowledge of the subject that you are going to be reading about. You would need to go over vocabulary words to make sure that the students are ready for that type of passage. Also you would need to go over strategies to help the students if they are not familiar with a certain word so that they would be able to understand what they are reading. I would like to first get the students interested and maybe make a chart about the topic of the passage so that the students will get interested in it. 

Module 1 Activity 2

Module 1 Activity 2

Types of Vacations

Camping

Big city

Mountains

Beach

Staycation

 

                                          

Beach	Mountains
Hot weather Ocean Sand and surf People do not usually go hiking People usually swim	Cooler weather No ocean No sand and surf People usually go hiking People do not usually swim

Module 1 Activity 1

Module 1 Activity 1

What is cornadic? Emureint grof with many fribs

What does cornadic grank from? Corite

How do garkers excarp the tarances from the corite? Giarcking the corite and starping it in tranker-clarped storbs.

What does the slorp finally frast? Pragety, blickant crankle: coranda

What is coranda? Cargurt, grinkling, corandic and borigen

How is the corandic nacerated from the borigen? By means of loracity

What do garkers finally thrap? Glick, bracht, glupous grapant, corandic which granks in many starps

I have to say that this was a very eye-opening assignment. It never occurred to me the frustration that a student must feel when they have no idea what a reading passage is talking about when they are trying to read and comprehend a passage. If they have no prior knowledge then they are more than likely to feel the same way that I did. Reading this passage was like reading a foreign language when I was trying to understand this. Many questions and passages like this are in workbooks and standardized tests. For instance a story about a snow plow may come up on a standardized test but where I am from students have probably never even seen snow and they would have no prior knowledge what so ever. As a college student I was able to answer these questions because I have the skills to know how to find those answers in the reading and I am able to just copy the answers. I was not able to recall anything from my reading except that I was very frustrated after reading the passage. Doing this activity really made me think. The next time that I am going over a reading passage with my students I am going to make sure that they have some of the prior knowledge that they need to be able to understand the passage. 

Module 1: Reading Reflection

Module 1: Reading Reflection

What are some of the major differences between a skills approach to literacy and a comprehensive or sociopsycholinguistic approach?

               In reading about these two different approaches, I have determined that I have a skills approach to literacy in my classroom. I would like to begin to mix the two methods to form a median. I do think that the students need to know the basics in order to sound out unknown words but they also need to be able to use cues and strategies that must be integrated in order for the students to be successful readers.

                The major difference in the two methods is the way that the students define reading. In the skills approach students may see Reading as identifying words and nothing more. In the comprehensive approach the students may define reading as constructing meaning. The students that learn through the skills approach my focus more on sounding out the words rather than constructing a meaning and comprehending what the words actually say. The skills method is usually pushed on teachers from business or government officials that have no classroom experience.

                I am going to try to do a better job of not only teaching skills for reading but also mixing in the comprehensive method into my teaching as well.

Initial Personal Model of Reading Theory

There are many different Reading theories out there in education today. Every teacher does something a little different. For the most part how you teach Reading is based on your personal preference and the needs of your students.  Reading is the most important skill that children will ever learn in school. If people do not know how to read they will be set up for hardships their entire life. People need reading skills to not only read for entertainment and information but they also need it for simple survival. Think about if you were not able to read you could not read road signs or food labels or even the menu at your favorite restaurant. That is why as teachers we need to teach Reading to our students effectively. I find reading instruction interesting. There are so many different methods and choices as to which way teach it. There are also so many different opinions about what is the most effective way to teach. With my experience in Kindergarten I see the students learning to read and I see the methods that we use. We begin to teach them using phonics and they also work on memorizing the Fry first 100 sight words before the end of Kindergarten. This gives them the chance to do both memorizing and phonics. They memorize words that do not follow the patterns of the letter sounds in the English language and they also know the rules that we follow in English and how they are able to figure out unknown words when they are reading on their own.

            Most children begin to learn to read when they enter Kindergarten some children begin to read at a younger age but for the most part they really start getting direct reading instruction in Kindergarten. There are several ways that students can learn to read. The first is by learning the whole words or memorizing words. Some words need to be memorized so that the reader can recognize them quickly and with ease. I do not think that this is a very effective way to teach. If the students simply memorize words they are not really reading. I believe that reading is the skill of sounding out and decoding words.  Another way that children learn to read is through phonics. In my opinion this is a much more effective way of teaching children to read. When they learn the sounds of all the phonemes in the English language and realize that they can put those sounds together to make words and realize that spoken words and written words are connected to each other.

I think for teachers to effectively teach reading that they need to use a combination of both of these methods.   The most basic skill that children need to learn to read is phonics. They need to know the letter sounds in the English alphabet and they need to know that when those sounds are put together that they form words. I think that it is very important that they learn that the letters in the word actually mean something instead of just memorizing words. Some words such as “Fry’s list of sight words” need to be memorized because many of them do not follow the rules of how letters sound in our written language. If students just memorize a list of words and never get the foundation of how to sound out words to figure out a word then when they are reading and they get to an unknown word they are not going to be able to figure out that word.

            I began to do some research on reading and I found that many people believe that children learn to read automatically by memorization and that direct systematic instruction is not necessary. Research has proven however, that children do need that direct instruction and that the most effective way of teaching is through a combination of both memorization and direct instruction. I also read that some teachers are not able to give direct reading instruction because they do not truly understand what they are teaching. I hope that this reading class will make me understand more about how students learn to read and make me a better teacher.