Literacy Now

In Part 1 of this blog I identified the challenge felt by many teachers about what to do when a close reading text proves to be too difficult for students. Unfortunately, this realization usually emerges after one or two attempts at close reading have failed—at least some of the students aren’t getting the message or don’t see how the author plies her craft to shape a reader’s understanding.

What’s a Teacher to Do?

Let’s unravel this challenge. A complex text is one that contains layers of information and may take multiple reads in order to be deeply understood.  Each read should focus on different aspects of the text including attempts to unearth central theme, word choice, language, structure, style, development of ideas, and author’s purpose. Teachers support success with each reading by focusing on a particular feature of the text, encouraging annotations, asking text-dependent questions, and encouraging collaborative conversations. How often these scaffolds occur depends on students’ success with the initial invitation. These are the scaffolds most students need to understand the complex text and also gain an appreciation for the power of close reading. But, what about the few who, at the conclusion of the close reading, are struggling?

What is the Teacher to Do Next?

Teachers must reassess student performance. What are the areas of challenge for these students?  What instructional contingencies can be shared, in a smaller group that will support their acquiring the information and knowledge about content, language, and style to gain the deepest understanding regarding what the text says and means, and, how it says it? ¹

One way to generate time for smaller groups with specific needs is to situate the close reading within a larger project the whole class may be working on. Then, as students work on the larger group project, time is created for working with the smaller group.

One option is to revisit the same text, but with more support from the teacher or a different purpose for close reading. Students can be invited to re-preview the text more closely to think about where in the text they might uncover particular information. A teacher might need to direct students to a certain paragraph or sentence. Or she might remind them of something learned earlier in text—or another recently read text. Or she might model how to search for information in this smaller group. The goal is to show them a way into the close reading window so they get a better idea of how to scrutinize the text.

Another option is to select a less complex text on the same topic and ask them to perform the same close reading tasks. But don’t stop there, once they have shown they can succeed with a more accessible text, have them return to the initial text and have another run at it. Even if, at the conclusion, a couple students still do not fully understand, they have learned more about the topic and the close reading process than if they had never struggled with any complex text.

One student I recently worked with in one of these smaller groups told me “My brain hurts from thinking so much, but I feel so smart.” His response calmed my worries about killing his motivation to read. Instead he now feels able to wrestle with a complex text.

Regardless of the instructional paths we take, our goal must remain constant: all students need to be able to learn to negotiate meaning from a range of texts, including texts that are genuine challenges for them.

Diane Lapp, EdD, Distinguished Professor of Education at San Diego State University (SDSU), is currently an English/literacy teacher and instructional coach at Health Sciences High and Middle School in San Diego, CA.  Also a member of both the California and the International Reading Halls of Fame, Diane can be reached at lapp@mail.sdsu.edu.

The ILA Literacy Research Panel uses this blog to connect educators around the world with research relevant to policy and practice. Reader response is welcomed via e-mail.

To begin to answer this question we need to understand why text complexity has become an issue.  In 2007 U.S. governors and education chiefs concluded high school graduates did not have the literacy or math skills needed for college or workplace success¹. This lack of proficiency meant many students had to take as much as a year’s worth of remedial work before they could start a genuine college curriculum or assume their rightful place in the workplace.

The inability to read post-secondary materials often occurs because college texts and workplace materials contain specialized vocabulary, academic language, and text structures unique to each discipline or job. Even students with surface knowledge of a topic are unable to deeply comprehend the depth in complex college texts.

The discrepancy between what students could and should be able to do sounded the alarm that we must collectively and individually focus our attention on literacy learning in U.S. schools². What resulted was agreement that the skills needed for high school graduates to succeed regardless of their next career steps must be identified. They were and we now have the Common Core State ELA and Literacy (as well as Math) Standards (2010 ), two sets of K-12 expectations of what skills are needed for career and college success³.

Of the various standards within the CCSS framework, two have received the lion’s share of attention among teachers and administrators:  Reading Standards 1 and 10.  When combined, these offer the expectation that students need to learn how to closely read increasingly complex texts across the school year and across grades. Like all of the Standards, the authors do not identify what information should be taught, how the information should be taught, or what materials should be used. These decisions are left to the discretion of educators.  But close, careful reading of increasingly complex test is the common thread⁴.

What Matters to Teachers?

As I work with teachers across the country, they often ask me what to do after they have selected a text within their grade-level complexity band, followed all of the suggestions for sharing a close read , and realized at the end of the lesson there are still many students who are not able to comprehend. Teachers don’t want to leave these students behind and they don’t want to continually frustrate them with texts that are too difficult⁵.         

When I ask my teacher colleagues why their students aren’t comprehending, they often offer alternative explanations: (a) the students didn’t have enough basic background knowledge about the topic, (b) they didn’t understand the language or the structure of the text, or (c) they didn’t have the skills needed to even decode the written text into speech.

Teachers are saying there is a difference between a complex text and a complex text that is too difficult for their students. I’ve concluded from these insightful teachers that a difficult text is a complex text that can’t be readily comprehended by readers because they don’t have the knowledge, language, or skills needed to interrogate it through multiple reads.

In part two of this post, I’ll offer some possibilities to help unravel what a teacher might do when this situation occurs during a close reading.

Diane Lapp, EdD, Distinguished Professor of Education at San Diego State University (SDSU), is currently an English/literacy teacher and instructional coach at Health Sciences High and Middle School in San Diego, CA.  Also a member of both the California and the International Reading Halls of Fame, Diane can be reached at lapp@mail.sdsu.edu.

The ILA Literacy Research Panel uses this blog to connect ILA members around the world with research relevant to policy and practice. Reader response is welcomed via e-mail.

by Jennifer Rowsell
Brock University
Dec. 18, 2014

Why are movies like Frozen, videogames like Minecraft, and book series like The Hunger Games fixtures in so many classrooms? What compels students to take up popular culture stories and become so preoccupied with their songs, characters, storylines, and associated objects? Researchers including Anne Haas Dyson , Jackie Marsh (2005), Deborah Rowe (2008), and Karen Wohlwend (2008; 2009a; 2009b) have written extensively about how young children play with media and popular culture texts and how these texts and associated practices have the potential to open up spaces for learning in early years and primary learning contexts.

Wohlwend provides a particularly incisive, critical framing of the often hidden practices and competencies children display when they play and think through media and popular culture. As she repeatedly demonstrates in her research (Wohlwend, 2008; 2009a; 2009b), children perform their identities through media and, in turn, media and popular culture powerfully shape children’s thinking and learning. In her various research studies, Wohlwend shows how adults have become more constrained by conventions, where children easily move across a variety of text genres (e.g. information, narrative, visual/image-based, haptically driven, and explanatory) and through a variety of modalities (e.g. sounds, visuals, gestures, animation). They do this seamlessly and often with abandon.

In one example of Wohlwend’s work, Wohlwend (2009a) examined closely how a group of children engage with toys and artifacts as identity texts. Wohlwend spotlighted Abbie Howard, a kindergarten teacher with 15 years of experience in early years classrooms, who had an inquiry-based style of teaching in which she would plan out and negotiate activities for each day with the children in her classroom. Once they had a plan, children set to work on a project or compositional task. Children worked independently as Abbie circulated. Children naturally consulted with peers and engaged in collaborative work as needed. In her seminal article about the research project during 24 once-a-week visits over one school year, Wohlwend offered a detailed discourse analysis interpreting a group of girls named “Disney Princess Players.” The group loved such Disney animated films as The Little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty, Mulan, Aladdin, Cinderella, and Snow White and they spent much of their class time talking about the films, enacting parts of the films, extending their own stories based on characters. Wohlwend particularly looked at gendered tensions that arose during their playing and writing particularly around their sophistication with animating characters—that is, moving them, speaking for them, building on stories about them.

Wohlwend provides an in-depth, bird’s eye view of material features of Disney princess characters (costumes, physical features, colour schemes, skin colours, etc.), connecting these material features to ways in which the girls in the group perform their own identities in the classroom and within their peer groups. Wohlwend shows how the girls not only negotiate their relationships with peers, but also how Howard had them critically reflect on the content and respond with their own plays. Howard fosters an environment in her classroom encouraging “approximated writing” and she builds on the children’s funds of knowledge (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005) about popular culture. In her article, Wohlwend notes the Princess Players engaged in 42% more authoring than other children in the class, primarily because of authoring considered texts they dearly love, and they invested a lot of time in viewing, thinking about, and remixing into other texts and compositions.

Stepping back and thinking about research informing practice, Wohlwend’s work tells us some important things that we might know on a tacit level, but that are not as prominent in theory and pedagogy, such as the power of incorporating media and popular culture in classrooms and how young children negotiate and even contest gender stereotypes naturally and in productive ways.

Three pieces of advice emerging from Wohlwend’s work are: 1) talk about popular culture and media texts, discussing material qualities, critically engaging with stereotypes, assumptions, and underlying ideas; 2) provide students with opportunities to focus on particular scenes or characters in popular culture texts, such as Katniss in The Hunger Games, and devise alternative storylines or scenarios; 3) have students work in pairs or small groups to compose a response to a popular culture texts, such as a short film, a rant, or visual montage that depicts a part or theme of the text.

by Catherine Compton-Lilly
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Oct. 23, 2014

I am constantly impressed when an 8-year-old-child easily shifts between languages, translating her mother’s words into English to compensate for my lack of Spanish. In recent years, a growing body of research has highlighted the significance of bilingualism and the long term effects being bilingual, or being multilingual, has not only on people’s understandings of language, but also on their general cognitive abilities. Perhaps this is why I am intrigued by a recent publication by esteemed scholar, Luis Moll. I highlight Moll’s work partly because I found it in a book on Vygotsky and feared it might not be discovered by many of us who focus on literacy.

In this chapter, Moll and his colleagues observed two groups of children as they moved between reading instruction in Spanish and English. The children spent half of their days in each classroom. The teacher who taught them to read in English did not speak Spanish. Moll and his research team were intrigued when they noticed that some children who were capable readers in Spanish, were identified as struggling in their English reading classroom. When their Spanish-speaking teacher viewed her students participating in the English reading classroom, she noted, “Those can’t be my kids. Why are they doing such low-level work?”

Moll and his colleagues initiated a series of teaching-learning experiments in which they asked children to read texts in English and then discuss what they had read in Spanish. The results were compelling. Children who appeared to have minimal comprehension of English texts when they were required to discuss these texts in English, revealed rich comprehension when they were allowed to talk about the texts using their native Spanish. Moll and his colleagues worked toward creating a “bilingual zone” in which children were invited to draw on their Spanish language resources to comprehend and discuss texts they had read in English. Specifically, Moll and his colleagues were careful to provide scaffolds when children discussed texts using English. They built on students’ comments and provided missing elements of stories enabling groups of students to collectively express what they understood and to share their ideas with each other. When students gave short one-word responses, the research team situated these comments within the story and invited other members of the group to build on these comments.

Finally, the research team invited children to use Spanish to access key terms and convey ideas the children could not yet express in English. Throughout this process, the research team actively resisted allowing the children to resort to literal and basic comprehension of texts. Instead, they asked high-level inferential questions and expected the children to respond to complex ideas while employing language scaffolding and allowing the children’s selective use of Spanish. As Moll reports, “we knew that the students could perform at more advanced levels,” and that “it was well within their zone of proximal development.”

Significantly, the idea we can invite bilingual speakers to draw on their full language repertoire— in two languages— is a concept quickly gaining traction with our colleagues who focus on ESL and bilingual education, as noted in several of the studies listed at the end of this post. Teachers can ask children to use their native languages to talk or write about books read in English or explore different ways of conveying ideas using multiple languages or language variations. In addition, it is important for teachers to recognize the bi-literate abilities many children bring to classrooms, including being able to write words and sentences in more than one language. Even teachers who do not speak the native languages of all her students can invite students to draw on their bi-literate abilities, consulting with bilingual colleagues as needed. Recent work on “translanguaging” opens the door for reading scholars to think deeply about intersections between reading and language. Moll’s work invites all of us to consider the competencies our bilingual students bring to text and possibilities for our teaching.

Catherine Compton-Lilly is an associate professor in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Compton-Lilly teaches courses in literacy studies and works with professional development schools in Madison.

The ILA Literacy Research Panel uses this blog to connect educators around the world with research relevant to policy and practice. Reader response is welcomed via e-mail.

Question:

Should we be teaching 100 sight words to kindergartners?

Response from Marcia Invernizzi:

Drilling kindergartners with high frequency words on flashcards is unlikely to support the development of their sight word vocabulary. In fact, it’s likely to do more harm than good.

A better approach would be to engage children in the kinds of purposeful activities that lead to a concept of word in text, a prerequisite for learning and retaining sight words. A concept of word in text is the ability to finger point accurately to multiple lines of text in a memorized rhyme or highly familiar/predictable text without getting off-track on two syllable words, without lumping together the article before the noun, and without pointing to a different word than is being pronounced. Research has shown that until children have a firm concept of word in text, they will be unable to remember words when seen in isolation (Flanigan, 2007).

Question:

How is it that spending instructional time on cultivating a concept of word in text results in learning sight words?

Response from Marcia Invernizzi:

When teachers spend time teaching children the skills needed to read and also provide the time children need to practice applying those skills, children will start to remember words they have seen before in context. To finger-point accurately to words of more than one syllable in a memorized rhyme, children must have the ability to isolate the beginning sound of each word and match it to the first letter of each word in running text. Using their memory for how the rhyme goes, children coordinate their pronunciation of each word from memory with the initial sound of each word they see in print. To do this, they must have automatic alphabet and letter sound recognition, the ability to isolate beginning sounds, and, of course, print concepts.  When teachers teach these skills (alphabet recognition, letter sound, print concepts, initial phoneme isolation) and provide children daily opportunities to finger-point read to known ditties, rhymes, songs, and/or predictable texts, they are teaching them the prerequisite skills for learning sight words. We need to help teachers realize that sight words are not learned in isolation, but rather, are the outcome of coordinating alphabet knowledge with beginning sounds in real text.

The term “sight words” is often confused with “high-frequency words,” which are the most commonly occurring words in print (i.e. was, the, can, these). It is important to understand that though a reader’s store of sight words will include many high-frequency words, it is not limited to them. Any word can be a sight word, that is, a word that is recognized “at first sight.”

Another common misunderstanding about sight words is that they are phonetically irregular words children cannot sound out and therefore must be learned in a different way, as unanalyzed wholes or “by sight.” Although there are some high-frequency words that lack dependable letter–sound correspondences (of = /uv/ and was = /wuz/), most words are more regular than not, especially in the consonant features that are most likely to be partially understood. For example, the high-frequency word from is 75 percent regular; only the o in the middle is irregular. There is no evidence that readers learn these words in a different way but, like all word learning at this stage, repetition in and out of context, along with word study, helps (Johnston, Invernizzi, Helman, Bear, & Templeton, 2015).