Literacy Now

Getting students to read during the summer months can be a challenge. Our aim should not be to force them to read; it should be to develop their motivation to read. Voracious readers are almost always the highest performing achievers in school. Reading, like any other hobby, must be a year-round activity for optimal academic development and eventual career success. A number of strategies can be used to capitalize on students’ existing attitudes and interests and to promote summer reading:

• Read together: Whether first-grade or 12th-grade, stop telling and start sharing literary experiences. Don’t feel bound to the child’s reading level, as listening comprehension is typically much higher in early years.
• Encourage children to read what interests them—from comic books to blogs and even drama: While wide reading is the goal, no one likes to read everything. Check out ILA’s Choices Reading Lists for book recommendations for children by children.
• Consider their interests: For example, if the child is a sports enthusiast, suggest adventure, history, mystery, or other genres with an essence of action and competition.
• Read challenging books: Often, children can understand books above their comprehension level if the material relates to their prior knowledge or experiences. Besides, with help, what challenge can’t be met?
• Share your enthusiasm for reading: In general, we speak about what matters most to us. Talk to students about the books you read to inspire habitual reading (e.g., It was so inspirational to see how Chelsea left everything behind for a chance to perform on Broadway. I wish I had that confidence when I was 18 years old).
• Link technology to reading: Apps and websites offer freely available e-books, words of the day, historical significant events on this day, and visual dictionaries.
• Find an online community: More than eight million stories have been uploaded to FanFiction for reading, reviewing, and interacting with child and adolescent authors.
• Engage in the arts: Music, art, and drama bring what we read to life.
• Incentivize with learning opportunities: Read a book and go to a museum, read two books and go to a theatre production, and so on.
• Subscribe to freely available e-newsletters written for children/adolescents: (e.g., Teen Ink and Clover).

Evan Ortlieb is a professor and coordinator of the Online PhD in Literacy in the Department of Education Specialties at St. John’s University in New York City. He is an internationally recognized leader in the field of literacy education with previous work experience in Singapore and Australia and whose expertise centers on literacy empowerment, literacy teacher preparation, language diversity, and differentiated literacy instruction. He currently serves as president of the Specialized Literacy Professionals (SIG) of the International Literacy Association, and section editor of Unlocking Literacy Learning within the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. He also serves as president of the Ortlieb Foundation, a non-profit organization that provides college scholarships for cancer patients.

Teachers who want to make Readers Theatre a more regular part of their reading curriculum often ask us where to find scripts for their students to perform. Although school and community libraries, as well as most classrooms, are filled with stories, informational texts, and reading materials, individual and collections of scripts are not as easy to find—especially if a teacher has a particular topic or concept in mind. In this post, we hope to help teachers become more adept at finding the kinds of scripts they want to bring into their classrooms.

The following are five suggestions for finding scripts or creating your own.

• Search published collections. The first place to look for scripts is where you already look for books and other reading materials: in your classroom, school, and community libraries. Although limited in numbers and scope, most children’s librarians will stock their shelves with at least a few scripts that can be practiced and performed in a classroom setting.

• Check the Internet. The Internet has a vast repository of scripts that can be easily downloaded and copied for classroom use. Many of the scripts you will find online are actually written by teachers who upload them for public use. A Google search yields a host of free sites (such as timrasinski.com and thebestclass.org) that offer a variety of scripts for free download.

• Write your own scripts. This might be a great time to tap into your writing potential, shake off your writer’s block, or enhance your amateur writing career. You can transform almost any text into a script. After choosing a text, consider how to approach the scripting process. Some texts have plenty of dialogue while others are heavily narrated, in which case you can add several narrator parts or change narration into dialogue. For instance, if the text reads, “Superman flew faster than ever to save Lois,” you could modify it so that Superman’s dialogue tells the story, “Oh no! I have to fly faster than ever to save Lois!”

Creating your own scripts also enables you to cater to your students. For example, fifth-grade teachers might script a short section from a novel. If you have a class of emergent readers, a narrated or teacher-led script might be a more suitable starter script for your classroom. Or, you can make one up.

• Use poetry. We have also found that students love to perform poetry. You can choose any poem and easily transform it into a script by adding narrators. A great source for funny, child-friendly poems is gigglepoetry.com.
• Have students write the scripts. We feel that students themselves are the ultimate source for scripts. When students write scripts based on stories or segments of stories they have read, they must engage in deep comprehension and analysis. Making inferences is one of the highest forms of comprehension. When turning a story into a script, students learn how to create inferences through dialogue and description. Students can also create nonfiction or informational scripts. When doing so, they will have to perform research to ensure that the information they convey in the script is accurate.

We recommend that you start by scripting existing texts. Poetry is an easy genre to begin with; there’s very little dialogue, so students are essentially breaking the poems into meaningful phrases or stanzas and assigning narrators. In our experience, short stories are a good next step.

There are no limits on what texts can be used, so let your students choose their favorite texts and let their imaginations take over. We hope that this brief article provides you with enough resources to implement Readers Theatre throughout the year so you can see the results for yourself. 

Chase Young is an associate professor at Sam Houston State University and a former elementary school teacher. He is the coauthor with Timothy Rasinski of Tiered Fluency Instruction: Supporting Diverse Learners in Grades 2–5 (Capstone).

Timothy Rasinski is a professor of literacy education at Kent State University and a former elementary and middle school teacher. He is the author of the bestselling book The Fluent Reader (Scholastic) and a member of the Reading Hall of Fame.

Faida Stokes is a doctoral student in literacy at Sam Houston State University. Formerly a special education teacher, she is now an educational diagnostician. She is the coauthor with Chase Young and Timothy Rasinski of Readers Theater Plus Comprehension and Word Study to appear in The Reading Teacher. 

To help students grow into informed, socially aware global citizens, we must allow them to explore the different languages, traditions, and history behind cultures around the world through multicultural literature. We must also encourage students to think critically about leading social and political issues and connect them to resources that will give them better insight into these global concerns.

Read about how you can do all of these things, ultimately guiding your students to have a better understanding of the world around them.

• Notable Books for a Global Society: A Slideshow to Share
• Fostering Global Citizenship Online
• Go Global! Multicultural Books for Children and Young Adults
• Let’s Build a World Together
• Connected Kiwis: Blogging With Students in New Zealand

Clare Maloney is a former intern at the International Literacy Association. She is currently seeking a BA in English from the University of Delaware

Writing is a critical literacy skill that plays an increasingly important role in everyday life. Our students need to demonstrate sufficient writing abilities, not only to meet schools’ curriculum requirements, but also to fully participate in social and civic activities.

Today’s standards place more emphasis on expository writing as well as writing as a tool to facilitate learning. However, students with language impairment (LI) tend to find writing particularly challenging. Therefore, it is critical that teachers understand how to provide writing instruction that supports students with LI.

Teach expository writing strategies

Research has shown that students with LI can benefit directly from learning strategies for planning, composing, editing, and revising expository essays. For example, the strategy mnemonic TREE BRANCH can help struggling learners to plan and compose compare–contrast essays:

• Tell what you are comparing and why
• Report important similarities and differences
• Elaborate on each point
• End with what the reader should learn
• Brainstorm idea words
• Recite self-talk
• Ask if ideas will meet goals
• Now, write with good organization, powerful words, and accurate information
• Challenge yourself to come up with more ideas
• Have a look for mistakes

Revision checklists can be used to facilitate revision of both content and mechanics.

Teach writing self-regulation strategies

It is important that students with LI understand how to self-monitor and self-regulate their performance during writing. Within the self-regulated strategy development model, students not only learn writing strategies, but also how to set appropriate writing goals (e.g., generating three superordinate categories for compare–contrast essays), instruct themselves on the strategy use (e.g., “OK, now I need to…”), monitor their own writing progress on a chart (e.g., recording the number of compare–contrast text elements included), and self-reinforce their performance (e.g., “I’ve done a good job writing up this paper!”).

Provide language support during writing instruction

Language difficulties make it challenging for students to generate key ideas (e.g., superordinate categories when comparing and contrasting two subjects/concepts) and use precise and impactful vocabulary in their expository essays. Therefore, teachers need to incorporate vocabulary support into their writing instruction. For example, complicated new words need to be presented to students multiple times and in varied contexts. Scaffolds such as picture cues and visual organizers could be presented to help students understand the meaning of the words. Teachers can also provide student-friendly definitions of keywords and discuss expository texts that effectively or ineffectively use these words.

Providing writing instruction that incorporates self-regulation strategies as well as language support could contribute to better overall writing performance for students with LI. Note that substantial time should be allowed for these students to practice and internalize the taught strategies.

Mei Shen completed her doctorate in special education at Michigan State University with a graduate specialization in language and literacy education. Her research focuses on providing evidence-based reading and writing instruction for struggling students with language difficulties.

Mei Shen will present a session titled “Empowering Students With Language Impairment With Effective Planning and Revising Strategies for Expository Writing” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17.

More than 80% of U.S. teachers are white, as are 80%–90% of students enrolled in U.S. preservice teacher programs.

Meanwhile, students of color compose more than 45% of the U.S. pre-K–12 population; by 2023, students of color will represent more than 50% of the U.S. student population. There is a significant divide between the demographics of the students in our classrooms and their teachers.

For decades, multicultural education and culturally relevant pedagogy have been fostering approaches to educational equity. Culturally relevant pedagogy, for example, aims to create inclusive instructional techniques and materials that align with students’ funds of knowledge—to make adaptations to a curriculum that is inherently not as relevant to students of color and those whose cultures are different from the white mainstream.

Culturally relevant pedagogy is a way to bridge the gap between the dominant, white mainstream culture of schooling and the diverse students who aren’t members of that culture. In doing the important work of culturally relevant teaching, teachers don’t often consider the systemic workings of our dominant white society that continue to make schools a place where instruction, materials, and curricula have to be adapted in order to meet the needs of diverse learners. Critical Whiteness Studies suggests that meaningful change for equity in our schools can come about only when we dig into the entrenched issues of race, racism, and white dominance that undergird schooling in the United States.

Carrying the Critical Whiteness Studies mantle is no easy task. It requires white teachers to reflect on their own racial identities in a society that systematically privileges their race. It requires examination of how schools are included among institutions in the United States that maintain and replicate a hierarchy of power that benefits whites.

These are not easy or comfortable topics to discuss. Building understanding about these issues should be part of ongoing professional development and learning for both preservice and inservice teachers. According to ILA’s Standards for the Preparation of Literacy Professionals 2017 (currently in draft stage and available 2018) professional development on issues of race, racism, and educational equity can help teachers challenge “their own cultures, belief systems, and potential biases” and engage in “reflective practice” with other teachers.

One approach to Critical Whiteness work is forming antiracism professional book study groups. These book groups can be facilitated in a variety of contexts and formats and can use a range of texts, including nonfiction, fiction, and multimedia resources. Book groups offer a space for in-depth and ongoing learning, reflection, and discussion that creates possibilities for meaningful change. 

Autumn M. Dodge is an assistant professor of literacy in the Department of Education Specialties at St. John’s University in Queens, NY. Her teaching and research interests include Critical Whiteness work through studying white teacher identity and antiracism pedagogy, leveraging literacy for LGBTQ+ advocacy, disciplinary literacy, and literacy and pop culture in education.

Autumn M. Dodge will present a session titled “Antiracism Education Through Teacher Book Study Groups” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17.