Notes from A's Class

Review from last week
Comprehension - making connections to schema
Stumbling blocks
Strategies to improve comprehension
Last week, played a game to show how questioning relates to thinking, and how to teach
questioning
Start with out of context actitivity to teach self-questioning (e.g. 20 questions); go to reading acitivity to teach questioning (e.g. Stump the Teacher); go to activities where they are reading and thinking of questions at the same time.

Questioning minds don't get bored. Questioning is thinking, is making connections.

For younger kids, 20 questions about pictures instead of reading passages.

Game: Guess who? A series of pictures of people with descriptions. Ask yes or no questions, put down each picture that doesn't match.

If you are doing a lesson and it's too difficult, you have to know how to go down a few levels, then work back up when they are comfortable.

Major topic: Visual imagery
What? Being able to create pictures in your mind.

Making connections in the brain: neurons sprout dendrites; dendrites don't touch each other. The gap is called a synapse. That gap is bridged by chemicals, neurotransmitters (e.g. adrenaline). There are positive ones and negative ones. The negative ones make you feel anxious, scared, etc.

Story of struggling reader who came for tutoring... said one day "I love you"; "you don't love me, you don't know me; you love the way you feel when i'm around you." A few months later, reading problems fixed, still coming because of good feeling. Asked "can you show me how to do what you did with me? I've got friends who are about to make bad choices and I want to help them.

Visual imagery - picture worth 1000 words. Helps students make solid connections.

Example, picture map of United States. Candidate got on the plane in Miami, FL. went to ..., etc. etc. listed off all of the places. Because you made a mental picture, you could remember all of those places.
Remember example of what I'm wearing. Once your mind starts working, it keeps working.

Second reason for using visual imagery with kids, it gives you pleasure. Avid readers, raise your hands. I don't expect many. Okay, when you read a book, and then a movie comes out, which do you like better? The book, of course. You are making pictures in your mind.

Third reason for using visual imagery, it will improve comprehension.

Visual imagery is very powerful.

So, how do we teach it?

First floor, out of the context of reading.
Example: Everybody, picture an elephant. With your arm show me what the elephant's trunk is doing. Arms down. Put the elephant in an environment. Now picture elephant raising his front right foot. Now give it polka dots. Raise your hand if you changed your elephant's color when you gave it polka dots. What color was your elephant? Put your elephant in clothes. What clothes is your elephant wearing? Make your elephant stand on its head.
Go back to a kitchen that is somewhere in your past. Go to your seat at the kitchen table. Think about the smells, sights. All of your senses can be activated.
In your mind, picture a 3 x 3 grid. Number each of the spaces, 1 through 9. Start in the upper right hand corner. Move down 2, left 1, up 2, left 1, down 1. What number are you on? Some of you are there on the third floor and had no problem doing that. To scaffold, give them the grid on a piece of paper and a red disk to cover. Next, take away the number, or take away the marker. Then let a kid call the directions. Use number cards to do a comprehension check with the kids of the whole class.

Story about little Jerome, who said his TV set wasn't working. When it "warmed up", he was happy.

Second floor, you read and have them make the pictures. Read passage from "Sarah Plain and Tall". Could also have them buddy read, where one reads, one visualizes, then switch off. Also, read a picture book, but don't show pictures. They visualize, then show them the pictures to compare. Also, read them a picture book and give them a wide angle lens. Ask them what's happening to the right and left of the picture you can see. Picture your favorite car. You're in it. Now you're going through a drive through. Where are you? What are you wearing?

Some people say that they can't tell a joke. As your comprehension gets better, you'll get better at telling jokes.
First floor activity: tell a joke, and have your students try to tell the joke back. By the third floor, try three jokes.
Inquest dramatization - I'm going to read first two pages of a chapter book, these two are going to act it out for you. Freeze them and ask questions. Read beginning of The Great Gilly Hopkins. 1) dramatization, 2) stop periodically to ask audience to ask questions.

Teach the students to make the pictures in their minds. As they move into 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade, there won't be pictures for them.

BREAK

I'm going to read a passage. As I read, I want you to go outside of this classroom and make a connection. When you do, raise your hand. I'll ask you to share your connections. Record in Inspiration.

Guided Reading, demonstration.
First floor. Warm up by listing six things to pick up from the grocery store. Who can list them backwards? Second floor. Read passage to them. Challenge them to remember everything. (Passage about caterpillars and moths.) Third floor, they read and remember everything.
Steps: 1) Challenge to remember, 2) Read to them, 3) record what they remember, 4) read again and make additions and corrections, 5) short term memory test, bar graph in reading journal. 6) Week or two later, long term memory quiz. 7) Graph in reading journal. Goal: by the end of the month, how many of you can get your LTM scores the same as your STM scores? That makes the kids responsible for their own learning. Guided reading procedure is very powerful.
Remembering 12 items and saying them backwards is a subtest of intelligence tests. Could you do that? Yes.
We study Alzheimer's here at USF. My friend is in one of the classes and they do a lot of these same activities to do with young children to get them to think. We pay a lot of attention to keeping people from losing their minds, but we don't pay enough attention in schools to making sure kids develop their minds to begin with. We test them so that we can say 'you're smart', 'you're not', but we don't pay enough attention to helping them develop their minds and become smart.

Chunking. Social security numbers, phone numbers with area codes. Cleaning garage: big job, break into chunks. When something isn't manageable, you break it into chunks. Break text passage into chunks. Use procedures on each chunk, like guided reading or visualization. Mnemonic devices.

Readers Theater
Story grammar
Once the students understand the framework, your mind wants to fill the framework.

Sunday reading

I feel like I've been bouncing around all day. In Barry (2002), I've been reading about post-structuralism, deconstruction, modernism, and post-modernism.
Online, I fell down a rabbit hole. When I was talking to Michael about "The Death of the Author", he mused about the death of the blogger. I searched that phrase, curious if anyone had developed that idea. Only six hits for that exact phrase, which is so rare.

One of the hits led me to a post on a blog called Reassigned Time.

This is an academic blog and this particular entry from early 2007 mourns Michael Bérubé's decision to stop blogging. It's also an interesting take on the place of blogging within academia and on academics who blog. This led me to Bérubé's blog (he restarted his blog last month), and that led me to this article in the Pittsburgh City Paper about Bérubé and his views on politics and academic freedom.

Via Facebook, I was led to this video from last week's "Rebooting the News" conference in Philadelphia. The workshop focuses on copyright and fair use and has given me a really good reason to look forward to November 11th. For more information, check out Renee Hobbs' Media Education Lab.

Good stuff.

Wilde quote

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” Oscar Wilde

Notes from A's Class

Midterm review
Talking through each item from midterm in brief
Interaction with Text will be on final
Remove graphophonic cues if a student is too dependent on them. The R are in the WS. The Rays are in the World Series.
Discussion questions: for basic sight words, needed to identify how to teach them, not just how to reinforce them.
Teaching phonograms. Why? Learn one, get 10-12 words. Circumvents teaching the vowel rules. It's fun.

If you're in the 40s, and have good scores for everything else, you are on track for an A.

Final is the same format, without the phonics section. By now, your mind should be comfortable with the teaching and with the test, so the final will seem easy.

New content
Comprehension (major topic, next three weeks)
What? Understanding what you read (internalizing, communicating with the author)

Every teacher would say that they teach comprehension. Most do not. They check comprehension. Checking comprehension doesn't help them comprehend.

Road blocks to comprehension: lack of vocabulary; lack of schema (timeline around the top of your room. Major markers, like the year of their birth, Pearl Harbor, 9/11; works of art; works of literature; lack of fluency; lack of interest; distractions; not interacting with the text; pronoun referent.

"Global Warfare" passage

Shouldn't we be teaching them what these road blocks are? Don't you think that a third grader or a fourth grader could understand that? We need to get more honest with the kids. If they know what the enemies are, they will avoid them.

Thinking
Very important to every part of our lives. Why don't we teach it? How many classes have you had in thinking? How many bulletin boards have you seen about thinking? All we got is "put on your thinking caps". When some teachers invites questions, it's after the fact, and they ask you to ask questions if you don't understand, meaning that you have to declare to the class that you don't understand.
Teaching without requiring the students to think prepares them only to answer low level questions, information recall. Ask questions before and during reading, model asking questions, give them wait time - allow them to think. Don't use questioning as interrogation.

Self-questioning (this will be on the final)
Teach the kids to ask the questions themselves. Picture a mother preparing her son to leave for school - do you have your lunch money, do you have your homework, etc. The son is thinking, "let me get out of here". Instead teach the kid to ask his own questions.
Three floors in a building: to get from first floor to the third floor, we need scaffolding. If you're teaching on the 2nd floor and your students are looking at you with blank faces, go back down to the first floor. Back to the example: first floor, the mother is asking the questions. Second floor, mother and son share the asking. Third floor, son asks.
In reading, first floor teach self-questioning out of the context of reading. (20 questions, with the teacher thinking of something; 20 questions with one student asking the questions of the students; celebrity game, but with animals or foods).
Second floor, involve reading. In "stump the teacher", the students think of the questions to ask the teacher. The teacher reads a text passage, then turns it over. The students ask questions of the teacher. If students can't think of questions, go back to the first floor because they are not thinking. Once the students have asked all of the questions they can think of, the teacher asks questions of the students. The teachers should ask higher level questions. Write them down ahead of time. "What word was used that meant 'not wise'?" "How much would 2 acres be worth?" You are modeling for them questions that they can ask next time. They will want to play because of the reversal of roles, but they are modeling just the kind of self-questioning you want them to be doing.
Third floor, "stump the teacher" after both teacher and students read it. When you go to the 3rd floor depends on the students.

Review examples of the Literacy Notebook, one over the top and one reasonable.
Must have table of contents.
Must be organized.
You can work together. Yours and your friend's could be identical.
It should reflect what we've been learning.
It can include things from other classes.

Toward developing exclusion/inclusion criteria

For the research blog, I'm excluding research for which literacy is a context to study something else. In the example listed below, the literacy classroom is used as a context to study social positioning. The research blog will focus on research about literacy, not about other things in a literacy context.

Zacher, J. (2008). Analyzing Children’s Social Positioning and Struggles for Recognition in a Classroom Literacy Event. Research in the Teaching of English, 43.

Configuring the new blog

Still working out the kinks on the process of content production for the new research review blog. So far, I've included these journals:

From IRA

RRQ - Reading Research Quarterly
RT - Reading Teacher
JAAL - Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy

From AERA

ARER - American Review of Educational Research
RRE - Review of Research in Education
EEPA - Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis
ER - Educational Researcher
RER - Review of Educational Research
AERJ - American Educational Research Journal

AERA, not included
Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics - focus is on research methods

From NCTE

RTE - Research in the Teaching of English
TP - Talking Points
EJ - English Journal

NCTE, not included
Voices from the Middle - doesn't publish research
College English - not focused on K12
Teaching English in the Two Year College - not focused on K12
College Composition and Communication - not focused on K12
English Education - doesn't publish research

Need to consider:

Reading Horizons
Writing Center Journal
The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy
Written Communication
Journal of College Reading and Learning
Reading Psychology
Reading
Journal of Second Language Writing
TESOL Journal
English for Specific Purposes
Journal of Reading
Language and Learning
Studies in Writing
Pedagogy
Journal of Child Language

Also, find some that deal with brain science.

The new blog

Croce on Genres

"All books dealing with classifications and systems of the arts could be burned without any loss whatsoever."

Benedetto Croce, quoted in The Power of Genre (p. 6) by Adena Rosmarin.

Fluency and Acting

I just woke up, so this may not be the revelation it feels like now.

In my dream, I was at some kind of celebration for the newly relocated Tampa Zoo, with which somehow our research group was involved. K and S had just been introduced on stage and now the gathered crowd was watching a video on a large screen on stage. I was backstage watching it. Some of the people in it were actors - I recognized Dean Winters - but others clearly weren't. There was an older woman speaking, and she was really bad, like you sometimes see in community theater, not at all able to make her words sound like natural speech. As I was waking up, I thought about this woman and why she couldn't act. It's like she had no awareness of the difference between how she sounded and how people normally speak. That's weird because, of course, she's heard, and produced, countless hours of natural sounding speech all through her life. But, she's never been directed to examine the differences. The distinctive features of natural speech have never been pointed out to her.

I thought about A's review in class this week, talking about the components of fluency - pitch, juncture, and flow. That woman was acting the same way a poor reader reads - with no fluency, no understanding of how the ideas are represented in the text. Only she wasn't reading, she had actually memorized it without connecting the underlying thoughts. Or, she had memorized it, connected the thoughts, but never considered the distinctive features of fluent, natural speech.

When we teach movie-making to kids, we touch on acting as a discrete set of skills because they are the actors in their own movies. When we do that, we need to use language that ties the ideas that we are teaching back to reading. We need to teach them to attend to the distinctive features within the text that cue pitch, juncture, and flow. We can do this the same way we teach reading fluency in the classroom. Let me qualify that by saying, we can use the engaging and effective strategies that are sometimes used in the classroom to teach fluency. The key is that, in the context of movie-making, they have a real purpose to learn how to read fluently. They want their movie to be good, so the fluency strategies that we are teaching serve the purpose of helping them make their movie better. In the process, we will be helping them become better readers.

This is another way in which the kinds of projects that we do can support the acquisition of traditional literacies. This connection has probably already been made in research about Process Drama.

Notes from A's Class

Vocabulary
Who is putting new words in their heads by 3rd grade?
Make a concerted effort to continue putting new words in their heads. If not, by third of fourth grade, they may look like they have a word recognition problem when really they have a vocabulary problem. A student reading comes to the word "proficient" for the first time. If that word is not already in their head, they won't be able to read it. If they have heard it used before and know what it means, they will be able to figure it out from context.

What: learning the meaning of new words
Why important: Comprehending text; communicating; building self-esteem.
How: be a model (push their vocabulary in spoken comments, comments on papers. To be an effective teacher, you have to make them want to learn. Don't you think if you put new vocabulary into your praise, don't you think they'll want to know what the word means?); continue reading to the students; teach with the why in mind. Teach them morphemes; teach a few a week and their vocabularies will grow exponentially; antebellum and beligerent. Start with words they don't know. Not only does it exponentially increase their vocabulary, it allows them to figure out words they don't know. Spectacles, inspect, spectator. Teach them etymology; history or story of words; how you were named; If your mind doesn't wonder, it will wander. Teach them word play. Word searches are the lowest form of this. Crossword puzzle incorporates semantic, syntactic, and grapho-phonic clues.

Gutiérrez & Orellana 2006, ELL Genres of Difference

Gutiérrez, K. & Orellana, M. (2006). The "Problem" of English language learners: Constructing genres of difference. Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 40, no. 4, 502-507.

Essay describing the limitations of many studies of ELL populations that result from methodology common to these studies. The authors describe these studies as a genre, with common characteristics, from participant selection to methods of analysis, typical of its members.

This might be an interesting article for AM's current project.

This article does not relate to genre in children's writing or literature.

Hillocks 2005, Form vs. Content of Writing

Hillocks, G. (2005). The focus on form vs. content in teaching writing. Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 40, no. 2, 238-248.


In this essay, George Hillocks (University of Chicago) discusses the "obsession" with teaching form (parts of the paragraph, structure of sentences, elements of style, etc.) to the exclusion of teaching how to create written content from subject matter. Further, Hillocks offers a discussion of research to support the idea that there are more important things about teaching writing than teaching forms.

No information on genre in writing instruction.

Altman 1999, Preface and Chapter 1

Altman, R. (1999). Film/genre. London: British Film Institute Publishing.

Although I may be shifting my focus to genre in literature and writing instruction in the classroom, Rick Altman's book still provides some interesting framing. In his first chapter, Altman walks us through the history of literary genre theory.

Altman suggests that literary genre theory has been historically under-theorized, or maybe theoretically malnourished. He begins by listing the unexamined assumptions that underlie Aristotle's Poetics which are transmitted intact down through the ages.

• Classical Genre Theory
• Aristotle - analyzes works of others to define genre by traits of the work (not effect produced, notes Altman)
  
• Horace - extends Aristotle's analysis into rules to writers
  

• Neoclassical Genre Theory
• Torquato Tasso
• Pierre Corneille
• Nicolas Boileau
• John Dryden
• Alexander Pope
• birth of tragicomedy
• birth of drama, then melodrama
• Nineteenth Century Genre Theory
• Romantic movement - mixing of genres
  
• Friedrich Schlegel - provided theoretical underpinnings to abolition of generic differences
• Stendahl - led the assault
  
• Victor Hugo - led the assault
• establishing new canon
• Ferdinand Brunetiére - brought in evolutionary model of genres
• Twentieth Century Genre Theory
• Benedetto Croce - rejected scientific model and attacked the notion of genre
• Before Croce, the genre theory debate was classic versus romantic; he changed it to genre vs. innovation
• René Wellek and Austin Warren
• genres can be based on inner form or outer form
  
• provided a reasoned theory for establishing the existence and exact borders of a genre
• possible to redraw the generic map
• criticized by Altman for failing to recognize the role of the critic or theorist (I don't know quite what he means by this)
• Northrup Frye
• extended Wellek and Warren
• freed genre definitions of a dependence on tradition
• Tzvetan Todorov
• structuralist
  
• strongly criticized and opposed Frye
• distinguishes between theoretical and historical genres
  
• furthers a move by Welleck and Warren and Frye, to critic-defined genres
• defines genre by effect produced instead of (Aristotlean) reliance on traits of the work
• E.D. Hirsch, Jr.
• genre in the reading process, including all reading (not just literary)
• all understanding starts with the identification of genre; the reader interprets based on the genre. If understanding of genre of a work changes, meaning changes.
• Altman seems worried about Hirsch and Todorov placing too much emphasis on the reader, describing it as a "Sorcerer's Apprentice" effect - using a magic word that unleashes power that can't be controlled. "Once labeled by writers and critics, genres might well fall into the hands of untutored readers or out-of-control audiences." I fail to see the risk.
  

On another note, I'm dying to know the current state of film genre theory, given changes brought about by desktop production and online publication. How does the field deal with the rapid emergence of new forms and the empowerment of "unsanctioned" filmmakers?

Also interesting that Altman studied film genres at the University of Iowa with fellow student Henry Jenkins.

Read for LMM

Stein & Albro 1997 Building complexity and coherence: Children's use of goal-structured knowledge in telling good stories. In M. Bamberg (Ed.), Narrative development: Six approaches (pp. 5-44). Mahweh, NJ: Erlbaum.

I'm interested in reading this to see how it relates to the composition process at the camp.

Wollman-Bonilla 2000, Teaching Science Writing to First Graders

Wollman-Bonilla, J. (2000). Teaching science writing to first graders: Genre learning and recontextualization. Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 35, no. 1.

Qualitative study of 4 first graders. Case studies.

1. Research Questions

1. To what extent can science journal writing by 1st graders be characterized as 'science writing'?
2. How do children appropriate an recontextualize the conventions of science writing?
   

2. Subjects, Setting, Context

Two classes of 1st grade students, suburban, majority middle class, majority white school. Classes used Family Message Journals, promoting two way communication between parents and students about classroom content.

3. Procedures (briefly)

Field notes from one hour weekly classroom participant-observations
Interviews with both teachers
Case studies on four students, including 4 sets of parents and all messages written from and to these 4 students
Researcher read and categorized writing into genres within scientific writing based on text structure and lexicogrammar.

4. Findings

Participants appropriated linguistic conventions of scientific texts flexibly and recontextualized genre elements to fit the family journal format. Kids could improvise within a genre to fit audience and situation.

5. Strengths and Weaknesses of Study

Limited sample size
Homogeneity of sample
Little data on teacher behaviors; primary focus on text alone

6. Implications

"The belief that personal ownership and self-expression must be foregrounded in teaching writing to children ignores the larger social context and functions for writing in society. Children, especially those from non-mainstream homes, must learn the mainstream genres of power to gain access to cultural capital in our society." p. 62
"Children become critically literate when they realize that texts are socially constructed, according to genre conventions, to serve specific social functions (Martin, 1998; Rothery, 1996)." p. 62

7. Other Comments
As it relates to genre-specific writing, the author identifies the consistency of the Western scientific community in the conventions of the genre of science writing (p. 36).
Scientific writing is intrinsic to the act of 'doing science'; can't teach science without teaching writing.
Theoretical background section will be especially useful.

Quoted section, from page 38:

Another strand of composition research, rooted in the Australian genre movement, has focused on empowering child writers by introducing them to socially valued genres. Within this school of thought, genres are defined as "social processes... for realizing purposes or goals through language," with language characterized by a particular test structure and lexicogrammar (Rothery, 1989, p. 221). Thus, textual and social perspectives on genre are complementary (Bazerman, 1998; Martin 1998). Genres' social functions are established through their structure and functional grammar (Bazerman, 1997, 1998; Cooper, 1999; Cope & Kalantzis, 1993; Halliday & Martin, 1993; Kamberelis, 1999; Kress, 1999; Martin, 1989). Knowing the right genre to use in a situation and knowing how to use it enhances children's power to communicate in society and participate in academic disciplines (Christie, 1989; Martin, 1989; Rothery, 1989, 1996).

Goes on to discuss differences between child-centered approaches, like whole language, and those who believe children must learn genre-specific writing so that they can gain access to discourses of power. Also discusses tension between the view that genre limits creativity and agency and the view that genre liberates and empowers writers. This whole section is great.

Cites Pappas 1991 for children asked to recreate genre-specific text.


Cites

• Cope and Kalantzis, 1993
• Kamberelis 1999
• Martin 1999
• Pappas 1991
• Pappas & Pettigrew 1998

Narrowing the focus

I like the direction that I'm seeing in Kamberelis 1999 and Wollman-Bonilla 2000 with regards to learning to write genre-specific texts to gain access to discourses of power. I'm interested in extending that thinking to video production.

For this lit review, I may turn my focus more toward this. Maybe my question should be limited to the relationship between genre in children's literature and genre within writing instruction. I'd like to relate it to genre in film, but that may be too ambitious for this semester.

I think for the outline that is due next week, I will try this narrower focus and then see how the semester progresses. This may end up being part of a lit review for another paper.

Okay... one more thing: The Wollman-Bonilla 2000 article relates to the Radio Lab episodes "Tell Me A Story" from 7/29/08 and "Making the Hippo Dance" from 9/9/08. In Wollman-Bonilla, they are teaching kids to approximate scientific discourse (objective tone, present tense verbs, precise language). In Radio Lab, they are talking to scientists about the need to make science accessible to the general public by making it more personal, less cold and removed, more subjective, more story-like. In both cases, the authors are advocating the importance of code-switching. Scientists need to able to relate stories to non-scientists. Non-scientists need to be able to adopt a scientific tone to gain access to science.

Still, Wollman-Bonilla is talking about adopting more than just the trappings of the genre; she talks about the inter-related nature of scientific writing and scientific thinking. Radio Lab isn't advocating an abandonment of orderly, systematic, scientific thinking; they are talking about relating scientific knowledge to non-scientists.

Notes from A's Class

Midterm framework

12 Identification

• Example - Consonant digraphs - two letters, one sound
• sh, ch
  

3-4 Discussion questions (Major topics so far)
Format - What, Why, and How

• Inter-relatedness of the Language Arts
• Reading Process - CLR
• Emergent Readers
• Word Recognition
• Fluency
• Vocabulary
  

Multiple choice
New material
Magnifying glasses - word detectives - theme
Kids physically manipulating paper letters
Oral cloze
Kids were having fun

With a worksheet, the goal is just to get it done. The kids aren't having fun. Attitude is a choice. What you choose to do will affect their attitudes. If you don't make learning fun, you won't enjoy teaching.

Read-Write-Think lesson on learning sight words. Semantic clues first, then graphophonic clues, picture of a watermelon. Review entire lesson.

Word recognition - Runny Babbit example
Use with 3rd or 4th grade.
Word recognition skills are learned, shifting to comprehension.

Fluency is the bridge between word recognition and comprehension. To get from word recognition to comprehension, you need to become fluent.

First part is reading with flow - correct pitch, juncture, and intonation.
Why important? I pause when I teach. I'm trying to get knowledge from my head to your head. It's more likely to get there if I speak with pitch, juncture, and intonation. Why important? It causes the words on the page to come alive in the reader's head. The opposite of fluency is word-by-word reading. When a child reads like that, the words are not going to his head. If the words don't come alive, there's no comprehension, no mental stimulation, no enjoyment. If you hate reading, your thoughts go to, 'how many pages do i have left?' We have to create this fluency bridge by grade 2, definitely grade 3.

To make sure kids do well on FCAT, schools work on comprehension. They should be checking fluency. Without fluency, you're checking on the other side of the bridge, they aren't there yet.

How do you make certain that the kids are fluent?


Echo reading (works on pitch, juncture, and intonation)
Very easy to see which aren't fluent. One thing to do is echo reading. One problem is word-by-word readers are grouped together, so all their models are non-fluent, and they weren't read to as kids. You become a good role model reader for them. May need to start by teaching them what an echo is.

5 Chinese Brothers, example of Echo reading. Kids enjoy imitating intonation, even accent, etc.

Model examples - mannequin, model home, HGTV

Start off with phrases. When they have the book in front of them, use entire sentences. Don't let memory become a part of it; make sure they have the text.

Speeches - from a teleprompter. That's reading. They have a speech coach. Gestures.

Buddy Reading -

• with friend
• self-select book
• self-select location
• make sure they aren't 2 non-fluent readers

Stop and Go Reading (working on juncture)
modeling stop and go reading
When you get to any type of punctuation, the next person starts reading. Kids have to focus and pay attention throughout.

With Round Robin reading, kids figure out which paragraph is theirs, then tune out. This is not a good strategy. You need to be a thinker. If it's a bad strategy, stop it. Don't use it.
Oral cloze
Let a student read and leave one word out, let the other students fill in the missing word.
When a reader begins to make more use of syntactic and semantic clues, they become more fluent.

Theme for each month
Logo contest. Logo goes on a bookmark. On the bookmark, put information for parents on how to build fluency, these methods.

NIM - neurological impress method Sit close behind, read aloud together, a little bit faster. Read into their right ear, theoretically impressing the left side of their brain.

Riddles and Jokes Telling a joke requires good delivery, good pitch, juncture, intonation. Have a theme

Vocabulary
Beethoven Lives Upstairs by Barbara Nichol
I told you never to try to teach them words that weren't already in their heads. So you need to put more words in their heads, so that you can teach them those words.
Period book. Timelines. Clothes they wore, vintage pictures. Writing with a feather.
This book is written in the form of letters from Christoph to his uncle, and responses. You could be teaching letter writing. Use compare/contrast on words that are not sight words. Most are. Once they get to the end of the letter, they want to hear the response.
As you go up in age, the words don't get that much more difficult. If they have the strategies, they can read these words.
Vocabulary - Learning the meaning of new words
Humerus - funny bone - acted out, made it come to life
Teaching and learning should make sense. If you can't comprehend,

In life, a good vocabulary helps you to accurately communicate with people. The best single indicator of someone's intelligence is their vocabulary. V. is important to being able to express yourself. Works in receptive and expressive. Works as a ceiling in many occupations. Can't get higher because they like the skills to communicate.

How do you teach vocabulary?
What doesn't work - get a list of words on Monday, look up the definition, write it in a sentence, test on Friday. If you had twenty words a week and did it for ten years, maybe you get 6000 words? You learned 20,000 words by a much better method and you probably don't remember learning them. By the time you were five, you learned those words by your parents talking to you. The best way to make sure that your students have healthy, robust, rich vocabularies? By purposely infusing these words into your speech with children. (Esoteric information is that which is known by only a few.) If you teach 3rd grade, go look at books written for 4th and 5th and 6th grade. Start using those words in your speech.

Enthusiastic Model

Teach morphemic analysis - get a list of Latin and Greek roots. Teach in the context of a word that they already know. When you're riding a bike, you put your feet on the PEDals. PED = feet. PEDestrian. BiPED is an animal that walks on 2 legs. If you want your camera to stay steady, use a triPOD. Cap on your head, CAPtion is the heading of a picture, CAPtain is the head of the team.

Wordplay - let them play with words. What do these words have in common? star, evil, peek, pals, now. Can you find any other words that can be read backwards?
palindromes - racecar
acronyms
Know what they are, give examples.
Wordplay makes them feel smart. They want to share and learn more.





The Reading Teacher's Book of Lists by Edward Fry
I did not say you stole my red bandana.

Shine & Roser, 1999

Shine, S. & Roser, N. (1999). The role of genre in preschoolers' response to picture books. Research in the Teaching of English, 34, 197-251.

This is qualitative study describing the ways in which a small group of preschoolers responded to picture books of different genres. It doesn't relate to my lit review because it does not involve writing. However some references may be helpful:

Devitt, 1993
Dyson, 1999 (Coach Bombay)
Kamberelis 1999
Martin, 1993a
Martin, 1993b
Miller, 1984
Pappas & Pettegrew, 1998
Russell, 1997 (this one looks especially promising)

Dyson, 1999

Dyson, A. (1999). Coach Bombay's Kids Learn to Write: Children's Appropriation of Media Material for School Literacy. Research in the Teaching of English, 33, 367-402.

Year-long ethnographic study of an urban first grade classroom.

I'd like to read this later.

Miles Davis on Knowledge and Performance

"For example, the great jazz trumpeter Miles Davis is known to have told his band members: 'You need to know your horn, know the chords, know all the tunes. Then you forget about all that and just play' (Sanjek 1990, p. 411)."


Kamberelis, 1999
Genre Development and Learning

I realize this is a lot of layers of quoting. I should track down the original source of the quote, especially given the vague wording of "known to have".

Still, great quote. I think it applies to what we teach at camp. They need to know the camera angles, shots, framing, the techniques of editing, lighting, audio. Then they need to forget about all that and tell a story.

Kamberelis 1999 - Genre development

Kamberelis, G. (1999). Genre development and learning: Children writing stories, science reports, and poems. Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 33, no. 4. pp. 403-
460. Urbana, IL: NCTE.

This study is an exploration of children's working knowledge of narrative, scientific, and poetic genres.

1. Research Questions

1. What differences in knowledge of genre are demonstrated in text production of K-2 students?

2. What do their texts and discourses about their texts reveal about how their knowledge of genre develops?

Theoretical frame: Bourdieu's sociology, social semiotics, critical language awareness, Sydney School text linguistics, socio-cultural-historical approaches to literacy

2. Subjects, Setting, Context

54 K-2 students

3. Procedures (briefly)

54 K-2 students wrote samples in each of the 3 genres and provided oral justifications for why their work was representative of the genre. Texts were coded for presence or absence of markers of each genre. He chose markers that were at the text or sentence (micro) level and markers that were at the document (macro) level. He chose markers that were easily differentiated between the genres being studied. He chose those genres because they are the most common studied and produced in elementary school.
Quantitative study. MANOVA, ANOVA

4. Findings

• More experience with narrative than the other genres.
• More experience with macro-level markers than micro-level markers

5. Strengths and Weaknesses of Study

Small sample size
homogeneity of sample
methods of analysis (K students read their pieces to him)
no random sampling
structure of experiment could influence performance of participants

6. Implications

• Kids develop "differentiated and flexible repertoires" of genres

Comparing findings with other studies

• tasks are a significant factor in how kids demonstrate genre knowledge
• tasks can scaffold genre knowledge

The author's implications for pedagogy involve warnings that an over-representation of narrative texts in kids' reading limits kids' ability to comprehend and to write in other genres. He suggests that children need exposure to a greater variety of genre texts. While these implications may be true, I don't think they are adequately supported by the data from this study.

7. Other Comments

Reread this study for firmer grounding of theoretical frames.

"Each genre possesses definite principles of selection, definite forms for seeing and conceptualizing reality, and a definite scope and depth of penetration... One might say that human consciousness possesses a series of inner genres for seeing and conceptualizing reality. A given consciousness is richer or poorer in genres, depending on its ideological environment...The process of seeing and conceptualizing reality must not be severed from the process of embodying it in the forms of a particular genre... Thus, the reality of the genre and the reality accessible to the genre are organically related."
Bakhtin & Medvedev, 1985, pp. 131-135, as quoted on p. 403.

Cites Luke, Focucault, Vygotsky

Other genre studies:
Hicks, 1990
Langer 1986
Newkirk, 1989
Pappas, 1993
Sowers, 1985
Zecker, 1996
Kroll, 1990
Scribner & Cole, 1981


Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays (V.W. McGee, Trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Berkenkotter, C. & Huckin, T. (1993). Rethinking genre from a sociocognitive perspective. Written Communication, 10, 475-509.

Chapman, M. (1994). The emergence of genres: Some findings from an examination of first grade writing. Written Communication, 11, 348-380.

Chapman, M. (1995). The sociocognitive construction of written genres in first grade. Research in the Teaching of English, 29, 164-194.

Derrida, J. (1980). The law of genre. Critical Inquiry, 7, 55-81.

These cited works also mention genre:
Coe 1994
Cope and Kalantzis, 1993
Fowler 1982
Freedman 1987
Freedman & Medway 1994a
Freedman & Medway 1994b
Hanks, 1987
Hicks 1990
Kamberelis, 1995a
Kamberelis & Bovino, 1999 in press
Kress, 1993
Pappas, 1993
Rosmarin 1985
Swales, 1990
Yates & Orlikowski 1992 * involves genre, communication, and media