Reading and Workshop Discussion - Week 7

This weeks readings consisted of chapters 8, 10 and 11 from;

Winch, G., Ross Johnston, R., March, P., Ljungdahl, L. & Holliday, M. 2010, Literacy: Reading, Writing & Children’s Literature, 4^th edn, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, Australia.

Before the workshop we were required to use the ‘Chapter Highlights’ to organise our notes for each chapter by using these as headings. A brief summary is demonstrated below:

Chapter 8 – The Effective Teaching of Reading

What do effective teachers do?

• Effective teachers understand the needs and abilities of their students and have a repertoire of strategies to employ in meeting those needs. 
• Effective teachers have an excellent understanding of reading theory and how students learn to read, and are able to balance the student's reading programs which enables the teacher to individualize the learning. 
• Effective teachers of reading accept responsibility for their own professional learning. 
• Effective teachers are highly skilled professionals who have high expectations of their students and a belief that they will all learn to read effectively.    

 Teaching Strategies

• The main objective in utilizing teaching strategies is to help students progressively become independent learns where teacher support is reduced, with the teachers becoming more of a facilitator for the students learning as they:
• see and hear new skills being demonstrated and explained.
• try out the new skill for themselves with high levels of teacher scaffolding.
• attempt to use the skill independently with little teacher support.  

 Shared Reading 

• Is usually done in a whole-class or shared situation
• Shared or Modelled Reading shows students what effective readers do
• When the teacher is conducting a Shared Reading activity, they make explicit to the students the required knowledge and skills that the students must obtain in order to interpret a text constructed by someone else.

Guided Reading

• The teacher works with individual students or a small group of students using a text at their instructional reading level. 
• Teachers can use prompts for early readers which could be:
• What word would make sense here?
• Would that word sound right in this sentence?
• What does the word start with? Can you see any letters that you know?
• Read the part again. Get your mouth ready for the first sound.

Independent Reading

• Provides sustained, uninterrupted time when students can read to themselves to practise and consolidate the skills and knowledge the have gained in Shared and Guided Reading.
• Independent reading enables students to spend time enjoying reading and pursuing their interests. 
• Students who read frequently and widely make greater progress as readers then those who rarely read.

Reading aloud by the teacher

• Shows students that reading can be enjoyable.
• Models to students how effective readers read.

Group and Independent Activities

• Allowing for students to employ their reading techniques and abilities in a group activity allows for students to practice their skills in a new and innovative way so that the new learning will become will become truly their own. 
• Features of good group and individual activities include those that:
• are at an appropriate level for each student in the class
• require higher-order thinking and exploration.

  

Chapter 10 – Learning to Read: The Early School Years

 

The emergent reader: An example with Shared Reading

• The first year of school is vital for every child.
• There is no one way to teach a child to read; speaking and writing are both part of the literacy spectrum.
• Reading and writing operate in social and cultural context, with each child having different literacy and learning needs. Systematic teaching is vital for all.
• a balanced approach to teaching reading meets different learning needs.
• It is important to build up semantic knowledge about a topic before teaching.

The developing reader: An example with Guided Reading

• Build up prior knowledge about the topic to act as a scaffold before reading the book.
• The title page should receive special attention
• Students call on mulitple cues to read with meaning.
• Each student has an opportunity to read.
• Various techniques are employed to overcome difficulties at graphophonic, grammatical and semantic levels.
• For student assessment a Guided Reading Record Sheet is kept for each student. 

The developing reader: An example with Independent Reading

• Students use their own initiative during Independent Reading.
• The chosen books must be interesting and at the correct level of difficulty.
• Students record their own progress.
• Independent Reading must be carefully monitored.
• Post-reading activities reinforce the experience and provide valuable information.
• Books across a range of genres should be made available and arranged in levels.

Chapter 11 – Learning to Read: The Primary School Years

   

Developing Skills and Knowledge: Years 3 and 4

• Semantic Knowledge allows students to access the meanings of a range of more difficult texts such as factual texts.
• Texts encountered in the primary years have more complex grammatical structures.
• Understanding grammatical structures of texts helps readers predict what might come next.   

Teaching reading in a Year 3 class: An example with Guided Reading

• A classroom needs to be weel organised for literacy learning to take place.
• Students work individually, in pairs and small groups and as a class.
• Reading activities are designed to further develop understanding of the shared text.

   Developing Skills and Knowledge: Years 5 and 6

• Semantic Knowledge for these years includes the technical vocabulary necessary for learning in all subject areas.
• New grammatical structures found in both literary and factual texts should be taught as part of the reading program.
• Students use graphophonic knowledge to work out new words in all learning areas.

   Developing the four reader roles

• Readers are code breakers when they work to decode the text.
• Developing skills in using different reader practices or roles enables readers to interact more fully with a text.
• Readers are text-participants when they work to understand the meanings of the text.

       Teaching Strategies

• Explicit teaching shows students how to understand the purpose and audience of different types of texts.
• Students may use a variety of different technologies to learn, such as Video, CD-ROM.
• The teacher can use prompts which help students to overcome new and unknown words by asking them to draw upon their grammatical knowledge.    

Discussion Summary: 

During this weeks workshop we discussed our pre-workshop tasks which were to bring in two cereal boxes, and two of the same newspaper articles that were written by different authors. We began by critiquing and analyzing the cereal boxes and noticed that the advertising on these boxes were targeted towards a younger audience. When discussing the newspaper articles we noticed that different perspectives of each author regarding the same topic they had both written about. With one particular newspaper article, one author produced their article with a subjective view that we considered to be biased, while the other author who wrote an article on the same topic produced factual content and was obviously remaining distant from his own opinion which gave off an objective view through this authors article.

The remaining part of the workshop was dedicated to review what we had covered in the readings about Shared and Guided Reading. We reviewed a large picture book, and analyzed the aspects of it that need to be taught to children in order from the to be able to navigate through the books for their own independent reading. The final part of our workshop was spent looking at Scanning and Skimming, where we were given a short article to read through and employ these skills to skim through the article to get a grasp of the main ideas, and then to scan for specific words and terms.