Week 3: C&R Ch 2; S&H Ch 1; H &F Ch 1; DS&G Ch 1;

C&R Chapter 2

First let me say, I love this book. It’s easy to read and the research described relates directly to teachers and students. Chapter 2 is titled “How Writing Develops” and the authors point out right from the beginning that writing development depends on “multiple factors” including “cognitive, social, linguistic, cultural, and instructional” as well as solid oral language skills. These skills are important for handwriting and spelling development, as well as for composition. Handwriting Development: Coker and Ritchey point out two important factors in relation to handwriting- fluency and legibility. Fluency includes the ability to produce numbers, letter and punctuation marks easy and with speed.  Speed increases with each grade level. According to a study by Berninger and Rutberg from 1992, the average number of letters produced in the first 15 Seconds-Grade 1—4.6; Grade 2—6.8 and Grade 3—8.7. Legibility refers to the how easily a reader can read what was written.  The neater the writing speed can be affected. Girls tend to write more legibly and quickly than boys with growth continuing through 9^th grade. This section was very interesting to me; all my students currently receive OT services and handwriting is a daily skill incorporated into our work. I also completed the task on page 10—its similar to the Greek alphabet activity we did in class. I appreciate even more how hard my students work to get their written thoughts down. Spelling development: This is a critical skill for writing. An important study by Charles Read (1986—I think his last name is fitting!) coined the term “invented spelling” by analyzing spelling mistakes and his work led to developing different models of spelling development. There are three linguistic components which are vital to spelling: phonology (sounds), orthography (writing), and morphology (meaning). Stages of spelling development (Ehri, 1997) contain the prealphabetic stage, semiphonetic stage, full alphabetic and consolidated alphabetic. There seems to be some discussion about the stage models of spelling development. Some researchers don’t believe the stage models are fully accurate, it’s too simple, students don’t necessarily progress in a sequential order, and that children learn from using all types of spelling knowledge (phonological, orthographic, morphological). Composition development: Composition development is usually broken into two components—written product and the writing process.  The written product approach examines children’s writing over time. Children learn to write in different genres gradually, and in each genre skills develop differently. Hence, one student might be great at writing narratives but have difficulty with informational writing. I found it interesting that McCraw (2011) discovered that children had better oral opinions that written ones—which goes back to having a solid oral language foundation.

A few questions I had when reading this: What will be the impact of iPads on writing development? What areas of writing development do you think would be important for novice teachers to understand? Why? What stages of spelling development do you think your students are in- or do you have a conflicting idea of the stages of spelling development as some of the researchers stated? Why do we start with print and not cursive handwriting—is it based on a developmental theory?

S&H Chapter 1

Vocabulary is crucial to comprehension of both oral language and to make the connection to reading and writing. The simple view of reading is referenced by Gough and Tunmer (1986) as decoding with linguistic comprehension equals reading comprehension. Compared with the simple view of writing, by Juel, Grffith, and Gough (1986) states the process of encoding with ideation equals writing proficiency. Having a strong vocabulary breadth (surface-level knowledge) and depth (knowledge of different meaning of words) are important for both views. On page 7, once again, having a strong oral language background is paramount for vocabulary development—and children learn vocabulary in their home and build upon the knowledge of language. Contextualized language is used in conversations, and involves all the nuances involved when speaking to one another (intonation, gestures, facial expressions, listener feedback). Decontextualized language refers to academic language, and does not depend on communication between two to convey meaning. I was happy when the authors stated that to use context to figure out unknown words, a student needs knowledge of the words surrounding the unknown word (page 17). Vocabulary must be explicitly taught to increase the vocabulary knowledge of all students. A few questions I had when reading this: Is there research to identify what amount of time in a classroom is devoted contextualized language or decontextualized language? Can effective instruction merge the two types of language? What would you want a novice teacher to know about vocabulary? Why?

H&F Chapter 1

To have solid word recognition skills, a student needs to have foundational literacy skills.  Skilled readers automatically recognize words which enables processing of written language and helps reading comprehension. There are three essential components to word knowledge: phonological (sounds), orthographic (visual), and semantic (meaning). When these three areas are well formed, a child will be more likely to be a stronger reader. The exercise on page 7 in trying to spell unknown words was interesting—spelling patterns/chunking by syllables matters! Literacy instruction must be differentiated to be effective. There are three stages (not divided by grade) of word recognition, emergent, beginner, transitional and page 12 outlines the stages and the book will outline three areas based on the developmental model of what, when, and how to teach. The spelling-reading slant is interesting—meaning that children will be able to read words they are unable to spell. Most my students fit this category. A comprehensive approach or balanced literacy “diet” should include: reading for meaning at an independent or instructional reading level, writing for real purposes, exposed to rich oral language. To facilitate this, the book provides an “instructional word knowledge toolkit” based on four areas—reading words, writing words, manipulating words and transferring words. This will provide activities to help develop word recognition skills in your students. On page 19, I appreciate the authors reminding me that word knowledge/spelling knowledge takes lots of practice to become an independent skill. A few questions I have after reading this chapter: Is this where the 90-minute block of ELA instruction originated? I am curious as to where that time was determined to be most appropriate. Based on a theory? What do you think is important for novice teachers to know about word recognition skills? Why?

DS&G Chapter 1

Constrained theory defines a continuum of skills related to reading comprehension. Highly constrained skills are mastered quickly and stay constant once mastered. The book describes letter identification and phonics as highly constrained. Vocabulary comprehension is unconstrained as it is difficulty to identify as a skill that is completely mastered (I learn new words all the time!). There is a visual representation on page 2 which shows the continuum of constraint. One important idea I found reaffirming is that deliberate teaching of comprehension is crucial and should be taught even if some foundational literacy skills are not quite fully developed. Essential elements that should be considered in a comprehensive curriculum involves the reader at the center with other contextual features overlapping (page 6). Students should be involved in Discourse. Gee (1990) describes Discourse (not discourse as in language use) as a certain way of using language that represents a way of thinking, feeling valuing and identifies one as an insider within a specific social network. This definition gave me pause. As I read further, from my understanding, Discourse is used when talking about what one reads, writes, or discusses literary texts but not science or social studies text. I liked the teacher self-assessment and goal setting on page 9 and completed this form Questions as I was reading: How did you interpret the definition of Discourse? What idea did you find important for a novice teacher to know? Why?

Week 2 (Clay Chp. 3 & 8)

It’s clear after reading Chapter 3 in the Clay book that a lot of research still needs to be done on the writing process in the earliest stages of literacy learning. It’s surprising to me how much more research needs to be done in this area. Why would there be such an expansive difference between research on early reading processes and early writing processes? Although we spoke about it in class, it is still surprising to me that seemingly so little emphasis is placed on learning reading and writing together when there is evidence and research out there to back up the fact that these two learning processes happen concurrently. In class we discussed how since oral language takes years to develop, we cannot expect literacy happen overnight. Therefore it stuck out to me in the reading when Clay mentioned that reading and writing are more challenging than oral language. It not only requires oral language knowledge but also all of the things we talked about in class- visual information, linguistic information, background knowledge, word solving, knowledge of graphemes, etc. I noticed that Clay brought up the self-extending system numerous times throughout the text, or at least I think she did- she did not actually use that terminology. However she talked about being flexible and children expanding on what they have learned.

 When Clay mentioned that teachers really need to harness students previous knowledge and use that to their advantage to help that child in their individual literacy journey, my first thought was “that sounds wonderful but how feasible is that?”  I was thinking to myself that this sounded like an IEP (Individualized Education Plan). Especially with current education issues such as class size and budget, I can definitely see that being a really big challenge for teacher-although since I’m not a classroom teacher perhaps this is already being done more than I know. Clay of course acknowledges the fact that having a complex theory of literacy learning in the classroom is probably not feasible but seemed to maintain that it is the best way. That is a little frustrating to me (and I would think most teachers) - to be told the best way of doing something and then told… but you probably can’t utilize this theory in your classroom.  With that being said, I realize that this text is not directed at classroom instruction. In my opinion she did a good job of anticipating the readers questions and answering them, at least she certainly answered many of mine! I appreciated the fact that she mentioned that teachers are often mandated to follow strict curriculum and have their students take standardized testing that can be harmful to the learning of their students.                                                                     

              I was glad to be able to learn more about the Reading Recovery program (or a second chance to learn) and its origins in Chapter 8. I absolutely LOVED when she said on page 292, “…we should try to take a larger proportion of the learning disability population away by providing opportunities for a second chance to learn.” I thought the parable that followed about the mythical town and the dangerous drinking water was a good representation of the problems she presented.  I couldn’t agree more with her that there are quite a few students that are labeled as having a learning or reading disability who simply did not have proper instruction or curriculum. The reading specialist at my school and I have spoken many times about how it is more than a little frustrating when a student is removed from her instruction and placed in special education for a learning disability with reading as the major problem. Once the child is placed in special education, they are no longer eligible to see the reading specialist. I do not know if this is a state guideline or district guideline. The explanations of why and where the Reading Recovery program worked as well as the cautions one should consider when considering the program were informative and helpful as well.