Spring Break Reading

A common factor that I'm seeing in all the readings is that in order to improve literacy, we need to speak. It's not enough just to read and write...we need to be discussing and being verbal.

In Tompkins Chapter 5 it says, "Teachers nurture children's phonemic awareness through the language-rich environments they create in the classroom. As they sing songs, chant rhymes, read aloud word-play books, and play games, children have many opportunities to orally match, isolate, blend and substitute sounds and to segment words into sounds," (pg. 147). What this tells me is that phonemic awareness shows the students that speaking and reading go hand in hand. Phonemic awareness means that children who are "phonemically aware understand that spoken words are made up of sounds, and they can segment and blend sounds in spoken words." Phonemic awareness has to happen before phonics so children can learn to convert letters into sounds. Again, there's the hand in hand correlation with speaking and reading.

In Gibbons Chapter two, it says when a teacher uses IRE type of discussions, "...there is little opportunity for the learner's language to be stretched, for students to focus on how they are saying something, or for giving them practice in using the language for themselves," (pg. 17). I think I may have referred to this quote before but I think it's such an important point. We can't expect our ELLs to improve in their literary discussions (or any form of communication for that matter) if we just depend on IRE types of discussions, our ELL students will most likely remain stagnant as far as verbal communication goes.

Chapter 3 says that students were seen to go through 4 stages when learning science: 1. Doing and experiment, 2. Introducing key vocabulary, 3. Teacher-guided reporting and 4. Journal Writing. Stage 3 states again how important discussion can be to facilitate learning and writing ability. It says, "...the overall aim of the teacher-guided reporting was to extend children's linguistic resources and focus on aspects of the specific discourse of science. As the teacher expressed it to the child, 'Now we're trying to talk like scientists.' She also anticipated that the reporting stage would create a context for students to "rehearse" language structures that were closer to written discourse--that is, that were closer to the written end of the mode continuum," (pg. 45). To reiterate, this stage basically says that in order for students to get ideas on what to write about, they need to discuss it first. Through different types of discussions, and using vocabulary and language that scientists use, they are more likely to write scientific papers or journal entries. I believe that having discussions where the students can pretend like their real scientists is extremely beneficial for the students because it makes it fun and interesting! And because they're having fun with the discussion, they'll have more to write about.

The Salna and Raphael articles go hand in hand. They both emphasis how important discussions are to have in book clubs. Holding discussions after reading a story helps not only with comprehension but also getting along in a group (Salna, 47). The Raphael article calls this "community share." Either way, this is what we've been emphasizing in 402 this entire semester: the benefits of book discussion. What I love about book discussions is that it doesn't even seem like you're learning; you're just having a conversation. And through that conversation, the student is getting more of an in depth look of the story. Salna says, "My observations of their discussions showed me that they comprehended what they had read... I was pleased to see that so many of them could figure out a theme from their reading. I think this showed higher-level thinking."

In my placement, my CT knows that discussions are important in comprehending stories. However, what she does is weird to me. She has the kids discussing while she's reading the story. She stops at almost every sentence it seems like. Last week, she wanted to show us that her students knew how to have a discussion and it took her 30 minutes just to get through three pages. Are the kids even hearing what the story is about? It's just a weird concept to me to have a discussion while reading. There's so much going on. If it were me, I'd read first and have the kids soak it all in before they can talk about what they thought.