Reading Response # 10

As it says at the beginning of Chapter 7, it is definitely true that many teachers who teach intermediate orthography find a lot of material they are unfamiliar with. It becomes a learning experience for them as well as their students. Much of the writing and spelling skills covered in the rest of the reading are things that I would consider common knowledge for myself, but I am not sure I could accurately explain the various rules to another who had yet to master them. For example, the rules for changing base words when adding suffixes seem obvious to me, but I would never have thought to explain them as well as they are laid out in the book. I don't even really think about the rules; I just... spell things.
(And yes, I rely on spell-check far too often, or else I ask myself the question "Does it look right?")

Examining the consonant/vowel sequence of a word can certainly help students in the intermediate stage figure out how a word is spelled and how a prefix or suffix might be properly added to the word.
Even at the college and post-college level, keeping this knowledge in mind is important for those who are thinking of applying to graduate school. I looked at a list of common prefixes and suffixes and their meanings while I was studying for the GRE last year.

By staying familiar with the reasoning and the patterns that are behind the spelling and pronunciation of words in the English language, teachers can be better prepared to pass on this knowledge to their students.

Reading Response #9

As I read about young children's concepts of words in text, I thought of a question I often have when teaching. When I do my creative writing activities after school with kindergarteners, first and second graders, I often find myself helping kids to spell a lot (or all) of the words they want to write. At this age level, I typically modify the activities to be more drawing- or craft-based than writing-based. But I do like to ask them to at least write a few words describing what they've drawn or made.

My question is: Is it better for me to flat-out tell them when they ask me "How do you spell _____?" or do I give them hints? For example, a student might ask, "How do you spell horse?" Do I go "H-O-R-S-E" or do I say, "Well, it starts with a "huh" sound, so what letter do you think that is?"

Telling them to "sound out" a word often leads to very interesting results, because the letter sounds and letter names can be misleading for them as they are still learning the alphabetic principle. But I enjoy seeing kids' invented spellings of words, and seeing how they try to figure things out on their own. And I think that it helps them in the long run to work through things on their own rather than just be flat-out told what the correct spelling is.

As it says in the reading on page 209, "accept students' best spelling efforts but make it clear that they are also responsible for spelling word features they have formally studied, and that they should use a variety of strategies to spell words they do not know." It goes on to say that it's important to let them attempt to spell a new word on their own before asking for help.

So I have the answer to my question! I just have to remember these strategies next time I am in the classroom with first and second grade students, and try to be patient when there are multiple hands raised at the same time, all asking for help with spelling.

Reading Response #8

I can remember being a very small child looking through my collection of Disney videotapes and picking up our copy of "Aladdin". Pointing to the swirly-font logo that said "Disney", I said to my mom "That says 'Aladdin'." She corrected me gently. "No, that says 'Disney'. That's a D." I was very confused because I had never seen the letter D printed in such a strange way. I had assumed using context clues (the picture of Aladdin and the Genie on the video cover) that the word was the title of the movie.

My Alphabet Knowledge had not developed far enough yet for me to be able to distinguish letters across varying fonts. In Bear Ch 4, Figure 4.9 shows a number of letter B's, all with different fonts and styles.
Learning the visual features of all the letters of the alphabet and how they can vary depending on upper-case or lower-case, as well and their font or print style is one of the first important skills needed when children are in the emergent stage of learning how to read and learning about phonological awareness.

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When I worked with Reading Partners last spring, one of the things I noticed my tutees doing a lot was substitute words they did not know with similar ones they did know as they read aloud. As it says in DeVries, "children use their knowledge of the syntactic system as they read: They expect that the words they're reading have been strung together into sentences". One exercise I would do with the students was to have them read a short picture book aloud and I would time them. The goal was to have them get better and more confident over multiple readings of the same book. Knowing they were being timed, however, sometimes had a negative effect. I had one second grade boy who often could obviously grasp the meaning of a word but not the spoken pronunciation, so when being timed on his reading aloud, he would always substitute it for a synonym.
While engaged in Guided Reading, whenever he would substitute a word, I would gently correct him with the word that was printed. If he did it again on the next read-through, I would stop him and ask him to think about what word it was. By doing this, I was scaffolding to support him as he practiced reading.

Reading Response #7

The ability to communicate what you're thinking and feeling is such a fundamental aspect of humanity. It is important to help and be patient with children who struggle with communication disorders as they try to express themselves.
One of the things that really stood out to me in this chapter on communication disorders were the ways in which teachers can help students who have trouble communicating. Above all, patience is key. It is important to be encouraging and supportive. Speaking at a moderate pace, not interrupting the student when they are talking, and asking the right type of questions are all important. With questions, it is important to phrase them correctly. Questions with one word answers like yes or no do not give the student an opportunity to exercise using language. However, asking too many questions can also be overwhelming.
Teaching literacy requires a different approach as well. Sometimes the problem is that the student cannot decode what they have read (and translate the words on the page to spoken words). It is important for the teacher and special education staff to work together with the student to help them.
As someone who was typically a fast learning when it came to reading and writing, I remember sometimes getting frustrated when some of my peers would take a long time to read their assigned passage during class read-aloud time. I sometimes even got in trouble for reading ahead of the group and then not knowing where we were when it came time for me to read aloud. As a teacher, I will always have to be mindful and courteous of any potential students I may have with communication disabilities. With an emphasis on early intervention, by the time children reach middle school, the percentage of those with disabilities of this kind is very low. However, I still need to be prepared.

Reading Response #6

Phonological memory, rapid naming, and phonological awareness are important factors in determining a child's reading skills. Development in these areas during middle childhood is all based on memory and - as discussed with Ehri - building a bank or reserve of words you can identify at first sight. By age 8 or 9, you don't have to read the word "cat" and sound it out, you just know it's "cat". Phonological memory goes along with this in the sense that it is the ability to recall that "ph" makes an F sound or that two O's together make an "oo" sound. As children get older, they no longer have to think about this, they just remember it and can apply it to new words. Even if they've never seen the word "philosophy" before, they can at least know that it starts with an F sound.
Phonological awareness is the ability to identify rhymes, alliteration, etc... I noticed when I was a tutor with Reading Partners that many students who were slow readers in other areas were quick to pick up on rhyming words-- both written and said aloud. Seeing "call" and "ball" next to each other was easy for them to notice that both words ended in "-all" and they knew the two words rhymed. My students had more difficulty with phonological memory and rapid naming. Many were a grade or two behind in where their reading level should have been. They could identify very simple monosyllabic words easily, but had difficulty with blended sounds and longer words. Even now with the first and second grade students I teach creative writing to after school, I see many having difficulty with this.

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As an experiment, I decided to take the first paragraph from a paper I wrote in 8th grade and calculate the mean number of words per T-Unit. The following is an actual writing sample of mine from middle school, when I was about a month shy of turning 13 years old:

I want to be a graphic designer, fashion designer, or a webpage designer when I grow up. I like this job because I enjoy working on the computer, and I like to draw and design things all the time. This job also sounds like fun, and I think it pays well, too. If I can’t get that job, then my alternative is becoming a writer. However, graphic designer is my first choice.

 I counted 7 T-Units, and calculated the average to be about 10 words/T-Unit. I noticed that I used adverbial conjuncts and conjunctive links like "and", "however", "also", and "because". There is something about the static quality of the writing, however, that feels very immature - despite my use of these higher-level grammar tools. I was an avid reader in elementary and middle school, and I remember that I often would try to mimic the writing styles in the books I enjoyed.
All I can conclude from this analysis is that this sample is a fairly standard example of the literacy abilities of a middle school student.

Reading Response #4

Last spring, I worked at North Charleston Creative Arts Elementary, teaching creative writing to students in the after school program. I normally work with grades 1 through 5, but at NCCA, I was also assigned to the kindergarteners and pre-k students. It was a challenge to find creative writing activities that they could grasp and still have fun with but one of their favorites was when I read a picture book to them, "Library Mouse", and we did an activity based on the story afterwards.

Shared storybook experiences are a good way to help pre-schoolers and kindergarteners develop their language knowledge in a number of aspects. Phonologically, storybooks help to develop phonemic awareness, as many books for children use rhymes and alliteration to tell the story. Semantically, it helps to expand their vocabulary as they might hear words not often used in their daily lives, but the pictures in the book help to define the meaning for them. On a syntactic level, hearing a storybook read aloud can help them to develop and use more advanced sentence structures. In the realm of morphemic development, being read to helps children learn distinctions between tenses. Many storybooks use clever wordplay and repetition to emphasize the different forms that verbs can take. Pragmatically, simply by hearing the story and knowing that words in the book are used to tell what is happening, they begin to learn that written language can be used to communicate in many contexts.

Reading Response #3

I grew up in southeastern Connecticut, but this dialect quiz from The New York Times placed me in Yonkers, New York City, and Newark, New Jersey. I have never lived in these places, but it makes sense when you consider that my mother grew up in Queens and my father in New Jersey. As stated in Chapter 3, I picked up my parents' dialects because we all learn to speak "within our home and cultural settings" at a very early age.

In the classroom, at any level, formal or academic English is certainly the most appropriate. While it is good to embrace diversity, it is also important to emphasize that within a professional or school setting, Standard American English should be used. My rule of thumb when working with my elementary school students in North Charleston is that if they are simply talking to me, I will let their dialect (typically AAVE) slide. But if we are writing anything, I tend to correct their work to be in an academic register. In this way, I am encouraging them to become linguistically flexible and develop bidialectism.

In Chapter 4, it was interesting to learn just how early in a child's life they begin to process and develop language. Reading that infants as young as 4 days (!!!) seem to prefer hearing their "mother tongue" over other languages is fascinating. The significant strides babies and young children make through the different stages of language development is incredible. From the early phonological stage, where infants will babble and attempt to mimic conversation, to semantic and syntactic, where they begin to use invented words or speak in one-word sentences, up to the final pragmatic stage where they are beginning to use gestures and eye contact when speaking. Toddlers go through the same five stages, this time spurred along by their energy and inquisitiveness about the world around them. All of this occurs in (roughly) the first 3 years of a child's life. That's pretty amazing.

Reading Response #2

I understand that the textbook we are looking at for this class is about literacy development in very young children, and I understand that it is an important area of study, as literacy development does begin at a very early age-- some might argue that it begins almost as soon as one is born. However, as someone who is planning on becoming a middle grades teacher, it was an interesting exercise to try and connect with some of the suggestions about building School-Home Connections made in this chapter of the textbook.

By sixth or seventh grade, very few students have the same eagerness about school as younger children. They aren't proud of their locker's decorations or neatness, they don't want their parents showing up to school where they could embarrass them in front of their friends. The "tween" years are some of the most awkward and difficult years of a person's life, and to many of them, the last thing they want is their parents hanging around.

I still remember a time my mother chaperoned a school dance when I was in sixth grade. A song came on and she screamed "YEEE-HAW!" at the top of her voice. I was mortified. Parent involvement in middle school is a lot trickier than it is when their children are five years old.

One hopes that by the time students reach middle school, they already have had previous teachers who established learning communities through respect and frequent communication. By helping parents to establish good relationships with all their child's teachers early on, it can benefit the type of good relationship they have with middle and high school teachers.

At the middle grades level, the amount of parent involvement is fairly low. There are no opportunities for parents to come eat lunch with their child or read stories to the class. The amount of at-home learning activities goes way down because the parents might not have had as much schooling or might not remember the content from when they were in school. Communication between the teacher and parents, at least from my own memory, is limited to calls (and now emails as well) home when students are misbehaving or failing the class, newsletters about general school events such as field trips or special celebrations, and parent-teacher conferences.

These interactions are just as important at the middle school level as they are in early childhood. I believe that students at this age should still see that their parents are invested in meeting their educational needs. Regardless of whether a student is six years old or in sixth grade, parent involvement must be fostered for the benefit of everyone.

Reading Response #1

The one thing that struck me again and again as I read Chapter 2 of "Language Development" and the excerpt from Chapter 2 of "Essential Linguistics" was how much of the various methods of speaking to young children I already use in certain settings. Linguistic scaffolding, questioning... these are all methods I am very familiar with just from my experiences as a camp counsellor this past summer. It's fascinating that I never learned to speak to young children this way-- I just do it naturally. I think a lot of people do. Perhaps it's because we remember adults speaking this way to us when we were younger...

For eight weeks this past summer I worked as a day camp counsellor at a country club in Mt. Pleasant. I worked with children ages 4 to 10-- a big age range, I know! The majority of the kids were 5, 6, and 7 years old. I constantly used what Beverly Otto refers to as "child-directed speech" or CDS. I especially resorted to linguistic scaffolding when conversing with them. A typical conversation most days would go something like this:

Child: I went down the water slide all by myself!
Me: You did? Wow!
Child: I went on my stomach.
Me: Ooh, was it scary?
Child: No, it was fun! I'm gonna go again!
Me: You're gonna go again?!
Child: Yeah! Watch me this time!
Me: Ok, I'll be down here cheering you on.

 In "Essential Linguistics", the author describes two views on how children learn reading and writing. While reading, I found myself recalling the work I've done as a reading tutor with first through fourth graders. The program (Reading Partners-- it's associated with several elementary schools in the Charleston and North Charleston area, as well as nation-wide, I believe...) mixes a bit of both the Word Recognition View and the Sociopsycholinguistic View. With younger students and those who are only at a beginner level in reading, the lesson plan always begins with a tutor read-aloud portion where the student could pick a book for me to read to them. The lesson also includes a section on breaking new words into parts to help with sounding them out. During the student read-aloud part of the lesson, any unfamiliar words the encountered would go in their vocabulary journals for us to discuss the meaning of at the end. This blending of both views on learning, I think, worked very well. I saw the majority of my students make improvements even in the short 3 months I had with them.

I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to recall specific instances from my own teaching experiences (few as they are...) while reading. The concepts feel less daunting and more tangible when I have something concrete to connect them to.