The Literacy Cookbook

A Practical Guide to Effective Reading, Writing, Speaking, and Listening Instruction

Sarah Tantillo

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118331538
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Elementary Education

Proven methods for teaching reading comprehension to all students

The Literacy Cookbook is filled with classroom-tested techniques for teaching reading comprehension to even the most hard-to-reach students. The book offers a review of approaches that are targeted for teaching reading, writing, speaking and listening skills. The book also includes information on how to connect reading, writing, and test prep.

• Contains accessible and easy-to-adopt recipes for strengthening comprehension, reading, writing, and oral fluency.
  
• Terrific resources are ready for download on the companion website.
  
• The materials in this book are aligned with the English Language Arts Common Core Standards

The website includes an ELA Common Core Tracking Sheet, a handy resource when writing or evaluating curriculum.

Part One

Basic Ingredients

If you read normal (food-based) cookbooks, you've probably noticed how much emphasis the authors place on using high-quality ingredients. One recommendation you see all the time is, “Always cook with wine you would be willing to drink.” Although this may say something about chefs' drinking habits, the point is well taken: what you put into a meal will determine what you get out of it. The same is true for classroom instruction.

Throughout much of my teaching career, while I had a clear sense of how important it was to cook with good wine, I knew relatively little about the comprehension process or how to teach the skills involved in reading, writing, speaking, and listening. I muddled through and learned more as I went, but in retrospect I am sure I missed many opportunities to deliver lessons that were as delicious or effective as they could have been.

Some people think that excellent teachers are simply born that way. I believe they're wrong. While some individuals might possess wonderful instincts or charisma, every great teacher I've met has demonstrated a firm grasp of the content and skills that students need in order to succeed, and as my dad would say, these things are “fact-sensitive.” In other words, you can learn them. You can master them. You can become great, too. The BASIC INGREDIENTS chapters will help you with that.

Chapter One

Comprehension

What Is Comprehension, and Why Is It Important?

In When Kids Can't Read: What Teachers Can Do, Kylene Beers calls comprehension “both a product and a process,”¹ which makes it a little tricky. You go through the process and arrive at a destination or create something. The possibilities for getting stuck or creating something imperfect are endless. But if we know how the process works, we can avoid obstacles (or overcome them), end up somewhere rewarding, and create something powerful.

Reading, writing, and oral fluency are the purest and most common expressions of comprehension. When students read, write, or speak, they are demonstrating how much they comprehend. Comprehension and literacy are thus inextricably intertwined. This explains why the Achievement Gap is, in fact, a literacy gap. Students who struggle to comprehend also struggle to perform in every academic area: they fail to absorb information, fail to solve problems, and fail to express ideas effectively. So here's the bottom line: no matter what grade or subject you teach, you need to understand the comprehension process and you need to teach literacy.

My Theory of Comprehension

I know I'm not the first person to theorize about reading comprehension. Plenty of people have written on this topic. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to share my own theory. I think of it as “Climbing the Comprehension Process Stairs.”

Let me explain this more fully. And please note: this is a theory of comprehension in general, not just reading comprehension. It applies to listening, seeing, smelling, touching—everything you do in order to try to understand. So, you encounter a “text,” and that “text” could be a picture, a song, a sign, a book, or even the defense on a basketball court.

As you approach the “text,” the first thing you do—a thing you will repeatedly do—is access your prior knowledge or skills that relate to this “text.” As illustrated in the Comprehension Process Stairs, your prior knowledge and skills might include previous experiences, the context, texts previously read or academic content knowledge, and knowledge of conventions such as genre, grammar, and syntax. You use your prior knowledge and skills first to orient yourself to the “text,” then in your initial attempt to “paraphrase” it. In other words, you begin to use what you know to put the “text” into your own words.

If the text involves words, you will need to unpack the vocabulary, unpack the grammar and syntax, and draw inferences from idioms. (More on para-phrasing in a moment.)

• If the “text” is a basketball game and you're a point guard dribbling up-court, you would use your prior knowledge of defenses (countless hours of practice) to observe how the defense is setting up and think, “Oh, they're playing man-to-man.”
• If you're reading a story and it says, “The man fell down,” you would use your prior knowledge of vocabulary to paraphrase that to “He collapsed.” PS: Some people think paraphrasing means “simplifying.” I prefer to think of it as “putting it in your own words, using the strongest vocabulary possible.”

Once you've paraphrased this bit of “text,” you immediately ask questions about it. These questions are also based on your prior knowledge and skills. Some people do this so quickly that they don't even notice they've done it. By contrast, many students don't do it very well, if at all. Why? If you lack prior knowledge and skills relating to the “text,” you don't know what to ask. Also, if you struggle to paraphrase the text (if it's figuratively or literally Greek to you), it will be difficult to generate questions other than “What does that mean?” Even if you are able to paraphrase the text, if you don't have frequent practice in explaining things logically, you might not think of the most logical questions to ask. When people wring their hands about how “kids can't think critically,” part of the problem is that students lack background knowledge and part is that they lack experience in questioning and explaining.

• In the case of our point guard, the most logical question would be, “Which offensive play should I call?”
• In the case of the Falling Man, you would wonder, “Why did he collapse?”

The next step—again, often done at lightning speed—is to use your prior knowledge and skills in an attempt to answer the question. If you've seen a text like this before or are highly familiar with the situation or content, the answer might be limited or obvious. Or it might require some reasoning as you sort through what you know. The result of this thinking (also called “extended reasoning”) is an inference.

• The point guard might think, “Well, we only have three different offensive plays to use against a man-to-man defense, and the first one didn't work, so let me call our second play and see if we score.”
• In wondering why the Falling Man collapsed, I would quickly recall my various experiences with falling: on basketball courts (of course), doing aikido (a martial art I tried for a few months in which the sensei told me I was “good at falling”—no doubt from basketball), falling down a flight of stairs, seeing a man have a seizure at a football game, and tripping over my sister's roller skates in our bedroom. After I generated these memories, I would reason that the “text” didn't say anything about the guy tripping over anything, and I know that healthy people don't usually fall down for no reason, so I would draw the conclusion that “he must have been sick.”

The inference that we draw takes the form of an explanation, and it becomes an assumption that we hold onto—that is, part of our “prior” knowledge—until it is challenged by new information. PS: In the next section, we'll look at how inferences and explanations are two sides of the same coin.

• In the game, if the play worked,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Jossey-Bass Teacher
• Title Page
• Copyright
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One: Basic Ingredients
• Part Two: Entrées
• Part Three: Desserts
• Index