But I'm Not a Reading Teacher

Strategies for Literacy Instruction in the Content Areas

Amy Benjamin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317930587
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book shows content area teachers in middle and high schools how to boost student achievement by including lessons and strategies which focus on students' reading comprehension without detracting from content area focus. These mini-lessons and strategies are research-based and address the specific literacy challenges of each particular subject area (social studies, mathematics, science, etc.). The author has provided a large number of reading examples from texts, sample tests and assessments, and actual mini-lessons, their content areas identified by marginal tabs.

1

Learning and Reading

I’ve grounded the teaching suggestions in this book in certain pedagogical principles that are supported by research (Jensen, Caine and Caine, Fogarty) and that I can personally endorse based on more than three decades as an English teacher and literacy coach.

First, we learn:

♦ Information in layers, over time

♦ Information best when we organize it into patterns

♦ Information best when we gather it into clusters

♦ Through our senses

♦ Through socialization

♦ Through prompts, cues, and associations

Second, learning is:

♦ Natural. Reading is artificial. To learn through reading, our energies have to be focused on comprehension, not the artificial act of decoding, which has to be automatic.

♦ Habitual. We tend to gravitate toward certain modes of receiving, processing, and remembering information.

♦ Cumulative. The more we know, the more we are capable of learning. The more sophisticated learning becomes, the more it depends on prior knowledge.

All of the research about durable learning supports these tent-post learning principles. Here is a brief explanation of them and how they relate specifically to reading comprehension.

We learn in layers, over time. What this means is that we learn by connecting new knowledge into an existing structure of what we can call old knowledge. We do not learn a lot of information all at once. The mind is not like a computer, accepting a CD full of information. The mind learns in layers, in a manner not unlike the way paint is applied to wood: The wood soaks up the first coat, and then is ready to accept more coats. This is why we have the metaphor of the learning curve.

We learn in patterns. Educational researchers Renate Nummela Caine and Geoffrey Caine assert that learning in patterns is a key principle in how the brain makes sense of information. Conversely, the brain, resisting chaos and meaninglessness, actively imposes order by creating patterns: “(the brain) resists having meaninglessness imposed on it. Really effective education must give learners an opportunity to formulate their own patterns of understanding.” I see two kinds of instructional implications of the pattern-learning principle that relate to reading comprehension. The first is the use of graphic organizers to make sense of text, to turn it into a pattern. The second, used along with the first, is that text itself forms patterns: narrative, description, classification, cause and effect, comparison-contrast, definition, exemplification, and process analysis. As we read, we can improve comprehension by perceiving that the text is written primarily in one of these patterns. We can then use an appropriate graphic organizer to see how the pattern holds the meaning.

We learn through our senses. Information that has come in through the senses tends to be memorable. Information that has come in through more than one sense tends to be even more memorable. Instructional implications of the sensory learning principle as it relates to reading comprehension involve creating sensory input, encouraging the imagining of sensory input during reading, and limiting extraneous sensory input during reading. We can accomplish the first by reading aloud, providing visuals and encouraging the use of existing visuals in the text as a reading comprehension aid, using color-coding as a memory aid. We should remind readers to visualize vividly as they read and to draw pictures or graphic organizers that represent what was read. We should instill the meaning-making habit of asking questions during reading that evoke sensory input: What did you see in the text? What did you hear? What textures did you feel? And, don’t overlook the importance of instilling the habit of reading without extraneous noise and distractions whenever possible.

We learn through socialization. How many times have you come to understand something by talking it through with someone else? Socialization is a powerful, authentic learning force, often overlooked as a reading comprehension aid because reading is thought of as a solitary process. Reading itself can be solitary, but making meaning out of reading need not be. The instructional implications of socializing reading comprehension are that we can set up reading partnerships where readers question each other to achieve comprehension. Readers can work on a post-reading activity that gives them the opportunity to mesh minds to fill in gaps in understanding. And working with a reading partner is motivational: Someone else is depending on you to read and help them understand.

We learn through prompts, cues, and association. Think about what happens when you remind yourself of something. What triggered the reminder? It happens all the time: A stimulus sets off a chain that leads you straight to something else. That is how the cuing system of the brain works. Because the brain has its own efficient cuing mechanism, we need to harness its energy as a reading comprehension tool. Educational psychologists speak of chunking as the way in which the mind can treat a cluster of related information as if it were a unit. The ability to chunk information is extremely important for effective learning management. The short-term memory is capable of holding only a handful of unrelated bits of information, as you know it you’ve ever tried to remember a phone number for more than a few seconds. But when you put the numbers into clusters, chunking them, you can hold more information in short-term memory, and later in long-term memory, should you decide to file that phone number in your mental directory. The instructional implication for reading comprehension is that we need to instill the habit of reading phrases as units of meaning, rather than reading single words. Single word reading is very inefficient, and it characterizes the way deficit readers approach text.

Learning is natural. Reading is artificial. The brain knows how to learn, wants to learn, loves to learn. Learning through language is perhaps the most natural form of learning of all, certainly the most human. That textbook is full of information that will help the world seem more satisfying to its readers. So if learning is so natural, why do so many of our students resist it so much, especially when the learning is locked up in text? Reading is artificial. It is an abstract, symbolic system having all kinds of encoded signals that don’t exist in speech (punctuation, spelling, many non–speech-like syntactical arrangements of words). Not only that, but a reader can’t be doing what humans naturally want to do: jump around, let our minds run free, watch television, eat, and so on. To read and actually get something out of it, the reader has to turn his or her brain over to an unseen author and allow the message of that offer, a message offered in code, to become its primary focus, forsaking all other thoughts that would lead the brain elsewhere. Not only that, but simultaneously, the reader must be aware of lapses and get back on track, usually by rereading. That any reading at all ever gets done is a wonder when you consider what the body and brain would really rather be doing! Fortunately, learning, I remind you, is natural, and I think it’s safe to say that everybody would like to become better readers, especially if they could do so with minimal effort, and if being better readers meant also being faster readers. The instructional implication of the natural tension that exists between wanting to learn and wanting to read is that these two fighting forces must cozy up to each other. The I Want to Learn Brain must break down the resistance of the I Don’t Want to Read Brain. One way for this to happen is that we must understand the abstract nature of reading and then make the reading experience more concrete. This happens through visualization. When you read the words “the apple,” you are seeing ink, not an apple. So you must visualize the apple, concretize the abstract.

Learning is habitual. The more we practice a process, the more its steps become automatic. This happy circumstance means that consistency and persistence in teaching the reading strategies will pay off. Educational psychologists distinguish two kinds of learning: memory learning and habit learning. The former is about amassing facts and figures; the latter is about developing behaviors that become ingrained after continual reinforcement. Students who learn that reading is a process with pre-, during, and post-reading steps will eventually internalize that process, giving themselves what they need to maximize comprehension. But, that won’t happen by being told what to do alone: They need guided practice and monitored opportunities to use the strategies.

Learning is cumulative. Reading comprehension depends heavily on prior knowledge about the subject. It may seem too obvious to deserve mention, but the more we know about a subject, the easier it is to read new information about it. This is not only because of the principle that we learn in layers, but also because every subject has its own language and much of this language is metaphor, jargon, allusion, abbreviations, and acronyms. Learning is like investment capital: The more learning (wealth) you have, the more you can use that knowledge (wealth) to create more. Pick up any bit of text, and you’ll see how much prior knowledge, general and domain-specific, is necessary to read it for meaning. Reading for meaning goes way beyond knowing what the individual words mean: What do the words mean as used in that context? The instructional implication is that any kind of reading is good reading if it contributes to the reader’s knowledge base and increases the reader’s stamina for reading.

Problem-solvers connect the dots. What all of these learning principles have been leading up to is that problem-solvers make meaning by putting together what they already know with new information. We know that we make sense of the world by connecting the dots. What we need to know for our students’ sakes is that we need a lot of dots! Where do we get them? We get dots from our education, experience, cultural activities, and social interactions. Dots accumulate language. Language is the stuff of reading. Anytime a student leaves your classroom knowing something about this great big world of ours, you have made that student more capable of being a great reader!

Anatomy of a Definition of Reading

Here is how the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) defines reading:

“Reading is a complex, purposeful, social and cognitive process in which readers simultaneously use their knowledge of spoken and written language, their knowledge of the topic of the text, and their knowledge of their culture to construct meaning. Reading is not a technical skill acquired once and for all in the primary grades, but rather a developmental process. A reader’s competence continues to grow through engagement with various types of texts and wide reading for various purposes over a lifetime” (NCTE, 2006).

Let’s unpack this important conceptual definition to see its instructional implications. First, let’s look at those four adjectives that inform our definition of what reading (comprehension) is: complex, purposeful, social, and cognitive.

Complex process: That reading is a complex process implies that many strategies must be folded into it and that it (comprehension) results from multiple paths to the brain. The complexity of the reading process refers also to the fact that comprehension results from the reader’s emotions, cognition, motivation, ambient physical conditions (lighting, noise, visuals, comfort), and experience.

Purposeful process: That reading is a purposeful process implies that the reader, like a hunter, should be knowing what to look for and, accordingly, should be employing the strategies appropriate for that particular kind of hunting. What we find depends to a great extent on what we’ve looked for.

Social process: We usually think of reading as a solitary process, but in two ways, reading is a social process. It may seem too obvious to need to be stated, but reading is a communicative process in which the writer has reached out to the reader. But, the reader and writer are unknown to each other personally. Each has to imagine the intents and needs of the other, just as I am now writing this for you, but I don’t know you, and you have no idea that I am writing this (for you) as I do so. But, there’s communication between us right now nevertheless. We’ve found each other! If you think that your students don’t need to be made aware of the writer-reader connection, if you think that they already understand that an actual person wrote their reading material, consider how they depersonalize the writer, referring to the writer as they. It may seem like a small point, but that use of the vague, nameless they reveals how disconnected the readers are from the human connection that is supposed to happen between writer and reader.

Cognitive process: Reading comprehension requires all lights on in the cognitive domain: mental representation, information, memory, language, attention. As a cognitive process, reading is not just decoding. It is decoding as a means of coming to know. We come to know when we add new information to existing information. Doing so is exactly what we mean by cognitive process.

Now, let’s look at the part of the definition that talks about reading holistically.

Readers simultaneously use their knowledge of spoken and written language: Written language derives from speech, but it is not exactly the same. Written language has features, such as punctuation and paragraphing, that stand in for the pauses and inflections that spoken language has. The reader must learn to animate written language by turning on the mental reading voice. Deficit readers may not even know about the reading voice, without which they cannot connect text to human communication.

Knowledge of the topic of the text and their knowledge of their culture: The importance of prior knowledge about text and culture as a prerequisite to reading comprehension cannot be overstated. Here’s an example from E. D. Hirsch, author of The Knowledge Deficit (Houghton Mifflin, 2006, quoted in American Educator, Spring 2006). The sentence “Jones sacrificed and knocked in a run,” easily comprehensible to most Americans, would be far less comprehensible to a British reader. Hirsch explains that to comprehend this sentence, the reader would have to place it in the context of baseball, interpreting all of the key words (sacrificed, knocked in, run) in that context. If you didn’t have the cultural capital about baseball, your ability to decode that sentence would not be sufficient to unlock its meaning. This is why building cultural capital, summoning prior knowledge, and being exposed to a variety of language experiences—formal and informal, academic and social—are essential for reading comprehension.

I think reading for comprehension is akin to the way threads engage fabric on a sewing machine: When you use a sewing machine, you have two threads, one upper and one lower. The two threads engage at the point of the fabric, and that’s how machine sewing happens. But sometimes, the lower thread does not engage; maybe the bobbin is empty. You go along for several stitches, thinking that something useful is happening, only to realize that the upper thread has not been attaching to anything at all. The thread comes right up when you tug it slightly. It’s just been looking and sounding like sewing has been happening. This non-sewing process reminds me of the non-reading of running one’s eyes over text when the brain is in fact disengaged. The following key principles of reading comprehension explain more about engagement in text: what it means and how it happens.

Key Principles of Reading Comprehension

In this book, we’re talking about reading comprehension, not decoding. By reading comprehension, we mean the ability to receive and process the writer’s intended message: in other words, reading for communication between the reader and the absent writer.

Some students at the secondary level have not learned to decode. They can’t translate the symbols on the page to make words. This inability can persist into secondary schooling for several reasons such as dyslexia, poor eyesi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgments
• Meet the Author
• How to Use This book
• Contents
• I About Academic Reading
• 1 Learning and Reading
• 2 Scaffolding Vocabulary Instruction
• 3 Standardized Tests and Reading Comprehension
• II Academic Genres
• 4 Academic Genres: Subject Area Reading
• III The Strategies
• Using the Strategies
• 5 The Before-Reading Strategies
• 6 The During Strategies
• 7 After-Reading Strategy: Taking Ownership Through Wrap-Up Activities
• IV Schoolwide Programs
• 8 What Works? What Doesn’t?
• Conclusion
• References