Reading+and+Teaching+Readin

=Reading Instruction=

The first step in teaching reading is to ASSUME NOTHING. The more I consider the role of shame in reading failure, the more I realize it comes in part from people who assume someone else has learned something and when the fact that the person has NOT learned that thing, then the assumers express chagrin, which leads to shame and other bad feelings. Basically, not everyone gets all the instruction to which they have been exposed. Sometimes the instruction is not detailed enough. Sometimes the learner has something major going on in his or her personal life and is not able to pay attention. There are many reasons why a person may not have learned what we think they "ought" to have learned. So, we should not assume that students have learned all the information, techniques, skills, and so forth that contribute to being a fluent reader. If we can inquire about what the student knows instead of assuming that they know it and if we can articulate all the steps in whatever skill we are working on so that we don't expect someone to learn something by osmosis, then we will get a lot further in instruction. An example in the music world is that it is often assumed that students know that the higher a note is on a staff, the higher it is in pitch. That is because this fact does not often get explicitly taught. Yet misunderstanding something about this fact can lead a student into real difficulties with reading music. We need to think about what is involved with what we are asking students to do and be prepared to teach (without judgment) the things that students do not understand or know.

Another principle of reading instruction is that people own their own meaning processes. In other words, while you want students to be able to support their interpretations with textual evidence, the point of reading is not to come up with the answers to teachers' "guess what I'm thinking"-type questions. This is why Bloom's taxonomy is so important in reading instruction--because it gets beyond the informational aspect of reading and into the meaningful aspect of reading, which is more important. The meaningful aspect of reading is the motivational part of reading. If our instruction is based solely on reading a text and regurgitating the facts, students will view reading as a boring and stupid activity. Yet, when we teach to the reading test, this is what we tend to do. No wonder so many kids turn off to school.

Bloom's taxonomy: []

Here is a great resource for teaching reading: []

Another great general resource on reading: [] Lillie Pope wrote an interesting book: **Teach Anyone to Read: The No-Nonsense Guide.** New York: Elk Press, 2008, ISBN 978-1-60402-148-6

Using this book as a general guide, we are going to amass a number of web-based resources here for the purposes of teaching reading. The web constantly changes, so while all the links may not work when you access this, the ideas behind the links can be used for internet searches that will provide similar resources.

Background
Pope covers why reading is difficult. An excellent, lengthy explantion can be found in the videos on Children of the Code (http://childrenofthecode.org). In particular, pay attention to their explanations of the history of English as well as the problem with having 50 sounds and only 26 letters to represent them.

What behaviors do we see in people who are struggling to read? []

[|http://www.readingrockets.org/families/recognizesignshttp://school.familyeducation.com/standards/school-readiness/37493.html|http://www.minddisorders.com/Py-Z/Reading-disorder.html]

=Good teaching= In real estate, it's LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION.

In teaching, it's RELATIONSHIP, RELATIONSHIP, RELATIONSHIP.

You cannot teach someone you don't like or respect because teaching involves change and people don't take the risk of changing their thinking in the company of someone they don't trust.

=Adapted from Pope's 12 Reading Steps= The idea here is to divide up skills into categories. What you want to do is go from whole to part to whole. Reading as a whole act, the components of reading, but then how the components of reading fit into the whole act. In other words, we teach these skills in the context of what reading is all about.

Step 1: Recognizing words at sight
[] Sight word memory game: [] Sight words on pdf files that you can download and print out: []

Step 2: Sounding out unfamiliar words
[] This site has a list of phonics skills organized by grade at which they should be taught. Well, if someone hasn't learned these by whatever grade, that's not something we can do anything about. The utility of this list is that when someone is struggling to read, you can use this list to make sure they have all the phonics information they need. [] This has a step by step way of approaching the techniques of reading (phonics). Step 3: Analyzing parts of words Step 4: Encouraging the student to read a story Step 5: Developing comprehension Step 6: Encouraging writing skills Step 7: Study and comprehension skills Step 8: Writing process Step 9: Comprehension and vocabulary skills Step 10: Study skills

=The Reading Wars Redux= Below is a pdf called "Whole Language High Jinks" that has a sharp criticism of whole language as not being research-based and not being effective. In the interest of intellectual honesty we present this information because you ultimately have to make decisions for yourselves about how you teach reading and the role of research in your teaching practice. Ultimately you are responsible for the nature of reading instruction in your classroom and for your work with students on their reading.

Here, we want to consider what the author of Whole Language High Jinks has to say in light of our perspectives on reading and language use. At the same time, we want to suggest that there are some valuable things about what this author has to say, despite her sarcastic tone. We would like to suggest how those things might be used effectively in your teaching practice.

One idea behind whole language is that everyone's relationship to language is necessarily different. One of the people who influenced the development of the whole language philosophy was Sylvia Ashton Warner. In teaching Maori children in New Zealand, Warner discovered that the literature books provided in the classroom did not reflect the culture of the Maori children and were not particularly meaningful to them. She began having students dictate stories to her and she used the children's verbal language (without correcting their grammar or changing their idioms or dialect to academic English) as a basis for teaching reading. She asked each child each day what word he or she would like to read. If a child selected a word but then later was unable to read that word, she felt that word was not sufficiently meaningful for that child. She also put each child's collection of words in a pile on the floor and each child had to find his or her pile by recognizing the words in that pile.

Warner's method is parallel to how we learn spoken language. That is, we all learn to speak, but we all learn different words at first. Our vocabularies differ because our lives differ. Kids who live with a dog learn dog-related words earlier than kids who don't live with a dog. To a certain extent, it doesn't matter what words a kid learns first as long as the kid learns the principle of using verbal language to communicate with. And whole language as an approach to literacy extends this idea: students should be working with meaningful language in the process of learning to read and write.

The author of Whole Language High Jinks suggests that about forty percent of children struggle with some aspect of reading and for this reason, whole language instruction is not systematic enough or thorough enough to help all children learn to read.

It is true that some children's brains seem to be constructed for literacy purposes, and these children will learn to read easily. They can learn to read through the time-honored whole language processes of engaging them with interesting books, teaching metacognitive strategies, and using process writing.

Other children struggle in one or more areas. The utility of Whole Language High Jinks is that it outlines five areas of specific instruction that will help children who are not naturally strong at reading:

Phonemic awareness Phonics Reading fluency Vocabulary development Reading comprehension

The problems with the type of instruction this author supports is that it is often boring, delivered at the wrong time in a child's literacy development process, based on language that is not truly meaningful to the child, and fails to acknowledge the centrality of meaning to all literacy processes. The strengths, though, of this perspective is that there are lots of materials that can be used in a systematic way to work on specific skills that seem to be lacking in an individual child's reading and writing practice. In other words, we don't have to inflict intensive phonics instruction on everyone in the classroom, but we should provide intensive and systematic phonics instruction to children who will benefit from it.

Our goal as reading teachers is to help our students be able to use written text in a variety of ways for both enjoyment and learning. This means understanding various genres of text, being able to handle the various technical aspects of reading, developing a vocabulary suitable for academic reading, and so forth. Some kids can pick up this kind of learning by osmosis and they don't need direct instruction. Other kids need direct instruction in one or more areas. Our job is to discern which student needs what and to provide each student with what he or she needs in order to succeed.

The next step in considering what a particular student needs would be to use the trouble shooting process in this book in order to assess the student's reading and to develop an effective plan for addressing that student's needs. While this might have been an impossible challenge in mid-twentieth century classrooms, with technology and creativity on the teacher's part, teachers can provide appropriate instruction to all students.



=Music Education as an Analogy for Teaching Reading: DON'T DO IT THIS WAY!!=

Although I have no systematic collection of data on this, I do know that when people learn that I teach and play music, they very often say to me, "I used to play [fill in the blank] but I quit." Then they give various reasons: I had no talent, I wanted to play Fur Elise but my teacher wouldn't let me, my teacher was mean, my teacher told me I would never be any good. Right off the bat, we know that there are kids who have checked out of reading instruction and unfortunately some of their reasons are similar to those who quit playing music.

I believe that music has many parallels with language and therefore the teaching of music has those parallels as well. I also know from personal experience that music teaching has too often been everything from ineffective to downright abusive. I would like to look at some of those parallels and use that information as a basis for making suggestions about how we can effectively teach reading.

First of all, both reading and music are meaning-making activities. The reason it is more satisfying to play a piece by Bach than it is to play a Kreutzer etude or a three-octave scale is that real music has a progression of feelings associated with it and technical exercises don't. We play music primarily to communicate this meaning to our audience and when we do so well, we create a powerful connection between us as musicians and the people who are listening to us. There is no feeling like this feeling; it doesn't always happen with every performance but it happens often enough that we keep coming back for more.

Secondly, within both music and reading there are folks who primarily focus on technique, too often at the expense of meaning. In music these include music Nazis who insist on robotic perfection, but also the behaviorist teach I knew who put together ("composed" is too grand a word to describe this) little lines of "music" so she could introduce one skill at a time to students and they could practice that single skill. This is also the teacher who yelled at a kid for figuring out Mary Had a Little Lamb on his own.

Technique has a role in both music and reading. You cannot make that connection with the audience without good musical technique and you cannot learn from reading without the reading process becoming completely automatic. This means that musicians and readers have to practice and there are some things that it is helpful to learn systematically. Even now that I play bluegrass, I am thankful I learned all the scales. Singers who play guitar (with a capo) often put songs into weird keys, or keys that are more difficult on the violin. This would include most of the keys with flats. Anyway, no one can pull one over on me--I can play a break in Ab (four flats notwithstanding).

However, the reward of practicing scales and other exercises is the ability to play real music. The reward of dealing with phonics is the ability to read what one wants to read. And, it makes a lot more sense to have students at the beginning of learning to play exercises that are very clearly related to the piece they want to play rather than to saddle them with 12 different major scales, which used to be the way violin was taught.

osmosis technique role of teacher attitude