The Challenge

Teaching and Learning with Text, APS

The challenge.

To gain fluency, it is absolutely essential that students read a lot and every day.

Texts are an indispensable tools for learning academic content. Yet, for many students, reading content area text can be like reading a foreign language. The heavy vocabulary load, the complexity of the writing, and the visual aids that accompany the text can be daunting. As a result, students avoid reading. They become passive and rely on the teacher to interpret the content of the text for them. Consequently, they never develop the skills that are needed to be independent learners, making their own connections and wrestling with the idea to construct their own understanding.

Teachers must take up the challenge to bring learners and text together. They must teach students the reading skills and strategies to learn the text. Reading in this context becomes a tool to learn and think. When students have the inner resources and the experience to interact and learn with the text, they become engaged learners. Responsibility for learning than shifts from the teacher to the student.

Reading content area text is a task that requires much more than basic literacy skills developed in the early Elementary grades. It requires that students have specific knowledge, skills, and strategies. They must be able to analyze long and complicated words found in content text so that they can identify them and get clues about their meaning. In order to have a good comprehension, students must develop a strong vocabulary base, and a wide range of background knowledge, in both General and specific to a discipline.

Students must also “work smart”, looking for structures within the text to extract information. They need to have strategies that help them monitor and comprehend what they read. In addition they must develop the oral and written language skills necessary to learn, communicate, and collaborate.

What students need to be able to do:

Comprehension

1. Activate prior knowledge of a particular topic or genre to access and understand text.

2. Activate strategies and resources that will enhance comprehension of the text.

3. Predict before, during, and after reading.

4. Set goals and purposes for reading.

5. Revise goals and purposes during reading.

6. Monitor comprehension during reading by

a. Asking clarifying questions,

b. Using problem solving strategy/techniques (i.e. rereading, reading ahead, looking at external text aids such as photos and illustrations.

7. Clarify knowledge of new words and make connections among words and key concepts.

8. Generate questions before, during, and after reading.

9. Determine likely source(s) of information to answer questions.

10. Summarize - capture and paraphrase the key ideas.

11. Use graphic organizers to eat comprehension.

12. Use note-taking to Aid comprehension.

13. Respond to text by

a. discussing personal reactions to reading,

b. challenging, supporting, and questioning the text, the author, or others responses to the same reading.

Vocabulary:

Indirect and Direct

1. Construct graphic organizers to discuss vocabulary, clarify knowledge of new words, and make connections among words and key concepts.

2. Use structural analysis to determine the meaning of unknown words. (i.e., inflections, roots, prefixes, suffixes conjugates).

3. Use clues authors embedded in text to discover word meanings (i.e., in the sentence, in illustrations, charts, graphs, and photographs).

4. Use listening, speaking, and writing to reinforce understanding the vocabulary words.

5. Use resources to verify educated guesses based on context or word structure (i.e., technology, dictionary, other texts, thesaurus).

Text structures.

External text structures that facilitate reading

1. Use organizational aids: Table of Contents, Printed Vocabulary, Website Calendar

2. Used typographical or format clues in text: italics, bold face, different color print, footnotes and blank spaces.

3. Use comprehension aids: introductory or summary statements, headings, subheadings, sidebar text, graphs, charts, illustrations, and guide questions.

Internal text structures that tie together significant ideas

1. Know how a discipline may use text: to tell, to explain, show, interpret, persuade, or aesthetically explore.

2. Know and use knowledge of how authors may structure information to identify important ideas in a passage and the relationship among them (i.e., hierarchical, linear, cylical, and conceptual).

3. Use signal words and phrases that help the reader make connections and a piece of text: (i.e.,also, before, but, therefore) to make connections among ideas in the text.