[Assam] Part 3-something for the school teacher

umesh sharma Sat, 30 Apr 2005 15:54:07 -0700

�Secondary Writing � a means of learning

Act of writing offers two instructional advantages.

First, it provides us with a chronology of our thoughts that we can label, objectify, modify or build upon a later time. Second, writing is an engaging act though which we become invested in our ideas and learning (Knoblauch & Brannon, 1983; Fulwiler, 1983)

Pedagogy

Research�.found positive effects for such strategies as the use of literacy models, free writing, sentence combining and scales (rubrics).. Research has found that most effective way to improve composition is to engage students in a process called �inquiry.�

Inquiry treats writing as a problem solving activity�one in which students come to understand something that they want to say before they begin drafting� Teachers are facilitators who guide students through the development of assertions and arguments about them�The inquiry process, in effect, is a process of coming to understand something worth drafting about� Strategies � composition based-inquiry.. also known as �writing-to-learn� strategies. They include free writing, focused free-writing, narrative writing, response writing (example ; response logs, starters or dialectic notebooks), loop writing (writing on an idea from different perspectives), dialogue writing (example: with an author, a character), and believing and doubting it�..such activities are also known as �writing-to-read� strategies, � Jacobs (2002).

�Although learners spend a great deal of time loading up on knowledge, schools do not typically teach them to do so strategically. Many young readers can decode competently but have never learned to ask themselves what they are reading for, to monitor their reading ad they do, to assess themselves afterward and to fill in what they missed,� (Perkins, 2004).

� When a student knows something, the student can bring forth upon demand � tell us the knowledge or demonstrate the skill. Understanding is a subtler matter��.Understanding is a matter of being able to do a variety of though-demanding things with a topic � like explaining, finding evidence, and examples, generalizing, applying, analogizing, and representing the topic in a new way,� (Perkins and Blythe, 1994.)

�education becomes an act of depositing, which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.

Banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradictions through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a whole:

the teacher teaches and the students are taught;

the teacher knows everything and the student knows nothing;

the teacher thinks and the students are though about;

the teacher chooses and enforces his choice an the students comply,�

(Friere, Paulo , 1971: Pedagogy of the oppressed)

Session 2

In class we had the mapping or schema activity in which we read a paragraph on oil production in Alaska and transportation to other US states � and drew a schema making connections between various parts of the text.

Reading: Trends in recent research and implications for instruction, Curtis, (May 2002)

http://www.nifl.gov/partnershipforreading/adolescent/summaryIIa.html

Note taking

�Teaching students how to take notes and to summarize can improve their overall comprehension performance especially among adolescents with reading difficulties�. Techniques like note-taking and summarizing would seem to encourage the development of active and purposeful reading�.and may enhance student�s understanding of the various parts of a text and how they are related,� Curtis, (May 2002).

Diagnosis: Reading problems and appropriate reading material for each grade

�Oral Reading Test:

Tool 1: a set of �oral reading paragraphs.� It takes only a few minutes to administer, and it will give you an estimation of the student�s reading level,�( Fry, 1997) (my note: The chapter contains material showing paragraphs appropriate for various age groups.)

Tool 2: Readability Graph: Matching the book to the student, and it is an important step in creating a successful reader (my note: it helps in grading a particular book according age or grade of students, by making use of the graph �and by counting the number of syllables and sentences in 100 words of a passage. In the entire book 3 passages are chosen � and their result is averaged � to get the final tally and compared with the graph to estimate the grade level of the book)

Tool 3 � The 1 out of 20 rule: Simply have the student read a section out of a proposed book, and count on your fingers the number of mistakes he makes. If he makes about one mistake in every 20 words, the text is approximately at his instructional level. If he makes less than one mistake in every 20 words, it is at his independent level� (Fry, 1997).

We performed this exercise in class.

Session 3

Cloze exercise � replace Russia with USA. And a poem � for each line one blank - 3 similar words to fill one blank. To understand why the author chose the one word he did, to understand his thinking and writing style and finer points of word usage.

From Resource Packet

Found these ones useful:

Graphic organizers for text structures � by Schoenbach, Greenleaf, Cziko, Herwitz (1993) � it provides note taking strategies � using different kinds of mapping or schema for different types of text structures.

Pre-reading exercise: we performed in class � �a 9^th grade social studies class may be planning to read about Moscow as an introduction to a unit on Moscow. Depending upon the purpose of the reading (and it is important to be explicit to students about purposes), the teacher might have students brainstorm individually about a national capital they already familiar to them: Washington DC.

The class could then compile and share their brainstorms, which the teacher can use to help the students grasp particular concepts or vocabulary that will be important to understanding the text.

The class might then organize their brainstorms into categories (such as monuments, government buildings, a tourist view of the city) or into webs, outlines or clusters � graphic organizers�..The teacher could then divide the class into small groups and assign each group a category from the brainstorm, asking them to use Washington DC as a way to think about Moscow. For example, a group that is assigned �a tourist�s view of the city� might consider whether there are gardens in Moscow that equal the beauty of cherry blossoms or whether there is a national cemetery near Moscow as there is near Washington DC.

They might also consider the monuments or government buildings that a tourist would be interested in seeing. As a result, the students build on the knowledge they bring to a text while beginning to anticipate and pose questions about the text.

Teachers can also make use of cloze � that is deleting important words or concepts from the passage and having students guess or choose the word that would best fit the blank,� (Jacobs, 1999).

We performed these exercises in class and as an assignment to be submitted at the beginning of the class. It was enlightening to note how the ELL students from India (non-native speakers of English) had very different words or/and lack on knowledge of the US context � which led them to make mistakes in filling the blanks.

Cultural Construction of struggling readers: Alvermann, 2001

�The deprivation approach is that Brent has the potential to reach his grade level placement in reading if he receives appropriate instruction from a school culture that takes his development characteristics into account and provides reading materials that are below his frustration level.

The difference approach � argues that the ways people in different groups develop competencies as literate beings will vary according to their particular cultures,� (Alvermann, 2001).

The culture-as-disability approach � argues that �culture disables some of its members, who do not measure up� (Alvermann, 2001).

Reading Strategies �that teachers use: (Barry, 2002)

Provides a listing of various reading strategies discussed in detail in other readings and how effective they have proved to teachers and how often they used the various strategies:

84% use Visual Aids

77% - Analogy

77% - Graphic Organizers

74% - Note Taking

73% - Writing-to-learn

70% - study guides

62% - Vocabulary activities

53% - Anticiaption Guides

52% - K-W-L (Know-Want to know � Learned )

50% - Summarizing

45% - Pre-viewing

43% - Pre-view

41% - Question-Answer relationships

40% - Problematic situation

40% - Student developed questions

38% - Think-Alouds

36% - Reciprocal Teaching

34% - Directed Reading-Thinking activity

30% - Guided Imagery

28% - Gloss

26% - Discussion Web

9% - Story Impression

8% - Intra Act.

From (Barry, 2002)

� �Teachers thought visuals �an absolute must,� �Always! Always ! Always!�

Teachers felt that analogies could be used to help relate content concepts to students� lives and that students often produced very good analogies of their own.

Graphic organizers were praised as �great organizational tools.� Teachers found that writing helped students make some of the strongest connections and that students �loved� a variety of vocabulary activities� (Barry, 2002).

�Teachers who think of an approach in superficial, procedural terms quickly abandon it, even if they are initially enthusiastic� Teachers must fully understand an intervention if they are to implement it successfully (Anderson & Roit, 1993).

��Tricks of the trade� do not work. Teachers must be engaged in learning-based rather than activity-based instruction to help their students truly learn to process text� (Alvermann, 2002)

Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com

_______________________________________________
Assam mailing list
[email protected]
http://pikespeak.uccs.edu/mailman/listinfo/assam


Mailing list FAQ:
http://pikespeak.uccs.edu/assam/assam-faq.html
To unsubscribe or change options:
http://pikespeak.uccs.edu/mailman/options/assam

[Assam] Part 3-something for the school teacher

Reply via email to