Regarding Building the Foundation.

Well, there isn’t much to be said about Building the Foundation.  It seems to be a simple, data orientated text.  I’m not even sure if it’s related to Chall’s Stages like Professor McVerry’s fifth module is suggesting.  That said, we can easily find that out by looking to our notes on Chall’s Stages and comparing them!  Regardless, remember the Common Core State Standards are practically the laws around these parts!

Note:  Oh yeah, Chall and the Common Core go hand in hand!  If you read last week’s reading you got the SparkNotes version in the form of a cute paragraph.  If you look at the Building the Foundation version you get a lot more text broken down over numerous, easy to chuck bullet points.

Nuff’ said!

This time, Glynda A. Hull and Elizabeth Birr Moje give us the skinny on what it actually means to develop literacy.  So, the first paragraph…  Yikes!  That was a lot to take in.  But let us see if we can break down any of what this nonsense means.  Apparently, research on literacy (both learning and teaching) is emphasized on the identification and support of cognitive processes and strategies for reading.  But there are several other facets of literacy that effect other… things.  This somehow leads to something called “the New Literacy Studies” (Gee, 1999; Street, 2003)… I guess?

“” Sociocultural” studies typically refer to practices rather than to processes…  Sociocultural research has documented a range of literacies across communities, societies, and institutions, including schooling, where academic language represents a specialized form of literacy and where reading and writing requirements vary according to knowledge domains and disciplines (Blommaert, Street, & Turner, 2007; Lee & Spratley, 2006; Moje, 2007, 2008a; Street, 2003).”

After a bunch of fun, they final acknowledge one of the goals, “we will suggest how literacy, rather than only being about the development of particular kinds of print-based skills, can helpfully be conceived as participation in a range of valued meaning-making practices, and that these practices are themselves nested within particular activity structures that index desired purposes, roles, and identities (cf. Gee, 1996; Holland et al., 1998; Moje & Luke, 2009).”

Geez… All of this was on the first page!

The text explains that the basic principals of any “good” practice are essentially set in stone.  That said, whenever a practice seems to “diverge from the mainstream,” they may appear as insignificant, incorrect, or simply end up being dismissed all together by those with power.  One power that everyone’s heard the name of is “Common Core.”  The text makes sure to admit that Common Core is the compilation of competent and experienced devotees to education.  However, “… other versions of literacy do exist, and more importantly, are being created…, and will exist in sub-rosa or open competition with societal-and school-sanctioned varieties.”  I think this paragraph is only an acknowledgement of other ideas though, because most of the text seems to follow Common Core.

There are multiple paragraphs of information to learn, but I’m going to copy the first line of each segment.  I can probably get most of what I need from that…  If not, I can always comeback.

1. Literacy learning is situated in and mediated by social and cultural interactions and tools.
2. Literacy learning occurs via a range and blend of explicit and implicit teaching, usually guided by interaction with a more knowledgeable other over time.
3. Across the age range and from all social/cultural groups, people learn and practice literacy outside of school, often with high degrees of proficiency.
4. To learn literacy well, students need meaningful purposes for engaging in literate practice and opportunities to use literacy for a broad rang of life activities related to goals and desires beyond the moment of instruction.
5. Learners require, and literate ability now consists of, facility with composing, interpreting, and transforming information and knowledge across various forms of representation.

They talk about Death of a Salesman for a while.  Not much comes from it, however, it’s used to show how people like keeping things traditional (or however they learned it).

6 pages of references follows…

Link here!

Stage 0.  Pre reading: Birth to Age 6.

                Reading is but a dream at this stage.  According to the highlights, “From birth until the beginning of formal education, children living in a literate culture with an alphabetic writing system accumulate a fund of knowledge about letters, words, and books.”  It seems like there’s something missing in that sentence that makes it not a full sentence, but I’m not sure.  But yeah, children should start getting some of the subtle nuances of words (like alliteration and rhymes).

Stage 1. Initial Reading, or Decoding, Stage: Grades 1-2, Ages 6-7.

                It isn’t learned in a day, but around this time, children should really begin associating letters with parts of spoken words.  This is also when they should be able to recognize when letters in words may not be correct (assuming something is spelled wrong).  This is the “Barking at print” stage.  Boy does that sound unpleasant lol.

Stage 2. Confirmation, Fluency, Ungluing from Print: Grades 2-3, Ages 7-8.6.

                This stage seems to be all about reinforcement!  Children will likely read a lot of what they’ve already covered once before.  Apparently, this stage isn’t about gaining new information, it’s about increasing fluency and brushing up on those “common, high-frequency words.”

Stage 3. Reading for Learning the New: A First Step.

                We’ve got a huge amount of highlighted text here.  Out of fear, I’ll quote it all!  It reads, ““learn the new”—new knowledge, information, thoughts and experiences. Because their background (world) knowledge, vocabulary, and cognitive abilities are still limited at this stage, the first steps of Stage 3 reading are usually best developed with materials and purposes that are clear, within one viewpoint, and limited in technical complexities.”

Stage 4. Multiple Viewpoints: High School, Ages 14-18.

                Stage 4 is about, as the title suggests, about multiple points of view.  The text glosses over how school text becomes more in depth as the grade level increases…  DUH!  But the important thing is that by this age (14-18), students have already obtained the knowledge to read for information.  “…the necessary knowledge was learned earlier.”

Stage 5. Construction and Reconstruction – A World View: College, Age 18 and Above.

                By this point your student is virtually a superstar.  You may feel that you have nothing left to teach them but remember to stay in their corner because being a person is difficult.  Sometimes, the support of an old mentor is worthwhile! LOL JK (but it’s true).  Regardless, by this stage, students will know what to and what not to assimilate from text.  I’ve quoted this line only because it’s highlighted and sounds auditorily sexy, “Whether all people can reach Stage 5 reading, even at the end of four years of college, is open to study.”  Wow, right?

Toddlers and Touchscreens:  Learning “Concepts Beyond Print” with Tablet Technologies

                I found myself reading this article calling it cute, but just more of the same.  The beginning in particular fawns over the concept of children being adapt within a generation (more or less).  Honestly, no duh, right?  A child’s going to be used to the technology of the age.  Toddlers of today know how to use a smartphone, children of 20 years ago were to bad with video game controllers, 20 years earlier than that, they were pretty wicked at… I don’t know… throwing rocks.  Regardless, the text goes into phenomena like toddlers mastering touch devices and what that means. 

In addition, it covers the immersion level that goes along with having to use one.  I’ll agree that there is a certain upscaled level of involvement with technology like this, but I’m unsure if I would say the difference is too great between say a pc and smartphone.  I would argue that how much of the viewers attention (regardless of age) is variable depending on how the content being inspected is being covered and the amount of interactions required.  It becomes difficult to compare the level of immersion to books in the same way it becomes difficult to cover immersion with adults.  This is an extreme example, but normally, toddler cannot effectively read.  Therefore, books wouldn’t likely be of much interest to most of them (even the picture heavy one).  The adult, however, has the discipline and ability to read (results will still vary).  This comparison is only for reading though.  What of the immersion of say watching YouTube?  I’ve seen first hand how easy it is for adults and toddlers to get lost surfing the web for hours.  But this of course is still as long as they are hooked by a topic they are interested in.  This ultimately make me believe that the immersion is more so based upon content than technology.  A young child may be just as captivated by the dinosaurs on his or her mother’s smartphone as they are with the television and the toys in his or her hand.  But I digress.

Note:  My disagreeing from time to time doesn’t necessarily mean that I don’t respect the argument as a whole.

Personally, I do agree that technology such as smartphones and tablets do help preschool aged children learn multimodally.  I like that the text soon dives beyond electronics and acknowledges the concept of learning through touch.  While it hasn’t been completely ignored according to the quoted studies, it clearly is hardly the prime subject of any studies regarding children and learning.  The quoting a notable line, “touchy-feely books with fluffy animals’ fur, or little holes in peekaboo books … Children who are given the opportunity to manipulate objects and experience their textures can often demonstrate implicit knowledge which they may not be able to yet verbalise” (Kurcikova, 2014).  With a screen, the process is similar yet different and teaches learners new but equally important skills.

We get a cute little summary from some silly viral video that the author seems to adore.  I see the allure (because I love cute things).  But, the stubborn old soul in me can’t help but think that the notion of seeing pages of print as things that don’t “do” anything irks me.

My feelings are suddenly in question.  Reading down around Interactive Modes in a Digital Reading Nexus section, I looked at several of the tables about screens.  After reading through them, I thought to myself, “Are books growing irrelevant?”  It sounds silly, but I honestly began to wonder about that.  Aside from saving paper, reading things and communicating electronically is clearly the way our species is heading.  We don’t write letters very often, we text or email.  We rarely choose sitting down and reading Victor Hugo’s Hunchback over watching Disney’s version.  The future is electronic, and I suppose we should make sure that children’s skills cater to and compliment that.  Honestly, fewer and fewer courses in the average university are asking for text books these days.

                Concepts About Print Assessment

                It’s important to remember that children, be they preschooler or 1^st graders, while impressionable, are not necessarily blank slates.  All young children come to school with some understanding about print (orthodox or not).  The text then goes on to say some really obvious stuff like, and I’m paraphrasing here, “A teacher’s responsibility is to assess their students’ respective understanding and lack there of in order to create lessons that will take the children from where they are to where they should be.”  That said, I’m not sure if this is self-explanatory or I have just heard ideas like this in class so much that it suddenly feels self-explanatory.  The text also asks neither metaphorically nor philosophically, “What is a word?”  Okay, I know that last sentence just sounds silly out of context.  But I wanted to be funny.  Now that I’ve got your attention, on to the real chunking of the text!

                The text gives us some bullet points on an assessment of emergent literacy print concepts.  It looks like this:

• Book orientation knowledge
• Understanding of principles involving the directional arrangement of print on the page
• The knowledge that print, not picture, contains the story
• Understanding of important reading terminology such as word, letter, beginning of sentence, and top of page
• Understanding of simple punctuation marks

It seems they got this information from this article:

(Gillett and Temple, 1994, Understanding Reading Problems: Assessment and instruction. Harper Collins: NY. p. 70)

It’s important to always cite your sources!  Life has definitely proven that you will gain credit by always giving credit where credit is due.  Regardless, upon rereading the bulleted text, I must admit to their importance.  The concepts acknowledged are all very minor and insignificant to cover in great detail.  But this is a peculiar case.  These ideas are only so minute because their importance is so… important.  Knowing where to and not to put a period isn’t the most difficult think to understand.  In non-scholarly and informal English writing, people occasionally don’t even use them and even then, it tends to only minorly annoy the reader.  But this is because of how simple and engraved the use of a period is.  The key concepts of reading print such as starting at the top left of a mass of text or reading to the right and then down a line are basic and hardly thought of to even the least experienced reader.  However, to the greenest of beginner, these ideas may possibly be unheard of.  Which of course means that they must be addressed in any classroom that teaches young children.  Small as they may seem, these concepts of printed emergent literacy are a part of reading at its core.  To not teach these would be to not teach reading.  But I’m rambling now.  Let’s move on.

                The text now goes into the actual ancient art of reading to children.  As you can well imagine, it’s quite complex.  It seems that you should start of with easy books for the kiddies.  If you’re ever in the lower grade level classes in the average elementary school, you’ll notice that most of the books have a level.  They normally range from like A through F (like in the text).  I think I’ve seen some uses numbers.  Regardless, they dictate the difficulty of text.  This is important when reading with a student one on one or with the class.  I could be mistaken, but I believe you’re supposed to cater to your students in this regard.  Naturally, you rarely want to give them something they’ve clearly mastered.  However, you also wouldn’t want to read them material that’s completely over their heads.  You want to read stories that are appropriately challenging yet easily understood.  Quoting the text, “The teacher should be very familiar with the text (story, layout and features, punctuation, etc.) before reading with the child.”  This seems obvious.  It sounds safe to assume that if you don’t know the book, you don’t know if the book can help the student.

                Marie Clay has a cute little quote over here, “Teachers must teach so that all children become knowledgeable about these essential concepts so they open doors to literacy.”  Naturally, I agree.  Education is built on literacy.  Not being literate closes the metaphorical doors to success.  (If I’m allowed to be cheesy.)  The rest of the text covers some good strategies for helping children.  They definitely seem worth revisiting!

Paige C. Pullen and Laura M. Justice shed some light on… the stuff in the title!  Woo!  So, the preschool years are critical to the development of our unsung heroes, the skills of emergent literacy.  The text goes on to say, “Children who grow up in rich literate environments enter school with an advanced understanding of the concepts underlying reading…”  Long story short, the text describes herself as an overview of the research on the relationship of emergent literacy skills.  Preschool is considered the age where phonological awareness development take priority.

I have a personal gripe with this text (What else is new, right?).  It’s too scholarly/formal and gives off the impression of lacking content (at the beginning [I haven’t made it that deep.]).  They keep dropping sources to sentences that allude to information that they never really getting around to covering.  Like an information drop?  I should probably give an example, but I’m pretty tired…  I will explain my complaint about being too scholarly though.  Nothing takes me out of the reading more than in text citations.  They should really go with the style where when something said is cool, paraphrased, and/or generally worthy of quotation marks, they should put a small digit by it in the form of a coefficient or something, which you can follow up at the bottom of the page and the name(s) or text(s) you’re quoting is down there.   Having your citations some of which literally look like:

(e.g., Blachman, 1984, 2000; Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1991; for review, see National Reading Panel [NRP], 2000)

 (e.g., Ball & Blachman, 1991; Brady, Fowler, Stone, & Winbury, 1994; Byrne & FieldingBarnsley, 1991; Rack, Snowling, & Olsen, 1992; Stanovich, 1992; Torgesen & Wagner, 1998)

And…

 (e.g., Hargrave & Senechal, 2000; Senechal, 1997; Senechal & Cornell, 1993; Senechal, LeFevre, Thomas, & Daley, 1998; Senechal, Thomas, & Monker, 1995)

Nothing ruins your reading experience and immersion in a text like having to read thirteen names of people you honestly don’t care about.  I understand that citations deserve to be there, however, it clearly doesn’t belong in the main body of text.  How am I supposed to remember what I was reading?  So, I suppose my main complaint isn’t about the text but about this format of writing in general.

This seems like a good time to jump to the summary.  Don’t sleep on preschool years.  They are essential to the development of emergent literacy.  The children who practice the related skills in their early years tend to do better later in life.  Teachers need to constantly seek ways to build their students’ emergent literacy skills.  Engage with the students, a group reading, a class circle, and all of those good things are ways to do so.  Get your students interested in print or at least have them observe and/or get acquainted with print.  And… some third thing about oral language.

Literacy-Rich Environments

By The Access Center

               I cannot claim to be a professional editor, spellchecker, or whatever.  But as a previous English major and (slightly less than) avid reader, I must ask how did they not catch the mistake in the first sentence?  This is laughable.  “… the academic successor failure of students.”  Clearly, they meant “success or…” not “successor…”  This is why you should always proof read your work!  (I probably won’t proof read this post…)

                “A literacy-rich environment is a setting that stimulates students with disabilities to participate in language and literacy activities in their daily lives thereby giving them the beginning understandings of the utility and function of oral and written language.”

                Honestly, this definition sounds like the example of any average elementary school class.  Nowadays, schools have great teachers communicated with students (disabled or not), there are books cases for both pleasure reading and source materials as needed, and computers which, often require active participation/interactions, are becoming more and more common in classrooms.  I suppose and hope this means the local school districts have good philosophies on literacy development.

                I find this article noteworthy.  In the introduction, they used information from Interventions for Academic and Behavior Problems II: Preventive and Remedial Approaches (Higgins, K., Boone, R., & Lovitt, T.C. [2002]).  What I found specifically conceptually interesting is, “Once students reach fourth grade… the focus changes from learning to read, to reading to learn.”  This was used in a context to remind the reader that of how important it is to develop good reading skills in students early on.  Pre-K through third grade represents a small window for growth in reading.  Afterwards, the way students are expected to learn changes and any student not as knowledgeable in text-based comprehension will be unfortunately at a disadvantage both academically and in general.  It’s a very simple notion.  However, what it implies is no less severe.  No educator would want to see their student struggle and no student enjoys running uphill or playing catch-up with the rest of the class in academic terms.

                The article uses phrases like print awareness, alphabetic principle, and phonemic awareness.  It’s probably safe to assume that these are important terms as I’ve also heard my professor speaking about them.  It may be worth taking notes on these concepts!

                It looks like having a theme may be a good idea when trying to build a literacy-rich environment…  Good to know!

                I know it’s cheap and lazy to copy the first line of a passage, but I like this one…  Regardless, “The role of the teacher is to encourage all attempts at reading writing, and speaking, allowing students of varying ability to experience the different function and use of literacy activities.”  I like this sentence because it does a great job of summarizing what the passage is about: communicating.

                It’s worth mentioning that a well-structured classroom “immerses students.”  It reminds me of what an old mentor of mine used to tell me, “Those who fail to plan, plan to fail.”

               I could probably pinch good information from this article for days, but this seems like a good place to stop.

It seems to me that the only way we can increase oral language development in a class is to continue to practice language orally.  In my studies in SCSU’s EDU 305 course, I was guided by one of my professors to a rather interesting journal entry.  In the text, I was reminded of various tips and tricks of trade.  It would branch from statistical data ranging on what and how young children (particularly in preschool) learned to good times to sit and chat with your young students.  That said, when it comes to oral language development, you must speak!  Talk to students about their day, the weather, or other relevant topics.

Additionally, questions are essential!  If you find yourself reading to students, there are times to stop and ask your students what they believe will happen next or how a character may feel in said scenario.  Try to get them to possibly explain how they would feel in similar situations.  This can also be implemented in to games.  Practicing this may prove invaluable for oral language development as it gets the students to practice putting language together to reach different levels of comprehension and accomplish important goals in general communication.

Parents can do similar things at home.  It’s likely obvious that a parent’s behavior and presence has a large effect on their child(ren).  However, the job of the parents’ goes beyond just logic and knowledge, but also includes emotional growth and understanding.  Remember, what a parent doesn’t teach can be just as important as what they do!

This is an insert from the work of Darwin T. Turner.

Oral history, records, and stories are important.  Nevertheless, they are often looked upon unfavorable in most situations.  That’s not simply because no one cares (which is occasionally the issue).  It is more so because it isn’t the most reliable way to tell the true.  Quoting the highlighted portion near the bottom of the ninth page, “Unlike videotape cameras, we human beings do not merely record our lives; we interpret them.”  That said, we humans are not “always” overtly lying or exaggerating, it appears natural to add personal connotations and bias to things told off memory.

Regardless, we should try to remember the importance of oral traditions.  The text reminds us that before some languages had written forms or used them for the reasons of today (leisure or otherwise) tales were told orally.

While I believe the message of the text may be timeless, tape-recorders, unfortunately, aren’t.

This selection comes form the work of Susan L. Massey.

My attention span isn’t long enough to finish the introduction despite four tries.

Preschoolers talk.  Assuming they’re in preschool, they’re going to speak with preschool teachers.  According to the text, they do that a lot.

Games that include personal narratives and pretending cause children to “re-create events.”  This evidently helps the children learn to speak on scenarios that either have occurred, are happening currently, or will take place later.  That’s pretty cool.

There is a large concentration on cognitive foundations.  This section reminded me of how important it was that a preschool aged child’s basic knowledge/understanding be reinforced before adding new things concepts to the mix.  Learning takes a while.

Nonimmediate and immediate talk.  That maybe worth remembering.  It’s just a little reminder of the times you can check for understanding.  Doing so also keeps students actively listening and participating.

Don’t sleep on snack time!  This is a good time to speak with young children and sneak in some vocabulary.  Assuming they’re not already in a good conversation with each other.