Week 8 R&W processes 2: comprehension, the writing process

As you read this blog this week, I'm working in Victoria, Canada with my 2 colleagues with whom I work in Kenya on early literacy instruction with teachers of PreK-grade 3.  We are completing the Guidebook for teachers and teacher leaders that has key concepts and strategies for supporting early reading development. Unlike this class, it is light on theory and heavy on teaching strategies, but also unlike this class, these Kenyan teachers mostly do NOT have bachelor's degrees and have limited possibilities to get a university degree.  I'm also working on a couple of articles and a research project....I'm looking for participants in my study of Knowledgeable teachers who engage their students in literacy learning in classrooms.  I may be contacting you to ask you to participate. 

This week is a week for completing the Virtual Check in again to let me know what and how you are doing.  Follow the link to the Google form and complete and submit it.  Please do that by Monday night.  http://goo.gl/forms/77Cd1DckrH

As you know, the purpose of reading is making meaning, or comprehension.  And the purpose of writing is communicating ideas. This week, Kucer will examine the factors that affect understanding text.  Those of you who read the text complexity article last week will make connections here, and I hope you will make them for the others in your group.  Kucer's second article examines the writing process and its relationship to reading. Finally, the article looks at a model of emergent writing development with preschool children.  Some concepts to think about and talk about for this week: background knowledge, cultural experiences, disciplinary knowledge, process, content, transaction, situated nature of comprehension, situational dependency, role of writing in knowledge construction.
Before reading, respond to these questions:  How do you think the concepts above will be used/discussed in Kucer? What do you think will be similarities in reading and writing process? What do you think will be similarities or differences in Kucer and a model of emergent writing?

As you read Kucer, be sure to complete the activities in the Tables in chapter 7 and jot down notes about your own thinking. Connect what Kucer says about vocabulary to what you have read and discussed in the S&H book. As for the emergent writing article, everyone should read the introduction and discussion.  If you have taken EDRG 5553 (or are a doctoral student), you also should read the methodology and results sections so you can explain how they fit with the discussion to the others in your group.

Key things to discuss, groups, is how the emergent writing model is similar to and different from Kucer's model and why you think that. Also address what the principles in Table 7.10 mean for instruction in comprehension and what the differences in proficient and less proficient writers means for teaching in primary grades. 

I'll be back late on Monday, but will have access to e-mail most of the time I'm gone, so let me know if you want me to weigh in next week. Since I'm writing this entry before I leave, I'm not sure what the weather will be, although it looks yucky for the weekend.  Stay safe and warm!

Week 7 Reading and Writing processes 1:word recognition and the reading process

This week we are moving into actually learning how to read, or recognizing words in print and what happens during the reading process. Some important concepts you will need to make sure you understand, and that you use in your blog discussions are: perception, short and long term memory, cognition, saccadic movement, fixations, regressions, readability, text complexity, predictability, transaction, skill, strategy, metacognition, epistemic beliefs, self-efficacy, motivation and engagement.

Before  you begin reading the chapters and articles for this week (and as you are reading this blog), think about what you are doing as you read.  What are your eyes doing? What is your brain doing? What is impacting your reading?  That is what I'd like you to blog about below.

As you read, I'd like you to think about the following questions/purposes: What is the role of perception in reading?  What does it mean to read? What factors impact your transaction with the text?  What else, besides reading strategies discussed in Chapter 6 are important to becoming a reader? What makes a text complex?  In Chapter 5, there will be a number of tables with activities that Kucer is going ask you to try out.  Please do them as it will help you to answer my questions. 

Everyone in the group needs to read Kucer 5 and 6 and the article titled Beyond Reading Strategies and Skills.  If you are a doctoral student or a reading specialist person, please read the Text complexity article.  It may be slow going, but it is good information for you as a reading specialist or budding scholar.  If you are an ECE major or a special education person, you do NOT have to read the text complexity article. 

Blog leaders:  Please make sure that you ask group members to tell you how they would define the academic vocabulary I have listed above as will be adding your definitions to the glossary we have started.  In addition, discuss your experiences with the tables in Chapter 5 and your responses to the questions in tables 6.2 and 6.6. Be sure to discuss key ideas in the article(s) and how they relate to Kucer.  You each may want to share also what you think is the answer to each of my questions in blue. Finally, make sure you think about what this theoretical information means to teaching young children how to read.

Stay warm and dry! Please e-mail me if you want me to join your discussion this coming week.  I'll be flying to Canada to work on our guidebook for Kenyan teachers on early literacy teaching strategies on Thursday so my not check the blogs like I should, so if you want me to join, e-mail is the best way to let me know.

Week 6: written language and the foundations of early reading and writing

Thanks for the blog discussions about the topics and the important vocab for beginning teachers.  They were rich and really demonstrated your own understanding of the topics as did the final versions you sent on Google docs.  I've moved the docs to a file titled iBook documents. If you haven't already, please make sure you include your names on your work so you get full credit for authorship when the book is published in the next edition.

Just a reminder that we are meeting on Adobe Connect on Monday, Feb. 16 at 6 pm.  You should have the link to the room from earlier in the semester, but let me know if you need it re-sent.


The readings this week take us away from oral vocabulary to consider the foundations of early reading and writing.  These foundations include understanding concepts of print and how it works, alphabet knowledge and the alphabetic principle, phonological and phonemic awareness, and learning how to recognize and remember words in print. There will be lots of technical information in the Kucer book about how written language works and its relationship to oral language. You will also get information about phonics and phonics rules in that chapter.  The B&M chapter introduces phonological and phonemic awareness and alphabetic principle, and how to best support learning of those foundational skills and understandings. Everyone needs to read both of these chapters.  There are also 2 articles on D2L under the heading of Understanding Language, Written and Oral. One deals with alphabet instruction and the other with teaching word study (also known as spelling, phonics, decoding).

Before reading, think about what you know (not believe) about phonological and phonemic awareness, concepts of print, alphabet and alphabetic principle knowledge, and word recognition and decoding.  Don't think so much about instruction at this point but about the actual concepts themselves.  Your blog can be about actual instruction.

Everyone in each group should read Kucer 3 and B&M 9.  Split up the two articles so half of you read 1 article and half the other.  For those of you new to the vocabulary, review Kucer chapter 2 again on the systems of language before you read Kucer 3.....it will be helpful.

Please have Kucer 3 and the first half of B&M 9 read before we meet on Feb. 16.  Bring to that meeting concepts you want reviewed, ideas you want explained, questions that you have about any of the content. 

Week 5 Oral language and vocabulary part 2

This week is a small group discussion week to have a peer review of your assessment task 1 (evaluations of a formal or standardized assessment). Remember to let me know if you need for me to set up a group meeting time on Adobe Connect for you, or let me know what other meeting arrangements you have made to do the peer reviews.  Together compose a summary of your meeting and e-mail it to me.  Be sure to include the names of everyone participating. The rubric for the assessment project tasks is on D2L.

Last week your readings focused on  Choosing words and texts, instruction, and assessment.  I read lots of great ideas and ways you all are incorporating vocabulary instruction in your own classrooms.  Please remember to specifically address (when you do this) how this ties in to the readings.  I see the ties but I also want to make sure that you all see the ties as well.  For those of you not teaching ages 3-8, make connections and identify differences to what you are doing at your age level.  Remember, we are focusing on children up through 3rd grade in this class.

Your blogs last week contained discussion on assessment, so I want to address this topic a bit.  Yes, the standardized tests that are listed in the book are expensive and most need to be administered by someone who is trained.  None of these are assessments that would be given by a classroom teacher. They are diagnostic tests given to children who are suspected of having a language difficulty. However, those of you in the reading specialist program, you may learn how to give the PPVT in the assessment class or other diagnostic tests as well. As a classroom teacher and/or a reading specialist, you are really more interested in progress monitoring of how your children in your class are learning the vocabulary words you are explicitly teaching as well as what words/concepts they already know. Informal or formative assessments are key here, and the ones in book are classroom tested to give you that kind of information.

Thanks for your thoughtful discussions on nonsense words.  They can be useful for assessing decoding or phonics knowledge but not really for vocabulary knowledge (except perhaps morphemic knowledge such as affixes).  One problem to think about with their use, even for assessment, however, is that children tend to then begin to think that reading is only about decoding and not about meaning making. So use nonsense words sparingly.

This week the B&M book chapter is going to provide a review of some of what you already read and discussed last week about explicit instruction and principles of vocabulary instruction. Then the S&H chapters will be addressing language rich environments and supporting independence in learning new words. Before you read, define what you think a language rich environment is. How do YOU learn new vocabulary words (like the academic vocabulary for this class)?


Your blog posts are going to be a bit different this week as I'm giving you explicit assignments for the iBook. First, each blog group needs to decide on 10 words that are academic vocabulary necessary for novice teachers to know related to understanding language and oral language development. Each group needs to choose at least 5 of those words from the Kucer book and the rest from the other readings.  In other words, at least 5 words each group chooses need to be about the theory related to the systems of language or language variation and the rest from the S&H and B&M books about supporting vocabulary development in classrooms.  Each group (and make your call as you respond to this blog) needs to choose 2 of the chapters from S&H to focus on. Once your group has chosen the words, you need to provide definitions for them in "novice teacher friendly" words.  These words and definitions will become the beginnings of a glossary of important literacy and language terms for the iBook.
Second, each blog group needs to choose two of the topics listed at the end of this sentence and create a piece to put in the iBook that will help preservice teachers understand about vocabulary development: the systems of language and word learning, language variation and word learning, teaching vocabulary, assessing vocabulary, language rich classrooms, independence in word learning. Your group will need to decide both on content of what you think should go in as well as the format it should take.  So your group leader may want to give assignments to different people to start off each of the tasks that you need to complete. Suggestion: Discuss on the blog what to include and why, put pieces of what you are writing on the blog for suggestions and edits, then start a group Google doc in a folder shared by you all to cut and paste what you decide in the blog is what you want to include. Finally, make sure I can access the doc next Friday to upload it to my file for the iBook. I'll be on this blog on Monday and on your blogs on Wednesday morning as well as Thursday afternoon and Friday if you want feedback or input.

So, remember, choose chapters to choose academic vocab from and topics to write about.  Your blogs will be discussions of how to do that and suggestions for content to include.

I hope you enjoy the early spring weather this weekend, and will be e-mailing each of you about your questions and projects from the sign up sheet.