Pauline Gibbons - Chapter 5 lyrics

This chapter focuses on how teachers can support El learners in accessing the meaning of written texts and in becoming more independent readers. As with other chapters, is has an across-curriculum focus. Increasingly as they move through school, students are “reading to learn,” as well as “learning to read.” Academic readings poses challenges for all learners, in the ways that Chapter 3 described, but there may additional challenges for EL learners. These have to do with possible greater unfamiliarity (in English) with the content or field of the text, les familiarity with spoken English, or, for some students, the writing script itself. The difficulty of a particular text may lead teachers in some cases to reject the use of it altogether for EL learners or to provide a simplified version. While these may be appropriate choices in some instances, most obviously in the case of learners who are at the very stages of learning English, there remains the dilemma referred to several times in this book: on-going simplification of language is likely to result in students' having little access to the very registers of English they need to develop for learning across the curriculum. Rather than placing a ceiling on what EL students are expected to read, teachers can instead “build bridges” to the text by providing reading activities that will scaffold El learners' reading. Specifically this support will enable readers to: Access the meanings of a text. Model reading strategies that are transferable to other reading contexts. Activities are broadly cla**ified into three types—those that will take place before reading, and after reading. Examples of each type are provided. The Chapter begins with a brief review of some of the current approaches to the teaching of reading. What Is the “Best” Way to Teach Reading? There have been many very different approaches to reading that claim to answer this question, and trying to develop a cohesive approach to the teaching of reading in he cla**room is a little like trying to a**emble a complex jigsaw puzzle. It is probably fair to say that each of the approaches focuses on one aspect of reading and has something useful to about what learners need to learn, but none of them along presents a complete answer. In addition, many approaches and mainstream reading programs do not take into account the needs of EL learners, since most are based n the a**umption that learners are already familiar with the spoken form of language. This section summarizes some of the key perspectives of a range of approaches and offers one way to a**emble the jigsaw puzzle. Traditional, or “Bottom-Up,” Approaches Traditional “bottom-up” or “phonic –based” approaches focus on the basic sk**s for decoding written symbols. Such approaches begin with the smallest bits of language: the sounds and the letters used to represent them. While a knowledge of a phonic system of English is necessary learning for any reader, we need to remember that it is only one strategy among many that a fluent reader uses. In traditional approaches, learning progress from recognizing simple words in isolation to reading simple sentences that use carefully controlled grammar and vocabulary. Books following this approach, often referred to as basal readers, rely heavily on repetition of (1) whatever sound symbol is the focus of the text and (2) a number of “sight words.” Meaning is therefore almost inevitably sacrificed to form, resulting in texts that are often neither interesting nor sensible, and are unlike any authentic spoken language with which young children are familiar A major disadvantage of phonics-driven programs for EL learners is that they offer few links to what these learners already know about their own language or about English. The language of the texts is probably far removed from any spoken “everyday” English with which the learner may be familiar. For beginning EL learners, phonics- based programs present other difficulties, since the English sound on which such texts are primarily based never exactly match the sounds of their first language. Consequently, reading becomes a very abstract process where unfamiliar knowledge (the sounds of English) is used to teach an unfamiliar sk** (reading in English). Whole Language, or “Top Down,” Approaches An Alternative approach, and one with which a phonics approach is often contrasted, is a “top-down,” or “whole language,” approach. The primary focus here is on reading for meaning at the level of the whole text--for example, being able to recognize the type of text and its purpose and predict meanings on the basis of one's prior background knowledge of the world and of the language itself. Top-down approaches avoid the limitations of bottom-up phonics approaches and give learners access to a rich range of text models in authentic contexts. However, for some learners, in particular EL learners, top-down approaches may not always include sufficient explicit focus on the language itself, and may not in fact go very far “down.” The notion that readers predict meaning is an important concept in a whole-language approach. Early work by Goodman (1967) illustrates how prediction works, and understanding this helps explain why the reading process may break down for some EL learners. Goodman argues that as they are reading, fluent readers draw on three kinds of knowledge to gain meaning from text: semantic knowledge (knowledge of the world and of the specific content of the text, which in this book is also referred to as field knowledge); syntactic knowledge (knowledge of the structure of the language); and graphophonic knowledge (knowledge of sound letter relationships). In other words, fluent readers do not need to read every letter or every word. Rather they predict the most likely meaning from context, using different kinds of knowledge. However, EL learners may not be able to read this anyway. They may not have the appropriate background knowledge needed to understand the text, especially if this relates to new or culturally specific knowledge. (For the same reason, you probably had problem difficulty reading the example of the linguistic text in Chapter 3.) Or they may not have sufficient knowledge of structure of English to be able to predict in the way an English fluent speaker is able to. They may, for example, be unaware of the kinds of meanings carried by important “signaling” words such as although, however, on the other hand, finally, or therefore and so do not recognize how to read the information that these signaling words introduce. These words also often function as connectives that link ideas throughout a whole text, and so failing to understand them means that connections between ideas are lost. EL learners are often unable to locate main ideas r their significance, or recognize the overall organizational structure of the text. Part of the reason for this is that they may be unfamiliar with the meaning and function of these key connectives or signaling words. Interactive Approaches to Reading Many researchers now argue that reading is a combination of bottom up and top down sk**s and that successful readers use both predictive and decoding sk**s depending on the kinds of texts they are reading. Readers also interact with the test itself, drawing on their own personal and cultural experiences to make meaning from it. These personal and cultural experiences are known as schema: they are the mental frameworks that we develop as a result of our particular culture experiences. Applied to reading, schema theory suggests that readers draw on this culturally acquired knowledge to guide their comprehension. We can predict all this before we even begin to rest the tests themselves. This information is in our heads and is the result of our familiarity with many similar texts that are pat of out culture. We “map” this prior cultural knowledge, or schema, onto the texts we read; in this way the reader can be said to “interact” with the text. What schema theory suggest is that meaning does not reside simply in the words on the page but interacts with the readers in the head knowledge. If, on the other hand, our previous experiences had not provided us with this cultural knowledge or had provided us with different cultural knowledge we could not interact with those texts in the same way and would be less able to predict the genre of the texts or their content. Because they draw on both top down and bottom up theories of reading and take into account the role of cultural knowledge, interactive approaches provide a major rationale for many of the reading activities that are described later. Critical and Social Approaches to Reading Increasingly, it is important for learners to have the ability to critique and question the text into which they come into contact, including advertisements, internet texts, and media reports. Critical approaches to teaching reading see it as more than the development of the kinds of technical sk**s discussed so far. All written texts exist in a particular social. Historical, and cultural context, No text is “neutral”- weather the arrival of white people in Australia and North America is described as discovery, colonization, or invasion depends on who you are, the viewpoint you hold, and your interposition of historical events. Different communities or individuals ay interpet a text differently dependin on their won cultural and social experiences, and this has implication for using test within a multicultural cla**room, In this approach, teaching needs to include cla**room discussion on the way that language and the writes ideology position the reader how the language does this, and the different “readings” that are possible of a single text. Reading is also a cultural and social practice. The value placed on it, and how it is used varies from culture to culture. Some EL learners may come from cultures that my not value the reading of storybooks to children but value highly the ability to participate in oral storytelling. Or in their community reading may occur mainly for religious purposes, rather than for gaining information about the world or for recreation. While not in themselves barriers to reading school orientations, towards the purposes of reading may also constitute an additional layer of unfamiliarity for some WL learners, particularly when teachers and schools are unaware of these learners community literacy practices and are therefore unable to build on their prior experiences and expectations about reading.