Kelsie's Blog

Assessment of Reading

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Regularly assess how students are progressing towards meeting important goals and then adjust their instruction based on these assessments. Teachers can also do a status assessment early in the year to determine how the student feels about themselves as a reader. These same questions can be asked to the student halfway through the school year and at the end. The teacher can then have the student look at this and see the progress they made.

Read Alouds

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Teachers read-alouds have been shown to be one of the major motivators for students’ desire to read. Reading aloud to students is a simple and research-proven way to motivate students of all ages to become readers.

Teachers should read both fiction and non-fiction. Students need to know that all types of books are accepted in the classroom for students to read. Most students develop their reading habits between the ages of 8 and 11. The teacher should also read books from series or from authors that wrote multiple books. This way students can expand their reading by choosing the other books that have been read in class.

Read alouds can help English Language Learners too. Read alouds can be used to help develop vocabulary by asking students to define unfamiliar words or words that may be tricky to understand. The teacher can also choose some books from these students cultures too.

Independent Reading

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All students should read for at least 20 minutes a day from materials they have chosen. Tell students that in order to get better at anything, including reading they need to do these things:

1. Instruction
2. Practice Skills
3. Practice the Whole Thing

A timer can be set to monitor the amount of time that the students are reading. When the timer goes off let the students know that it is okay for them to take another minute to get to a good stopping spot. Once students have chose their spot for reading, they shouldn’t be moving around and should have enough materials to read for the whole time. Begin with 5-6 minutes and expand from there.

English Language Learners may need dictionaries to help them figure out unknown words. They may also read books from their home language too.

Getting Materials for the Classroom

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Teachers can get free books from book clubs when their students order books, asking parents to donate unwanted books, begging for books from friends or relatives, or looking through yard sales and thrift shops.

Libraries may either sell or donate used books or magazines. Bookstores may also give teachers deals on books or collect donations for classrooms of books. Teachers can also subscribe to popular children’s magazines at a low cost.

Teachers may also want to share books among other classrooms. This can be done by having crates of interesting books and rotating them every month to keep the students interested in reading.

Conferencing with Students

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Reading conferences need to be something that students look forward to and not dread. To do this, the teacher needs to think of it more like a conversation than an interview and let the students have responsibilities too. Some conversation starters may include:

• “Let’s see. What have you got for me today?”
• “Oh good, another book about ocean animals. I had no idea there were so many books about ocean animals!”
• “I see you have bookmarked two pages to share with me. Read these pages to me, and tell me why you chose them.”
• “I never knew there was so much to learn about animals in the ocean. I am so glad you bring such interesting books to share with me each week. You are turning me into an ocean animal expert!”
• “I can’t wait to see what you bring to share with me next week!”

The students are in charge of choosing a book or magazine they want to share and bookmark any parts that they want to discuss with the teacher. Each student will get about 3-4 minutes too share. The teacher will start by modeling what the conference will look like and eventually will be able to just hang up a poster to remind students of how they will work.

Making Time for Students to Share What They Read

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One way to start conversations about reading is to create a classroom book board. This will consist of 40-50 books with the titles written on the book board. Students can then rate these books after they read them by writing what they thought about the book on a piece of paper and pinning it by the book title. The teacher can take time once every few weeks to read these reviews and discuss with the students why they felt that way. The board can be changed once most students have read the books.

Another way to start the conversation is having a “Reader’s Chair” and having a few students share what they read about during independent reading. The student’s job is to sell the book to their peers.

One more way is to have “reading parties.” The students are randomly put into groups (the teacher could make this more structured too by assigning groups) to discuss books they have read and enjoyed. Because it is a party the teacher can provide snacks or students could bring something in to share. By making it fun the students will want to do it more often.

Classroom Application

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I love all of the ideas for having the students share books that they have read. I definitely want to make a book board and have “reading parties.” I also liked the idea of reading conferences which will help the teacher get a better look at what students like to read and will be able to assess students’ comprehension of what they are reading without them even noticing.

I would love to get the community involved by either asking members to donate books to the classroom or coming in to read with the students. This is a great way for students to build connections with members of their community.

Resources

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Cunningham, P. M. & Allington, R. L. (2011). Classrooms That Work: They Can All Read       

and Write. (6^th ed.). Boston: Pearson

From the following video you will learn some first steps to reading. The teacher in the video has students starting to recognize their own names and reading first letters and thinking of whose name it could be. She also has a letter of the week where the students can see the letter, hear the sound, and then think of words that start with that sound.

From the following video you will learn the 6 strategies for reading and figuring out words you don’t know. By showing this video to students, they might be able to easily remember the strategies and how to use them so when they get stuck while reading they will know what to do.

Reading First

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Reading First required states to assess student progress in reading and schools were penalized of they failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress. This program specified that by 2014 all children were expected to read on grade-level. Unfortunately, this important goal was not achieved by the costly and widely implemented Reading First initiative. Evaluators concluded that there was no consistent pattern of effects over time in the impact estimates for reading instruction in grade one or in reading comprehension in any grade and that there appeared to be a systematic decline in reading instruction impacts in grade two.

Classrooms with the Highest Gains

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Teachers in these classrooms did the following things:

• Emphasized higher-order meaning construction more than lower-order skills
• Maximized opportunities to read
• Integrated reading and writing with other subject areas
• Provided opportunities to discuss what was read

Basic Principles of Effective Instruction

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• Integrate skills teaching with reading and writing
• Use time wisely. Turn mundane moments into instructional events
• Use scaffolding and coaching
• Emphasize self-regulating and self-monitoring
• Incorporate reading and writing into other content areas
• Have high expectations
• Be an excellent classroom manager

The Most Effective Classrooms

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• Skills were explicitly taught and related to reading and writing
• Books were everywhere and used in a variety of ways
• Children did a lot of reading and writing throughout the day and for homework
• Teachers had high but realistic expectations and monitored progress regularly
• Self-regulation was modeled and expected
• Cross-curricular connections were made as children read and wrote
• Classrooms were caring, positive, cooperative environments where discipline issues were dealt with quickly and quietly
• Classroom management was excellent and teachers use a variety of grouping structures
• Classrooms has high student engagement
• Real conversations took place, between students and teachers

Effective Teachers

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• Had higher pupil engagement
• Provided more small-group instruction
• Provided more coaching to help children improve in word recognition
• Asked more higher-level comprehension questions
• Communicated more with parents
• Had children engage in more independent reading

What Do We Know About Effective Classrooms

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• Provides huge amounts of balanced, comprehensive instruction
• Do a lot of reading and writing
• Science and social studies are taught and integrated with reading and writing
• Teachers emphasize higher-level thinking skills
• Skills and strategies are explicitly taught and children are coached
• Teachers use a variety of formats to provide instruction
• A wide variety of materials are used
• Classrooms are well managed and have high levels of engagement

Common Core

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Developed after the Reading First initiative failed. Common Core Standards are developed for grades K-12 and are things students should be able to do by the end of that grade level. These standards are set up to get students college ready as soon as kindergarten.

Classroom Application

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I really enjoyed the first video shown above as I would like to teach Pre-K or Kindergarten. Having the students begin recognizing names and letters with their sounds is a huge first step to reading and writing. I also would like to use a combination of the strategies listed above especially scaffolding and coaching which is another thing that I think is very important at a young age. Teaching younger learners these skills, they will be able to pick up on newer skills more easily. I believe Common Core is something that is used in most schools and is something I would like to use to make sure students are performing at grade level or above before moving on to the next grade. I like how Common Core is more benchmarks than a timeline of exactly when students need to accomplish something. This way all students can learn at their own pace.

Components of a Basal Reading Program

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A brief overview of some of the similar components that are part of almost every basal series follows:

• Emergent Literacy: develop basic concepts in language, letter-sound relationships, sense of context, following directions, and listening comprehension. Programs are often organized thematically, include a variety of support materials, and capitalize on children’s curiosity about print to get them excited about reading and making predictions
• Beginning Reading: New basic sight words are introduced, high-frequency sight words accumulate. Feature explicit, systematic, and intensive phonics with decodable text
• Strategy Lessons: Individual and group lessons and activities to teach sight vocabulary, phonics, structural analysis, and use of contexts
• Comprehension Strand: Prereading, during reading and postreading strategies and lessons. Comprehension is the goal of reading instruction. Follows a set routine, using prompts consistently throughout the book. Questions are fewer in number, inquiring into purpose, motives, and acts of main characters. Emphasis is on critical reading through higher-level questions and encouragement of prediction making
• Language Arts: Integrating reading, writing, listening, and speaking at each grade level in promoted
• Management: Provides teachers with goals and objectives along with teaching plans and assessment tools, all for documenting individual students and class progress
• Assessment: Teachers are given numerous types of formal and informal assessment options
• Differentiation: Differentiating instruction in the classroom and intervening for students who need further support, this is also known as RTI where different interventions are provided depending on how much support a student needs

Lesson Framework of a Lesson in a Basal Reading Program

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• Motivation and Background Building
• Guided Reading (Silent and Oral)
• Skill Development and Practice
• Follow-Up and Enrichment

Modifying Basal Lessons

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Teachers may prefer to follow the basic lesson framework, incorporating some alternatives into this structure. Modifying lessons personalizes reading instruction for teachers and students. Sometimes lessons may simply be rearranged; at other times, parts might be omitted or expanded.

Evaluating Reading Material for Instruction

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The steps in this process should be done before deciding whether to consider new programs; it’s important to have this information as baseline data:

• What is the overall philosophy of the program? How is reading discussed in the teacher’s guide?
• What kind of learning environment does the program recommend? Is it child-centered? Teacher-centered? Literature-centered? Skills-based? Scientific?
• Describe the emergent literacy program in detail. How does it provide for communication between school and home?
• Describe the instructional program in detail. How are lessons structured to teach phonemic awareness, word identification, vocabulary, reading fluency, comprehension, writing?
• Describe the literature of the program. Are the selections in unabridged form? Are different genres included? Is there a strong presence of nonfiction text? How culturally diverse is the literature?
• How well does the program integrate across the curriculum? In what ways is assessment connected to daily instruction? What opportunities are there for connections between the various language arts?

Vacca, J. L., Vacca, R. T., & Gove, M. K. (2012). Reading and learning to read (8th ed.). New York: Longman.

Classroom Application

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In this chapter, I learned techniques to modify basal reading lessons, the basics of these lessons, and how to evaluate these programs. There was even a nice checklist provided to evaluate reading programs.

Supporting a Community of Readers

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A literature-based program includes independent reading, sustained reading and writing, social interactions, and read alouds using literature, books, novels, short stories, magazines, plays, poems, and electronic books that have not been rewritten for instructional purposes. There are ling-term benefits implicit in bringing children and books tgether on a regular basis:

1. Reading expands children’s experiential backgrounds
2. Literature provides readers with good models of writing
3. Students learn to read be reading
4. When the prime purpose for reading is pleasure, children want to understand what they are reading and are likely to select cooks with familiar topics, themes, or characters
5. Wide reading provides opportunities for children to develop vocabulary knowledge

Students in the literature-based program had increased their fluency and comprehension skills. Literature-based programs create a community of readers. Students, in alliance with their friends and teacher, work together in classrooms in which school reading becomes like adult reading, where adults are motivated to read.

Selecting a Classroom Collection of Books

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These books come from different sources – the teacher’s personal collection, the school library, the public library, and paperback book clubs. The core collection is permanent, mant if the borrowed titles change frequently, so there is always something new to encourage browsing.

Choosing Classroom Literature

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Several strategies can be used to help choose classroom literature:

• Read and enjoy children’s books yourself
• Read children’s cooks with a sense of involvement
• Read a variety of books types
• Read books for a wide variety of ability levels
• Share how your students respond to particular books with others teachers
• Start by reading several books of good quality

Determining Good Literature

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It is important to take into consideration students’ diverse backgrounds, academic abilities, and interests. Four criteria to use in building a balanced collection of books:

1. The collection needs to contain modern, realistic literature as well as more traditional literature
2. The collection needs to contain books that realistically present different ethnic and minority groups and nontraditional families as well as mainstream Americans
3. The collection needs to contain books with different types of themes and books of varying difficulty
4. The collection needs to include nonfiction

Multicultural Literature

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Five reasons for multicultural literature in the classroom:

1. All children, and especially children of color, need to experience multicultural books. Students receive an affirmation of themselves and their cultures when their life experiences are mirrored in books. The infusion of multicultural literature in the classroom affirms and empowers children and their cultures.
2. Children perceive that members of their cultural group make contributions to the world.
3. Children derive pleasure and pride from hearing and reading stories about children like themselves and seeing illustrations of characters who look as if they stepped out of their homes or communities.
4. Multicultural literature offers hope and encouragement to children who face the types of dilemmas and experiences depicted in some of the books they read.
5. Children who read culturally diverse books encounter authors who use language in inventive and memorable ways, who create multidimensional characters, and who engender aesthetic and literacy experiences that con touch the heart, mind, and soul.

So, how do you select multicultural literature?

• Cultural accuracy
• Richness to cultural details
• Authentic dialogue and relationships
• In-depth treatment of cultural issues
• Inclusion of members of a minority group for a purpose

Designing the Classroom Library

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Students will read 50% more books in classrooms with libraries than those who don’t have the same access to books. The classroom library should be highly visible and shows the importance of this part of the classroom. There should be comfy seating with about 5-6 books per student in the classroom. There should be multiple copies of favorite books. Also, books should include a variety or genres and reading levels.

Listening to Literature

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When children listen to literature, they are exposed to stories and poems they cannot, or will not, read on their own. Often, once children are excited by hearing a selection, they want to read it for themselves. Through hearing stories and poems, students develop a positive feeling towards books.

Read-alouds can be used too. This is where the teacher reads for at least 10-20 minutes a day to students. Reading aloud needs to be incorporated into all aspects of the curriculum.

Helping Children Select Books

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Teachers can tell exciting anecdotes about authors, provide previews of interesting stories, show videos about stories, suggest titles of stories that match students’ interests, enourage author searches on the Internet, share leveled book listings, or compile teacher- and/or student- annotated book lists.

Core Books: a collection of books at each grade that is judged to be age appropriate and of high quality. Students have little to no choice in the selection of core books.

Reading Workshops: a way to integrate the language arts around literature and provide an organizational framework that allows readers to demonstrate their use of reading strategies be responding to books and sharing meaning with others.

Literature Circles: are small, temporary discussion groups that have choosen to read the same story, poem, article, or book. Each member prepares to take specific responsiblities in the upcoming discussion, and everyone comes to the group with the notes needed to help perform that job. The circles have regular meetings, with discussion roles rotating each session. Teams are formed by choice of reading material, not ability level.

Encouraging Responses to Literature

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Lead students in classroom experiences in which they analyze their personal reactions to what they have read. This can be done through book talks, free response and literature journals. Reader-response theory is a theory that states that the reader is crucial to the construction of the literacy experience.

Vacca, J. L., Vacca, R. T., & Gove, M. K. (2012). Reading and learning to read (8th ed.). New York: Longman.

Classroom Application

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I love all of the strategies and techniques for setting up a classroom library. The tips on incorporating multicultural literature will be especially helpful because I feel like this is an area that I struggle because I choose books that I think student will enjoy, not always thinking about multicultural literature.

Relationships Between Reading and Writing

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Students should write about what they are reading and should read about what they are writing. Supported by new knowledge about literacy development, today’s teachers recognize that when students are engaged in writing, they are using and manipulating written language. In doing so, children develop valuable concepts about print and how messages are created.

Writing and reading abilities develop concurrently and should be nurtured together. Children write first and read later according to Carol Chomsky. Children acquire letter and word knowledge through invented spellings. Teachers need to understand that the reading and writing connections for students from diverse backgrounds ought to be based on the roles reading and writing play in the social lives of people of various cultures.

• Reading and writing processes are correlated; that is, good readers are generally good writers, and vice versa.
• Students who write well tend to read more than those who are less capable writers.
• Wide reading may be as effective in improving writing as actual practice in writing.
• Good readers and writers are likely yo engage in reading and writing independently because they have healthy concepts of themselves as readers and writers.

Creating Environments for Reading and Writing

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There are 8 suggestions for encouraging classroom writing:

1. Use students’ experiences, and encourage them to write about things that are relevant to their interests and needs
2. Develop sensitivity to good writing by reading poetry and literature to students
3. Invent ways to value what students have written
4. Guide the reading personally
5. Write stories and poetry of your own and share them with your students
6. Tie in writing with the entire curriculum
7. Start a writing center in your classroom
8. Create a relaxed atmosphere

When a teacher encourages students to write, they engage in reading activities in varied and unexpected ways.

Connecting Reading and Writing

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Dialogue journals emphasize meaning while providing natural, functional experiences in both writing and reading. Students and teachers use dialogue journals to converse in writing. A teacher’s response to students’ entries may include comments, questions, and invitations to children to express themselves.

Buddy journals are similar to dialogue journals except instead of the teacher writing back, another student writes back.

Key pals are similar to pen pals except that students write back and forth through email or other electronic technology. Key pal correspondence creates opportunities for students to communicate with other students from around the world, learn about different cultures, ask questions, and develop literacy skills.

Double-entry journals provide students with an opportunity to identify text passages that are interesting or meaningful to them and to explore, in writing, why. Students fold paper in half lengthwise to create two columns for journal entries. On the left side, readers select quotes from the text (could be a word, phrase, sentence, or more) that they find interesting. On the right side, the reader enters their personal responses and reactions to the text.

Reading journals provide students with more structure and less choice in deciding what they will write about. The teacher often provides a prompt to guide the students’ writing after a period of sustained reading.

Response journals are different from reading journals because of the amount of prompting the teacher gives. Response journals invite readers to respond to literacy texts freely, without being prompted.

Writing notebooks are used to gather observations, thoughts, reactions, ideas, unusual words, pictures, and interesting facts that might later spur them to write. Unlike journals, the notebooks are meant to provide students with a place to collect thoughts for future writing.

Multigenre projects or paper is a collection of genres that reflects multiple responses to a book, theme, or topic. Students are given choices about which genres to use and they experiment with writing in a variety of ways.

A Plot scaffold is an open-ended script in which students use their imaginations and creative writing in a playful way. The open-ended scripts include characters, a setting, problem, and solution with spaces for the students to write additional descriptions and problem-solving dialogue. There are 7 elements to plot:

1. The book
2. The problem
3. Backfill
4. A complication
5. Action-reaction
6. Dark moment
7. Resolution

The Writing Process

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Traditionally, these stages include having students:

1. Brainstorm (a time to generate ideas, stimulate thinking, make plans, and create a desire to write) what they want to write
2. Draft their thoughts
3. Revise their thoughts after input from the teacher or peers
4. Edit their writing for errors
5. Publish their writing

The authors of our text have a few different terms for these stages.

• Discovery: finding a topic and writing preliminary ideas
• Drafting: getting ideas down on paper
• Revising: Making it right

The Writing Workshop

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Begins by providing students with the structure they need to understand, develop, or use specific writing strategies or by giving them direction in planning their writing or in revising their drafts. The minilesson is  brief, direct instructional exchange (usually no longer than 10 minutes) between the teacher and the writing group (can be the whole group too).

Writing workshop plan:

• Minilesson (3-10 minutes)
• Writing process (45-120 minutes)
• Group share session (10-15 minutes)

A main purpose of a group sharing session is to have writers reflect on the day’s work. “Process discussions” focus of concerns implicit in the following questions:

• How did your writing go today? Did you get a lot done?
• Did you write better today than yesterday?
• Was it hard for you to keep your mind on what you were writing?
• What do you think you’ll work on tomorrow?
• What problems did you have today?

Guided Writing Instruction

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An instructional framework in which teachers scaffold students’ writing as they write. Guided writing involves teaching skills that are needed by students based on actual observation, engaging the students in conversations as they write, and using prompts to guide instruction.

Reading – Writing – Technology Connections

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Technology integrated into the curriculum for meaningful learning, can be a powerful tool in students’ literacy development. Students have instant access to electronic texts on the Internet. Using computers to construct electronic texts helps students examine ideas, organize and report information and inquiry findings, and communicate with others. Word processing, desktop publishing, and authoring software programs allow students to use and develop literacy skills to publish writing in creative ways and prepare multimedia reports and presentations relevant to curriculum objectives.

Vacca, J. L., Vacca, R. T., & Gove, M. K. (2012). Reading and learning to read (8th ed.). New York: Longman.

Classroom Application

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I really liked the idea of having the teacher write stories and poetry and sharing it with the students. This gives students a role model to their writing and then they can get to know more about their teacher through their writing. When the students write during class about a topic the teacher gives or just free journal writing, the teacher can write too and share what they wrote. I will also use the ideas for setting up the classroom to encourage writing. Writing is so important in students’ lives and will be something they will use when they get older too. I want to encourage this the most I can.

Scaffolding the Development and Use of Comprehension Strategies

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Scaffolding instruction means that teachers model strategies step-by-step and explicitly demonstrate the processes of thinking before, during, and after one reads. Next, teachers provide the students with guided practice in the strategies, followed by independent practice and application.

Active Comprehension and Asking Questions

A common comprehension strategy is to have students answer questions about what is read. These questions include:

• Literal questions: students answer by using information stated in the text
• Inferential questions: students answer by using the background knowledge along with the information from the text
• Evaluative questions: students answer by making judgements about what they read

When students are engaged in a process of generating questions and making connections throughout reading, they are involved in active comprehension.

Reciprocal Questioning (ReQuest)

ReQuest encourages students to ask their own questions about the material being read.

Question-Answer Relationships (QARs)

QARs help learners know what information sources are available for seeking answers to different types of text questions. QARs enhance student’s ability to answer comprehension questions by teaching them how to find information they need to answer questions. The first information source in the text. The second source in the reader.

Questioning the Author (QtA)

QtA demonstrates the kinds of questions students need to ask in order to think more deeply and construct meaning about segments of text as they read. Students learn that authors are fallible and may not always express ideas in the easiest was for readers to understand.

Reciprocal Teaching

Reciprocal teaching is an approach to scaffolding reading comprehension in which teachers introduce four strategies, model the strategies, and gradually encourage independent use of the strategies in small groups as students take on the role of the teacher. The four strategies are:

1. Predicting what the text is about
2. Raising questions about the text
3. Summarizing the text
4. Clarifying difficult vocabulary and concepts

Think-Alouds

Think-alouds is a strategy in which teachers and students share their thoughts, discuss what they wonder about and what confuses them, and make connections as they are reading. One of the best times to do think-alouds is when the teacher is reading a story out loud.

Developing Readers’ Awareness of Story Structure

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Stories are central to student’s reading development. Student’s knowledge of stories begins to develop at an early age.

Mapping a Story for Instructional Purposes

Story maps are a way of identifying major structural elements, both explicit and implicit, underlying a story to be taught in class. Structural elements include setting, characters, and the problem/solution and the steps it took between the two.

Building a Schema for Stories

Some activities to build schemas for stories are: read, tell, and perform stories in class; show relationships between story parts (flow charts work best); reinforce story knowledge through instructional activities. Some of the instructional activities include:

• Macrocloze stories are similar to cloze passages except that the teacher removes single words, sentences, or even whole paragraphs from a story.
• Scrambled stories are a story separated into its parts and jumbled
• Story frames provide the student with a skeletal paragraph: a sequence of spaces tied together with transition words and connectors that signal a line of thought
• Circular story maps use pictures to depict the sequence of events leading to the problem of the story

Guiding Interactions Between Reader and Text

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Directed Reading-Thinking Activity (DR-TA)

DR-TA involves readers in the process of predicting, verifying, judging, and extending thinking about the text material.

KWL

KWL is a three-step teaching plan designed to guide and to motivate students as they read to acquire information from the text. K – What do you know? W – What do you want to find out? L – What did you learn?

Discussion Webs

Discussion webs require students to explore both sides of an issue during discussion before drawing conclusions. In the center of the web is a question. The question reflects more than one point of view. Students explore the pros and cons of the question in the No and Yes columns of the web.

Story Impressions

Story impressions is the name of a strategy that helps students anticipate what stories could be about. Fragments from the story, in the form of clue words, enable readers to form an overall impression of how the characters and events interact in the story.

Text Connections

Text connections can be thought of in three ways:

• Text-to-Self: This is a text connection that asks the students to share what a piece of fiction or nonfiction text reminds them of personally
• Text-to-Text: This is a text connection that asks the students to recall another text that reminds them of the one they are reading
• Text-to-World: This type of connection is more inferential in nature because it asks the students to make connections beyond the story

Vacca, J. L., Vacca, R. T., & Gove, M. K. (2012). Reading and learning to read (8th ed.). New York: Longman.

Classroom Application

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Something that I really liked from this chapter was having the students come up with questions to enhance their comprehension. This is something I would like to use with the student I am tutoring as well in my classroom someday. This is a different technique to work on comprehension that I wouldn’t have thought of. I also like the text connections because this allows the student to relate what they are reading to something they already know.

The Relationship Between Vocabulary and Comprehension

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Experiences, Concepts, and Words

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Vocabulary is represented by breadth and depth of all the words we know – the words we use, recognize, and respond to in meaningful acts of communication. Breadth is the size and scope of out vocabulary and depth is the level of understanding that we have of words. Vocabulary is classified by four components: listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

Principles to Guide Vocabulary Instruction

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Principle 1: Select Words That Children Will Encounter While Reading Literature and Content Material

• Key Words
• Useful Words
• Interesting Words
• Vocabulary-Building Words

Principle 2: Teach Words in Relation to Other Words

When words are taught in relation to other words, students are actively drawn into the learning process. They must use background knowledge and experiences to detect similarities and differences.

Principle 3: Teach Students to Relate Words to Their Background Knowledge

Ask “What is it that the students already know about that they can use as an anchor point, as a way of accessing this new concept?”

Principle 4: Teach Words in Prereading Activities to Activate Knowledge and Use Them in Postreading Discussion, Response, and Retelling

Prereading and postreading vocabulary activities that connect vocabulary words to content are more desirable than isolated vocabulary exercises.

Principle 5: Teach Words Systematically and in Depth

Researchers are finding that for students to process vocabulary in depth, they must generate a novel product using the term.

Principle 6: Awaken Interest in and Enthusiasm of Words

The teacher’s attitude towards vocabulary instruction can be contagious.

Strategies for Vocabulary and Concept Development

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• Relating Experiences to Vocabulary Learning
  • The more direct experiences students have, the better.
• Using Context for Vocabulary Growth
  • Students need to hear the new words used in different contexts.
• Developing Word Meanings
  • The ability to relate new words to known words, can be built through synonyms, antonyms, and multiple-meaning words
    • Synonyms: words that are similar in meaning to other words
    • Antonyms: words that are opposite in meaning to other words
    • Multiple-Meaning Words: give students opportunities to see how words operate in context
• Classifying and Categorizing Words
  • Categorization: students recognize that they can group words that label ideas, events, or objects. The teacher gives students 2-6 words and ask them to find the word that describes all the other words or to cross off the word that doesn’t belong
  • Word Sorts: to group words into different categories by looking for shared features among their meanings
  • Concept Circles: putting words or phrases in the sections of a circle and then directing students to describe or name the concept relationship among the sections
  • Semantic Mapping: a strategy that shows readers and writers how to organize important information
  • Analogies: a comparison of two similar relationships
  • Paired-Word Sentence Generation: a task that could be used to test students’ understanding of difficult concepts. The teacher gives students two related words. The goal of the strategy is to generate one sentence that correctly demonstrates an understanding of the words and their relationship to each other

Semantic Analysis to Writing:

Predictogram: Story elements – including the setting. the incidents in the plot, characterization, the character’s problem or goal, how the problem or goal is resolved, and the theme or larger issue to which the problem or goal relates – can be used to develop students’ meaning vocabulary with the predictogram strategy.

Teachers choose words from the story that they feel will be challenging to the students. The words and their meanings are discussed in class, and students relate their personal associations with the words. Finally, students work in groups to predict how they think the author might use each tern in the story.

Self-Selection Strategy: Students select the words to be studied. Each student selects one word they believe the class should learn, the teacher chooses one too. These words are written in the board and students give the definitions they gathered from the context in which they found the word.

Word Knowledge Rating: A way to get students to analyze how well they know vocabulary words:

• I’ve never seen the word
• I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know what it means.
• I recognize it in context. It has something to do with _____________.
• I know the word in one or several of its meanings.

Vacca, J. L., Vacca, R. T., & Gove, M. K. (2012). Reading and learning to read (8th ed.). New York: Longman.

Classroom Application

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I really liked reading about the strategies for vocabulary and concept development. I have never heard of some of the strategies and look forward to using some of them. Concept circles sounded interesting and is a different visual that just putting the words in a list. I also liked the idea of paired-word sentence generation, giving the students two words that can be written in a sentence together to make them related. I also liked the idea of the predictogram and might be something I will use for tutoring.

Defining Oral Reading Fluenct

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Fluency means reading easily and well or the ability to read expressively and meaningfully, as well as accurately and with appropriate speed. Fluency has three parts:

1. Accuracy in word decoding: readers must be able to sound out words (using phonics and other word decoding strategies). Mediated word identification may need to be used. This means that the reader may need more time to retrieve words from their long-term memory.
2. Automatic processing or automaticity: readers use as little mental effort as possible in the decoding or text, saving mental energy for comprehension.
3. Prosody or prosodic reading: a linguistic concept that refers to such features in oral language as intonation, pitch, stress, pauses, and the duration placed on specific syllables.

Effective fluency instruction has three parts too: instruction, practice, and assessment. Fluency instruction should incorporate the teaching of basic skills such a phonemic awareness and phonics. It should also model what fluency looks and sounds like. Fluency practice includes the use of decodable text and other independent-level texts to strengthen the sounds and spelling that are taught in the classroom.

The final component to fluency is assessment. Assessing fluency can be done relatively easily and requires little time, especially with today’s available technology.

Predictable text can be read with ease. Predictable books have context or setting that is familiar or predictable to most students. The pictures should also support the text. The story line is predictable and there may be a repetitive pattern. There are several different kinds of predictable texts:

• Chain or Circular Stories (If You Give a Mouse a Cookie)
• Cumulative Stories (The Gingerbread Man)
• Pattern Stories (The Three Billy Goats Gruff)
• Question and Answer Stories (Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?)
• Repetition of Phrase (Goodnight Moon)
• Rhyme (Is Your Mama a Llama?)
• Songbooks (Over in the Meadow)

Strategies to Assist with Fluency

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• Choral reading is reading aloud in unison with a whole class or group of students.
• Echo reading is a method of modeling oral reading in which the teacher reads a line of a story and then the students echo by reading the same line back, imitating the teacher’s intonation and phrasing.
• Fluency-oriented reading instruction (FORI) was developed for whole group instruction with a grade-level basal reader. FORI incorporates the research-based practices of repeated, assisted reading with independent silent reading within a three-part classroom program. The three components are a reading lesson that includes teacher-led, repeated oral reading and partner reading, a free-reading period at school, and home reading. The purpose of FORI is to build fluency and comprehension of grade-appropriate text through repeated reading, text-related discussion, and teacher support and guidance before and after reading.
• Reader’s theater is an oral presentation of drama, prose, or poetry by two or more readers. Reader’s theater differs from orally reading a selection in that several readers take the parts of the characters in the story or play. Instead of memorizing or improvising their parts as in other types of theater productions, the players read them.
• Repeated readings are done orally and provide additional sensory reinforcement for the reader, allowing him or her to focus on the prosodic elements of reading that are essential of phrasing. Oral readings also ensure that the student is actually reading, not skimming or scanning the text. This involves simply having a child reading a short passage from a book, magazine, or newspaper more than once with differing amounts of support.
• Paired repeated readings is where students select their own passage from the material with which they are currently working with. Students first read their own passages silently and then take turns reading them out loud.
• The fluency development lesson has five steps to follow. Those steps are:
  1. Read the text to the class while students follow along silently
  2. Discuss the content of the text
  3. Together, read the text chorally several times
  4. Have the class practice reading the text in pairs
  5. With the entire class, have volunteers perform the text as individuals, pairs, or groups of four
• Automated reading or listening while reading a text
• The oral recitation lesson has two parts: direct instruction and student practice. The first part incorporates comprehension, practice, and then performance. The second part involves practicing until mastery is achieved.
• Support reading strategy and cross-age reading both emphasize specific aspects of fluency training and integrate the teaching of fluency with other important aspects of reading, such as comprehension and word recognition.

Parents can also be involved in their student’s learning by:

• Reading more
• Reading aloud
• Rereading familiar texts
• Echo-reading
• Using predictable books

Assessing Oral Reading Fluency

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The easiest way to do this is to listen to them read orally and keep records of assessment. Fluency assessments help teachers determine if their instructional approaches are working, and if more instruction is needed for some students.

The simplest way to formally assess fluency is to take timed samples of students’ reading and compare their performance with published oral reading fluency norms or standards. The number of correct words per minute assesses both accuracy and automaticity, also known as reading rate. To get a word-correct-per-minute (WCPM) score, students are assessed individually as they read for one minute from an unpracticed, unfamiliar, grade-level passage of text.

Vacca, J. L., Vacca, R. T., & Gove, M. K. (2012). Reading and learning to read (8th ed.). New York: Longman.

Classroom Application

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I really enjoyed reading about all the different fluency strategies. I like how some of them were for large groups and how some were for small groups or individuals. I have seen choral reading done before but not much echo reading which really interested me. I also liked how the text mentioned that assessment can be done by simply just listening to the students read. This makes reading assessment seem a lot less stressful than having to do a formal assessment.

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Defining Word Identification

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Several terms have been associated with identifying words: word attack, word analysis, word recognition, and decoding. Word identification means putting a name or label on words that are encountered in print. Word recognition is a process that involves immediate identification. This could include sight-word recognition or sight vocabulary. The terms word attack, word analysis, and decoding suggest the act of translating print into speech through analysis of letter-sound relationships. Also commonly referred to as phonics. Phonics provides readers with a tool to “attack” the pronunciation of words that are not recognized immediately.

Phases of Development in Children’s Ability to Identify Words

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Prealphabetic phase: Occurs before the development of alphabetic knowledge. Children are able to recognize some words by sight because of the distinctive visual and contextual cues in or around the recognized word. This can include cereal boxes, restaurant logos and other environmental print.

Partial alphabetic phase: When they begin to develop some knowledge about letters and detect letter-sound relationships.

Full alphabetic phase: Emerges in a child’s leteracy development when readers identify words by matching all of the letters and sounds. Sounding out letters and blending them into words may be laborious and slow at the beginning but eventually it will become more smooth.

Consolidated alphabetic phase: Would be able to segment word into to larger letter or spelling patterns and match them to larger sound units known as onsets and rimes. Onsets are the initial consonants and consonant patterns that come at the beginning of syllables. Rimes are the vowel and conconants that follow them at the end of syllables.

Approaches and Guidelines for Teaching Phonics

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Analytic phonics: A whole-to-part approach to word study in which the student is first taught a number of sight words and then relevant phonic generalizations, which then apply to other words. The instruction involves these steps:

1. Observe a list of known words with a common letter-sound relationship
2. Begin questioning about how the words look and sound the same and how they are different
3. Elict the common letter-sound relationship and discuss
4. Have the learners phrase a generalization about the letter-sound relationship

Synthetic phonics: A part-to-whole phonics approach to reading instruction in which the student learns the sounds represented by letters and letter combinations, blends these sounds together to pronounce new words, and finally identifies which phonics generalizations apply. The instruction involves these steps:

1. Teach the letter names
2. Teach the sound or sounds each letter represents
3. Drill on the letter-sound relationships until rapidly recognized. Discuss rules and form generalizations about relationships that usually apply yo words
4. Teach the blending of separate sounds to make words
5. Provide the opportunity to apply blending to unknown words

Linguistic instruction: A beginning reading approach based on highly regular sound-symbol patterns. This approach emphasizes learning to decode words through regular letter patterns like fish, wish, dish, and swish. Decodable text contains the following features: It is text that is written with a large number of words that have phonetic similarities and there is typically a match between the text and the phonic elements that the teacher has taught.

Language of Phonics:

• Digraphs – when two or more consonants or vowels are combined to produce a new sound
  • ch
  • sh
  • th
  • wh
  • ph
  • gh
  • -nk
  • -ng
  • oa
  • ee
  • ea
  • ai
  • ay
• Consonant Blends – two or three consonants grouped together, but each consonant retains the original sound
  •  l blends
    • bl
    • cl
    • fl
    • gl
    • pl
    • sl
  • r blends
    • br
    • cr
    • dr
    • fr
    • gr
    • pr
    • tr
  • s blends
    • sc
    • sk
    • sm
    • sn
    • sp
    • st
    • sw
  • three-letter blends
    • scr
    • spr
    • str
• Diphthongs – sounds that consist of a blend of two separate vowel sounds
  • /oi/ as in oil
  • /oy/ as in toy
  • /au/ as in taught
  • /aw/ as in saw
  • /ou/ as in out
  • /ow/ as in how
• Syllables –  a vowel or a cluster of letters containing a vowel and pronounced as a unit. The number of syllables in a word is equal to the number of vowel sounds.
  • Long vowels
    • CV
      • be
    • CVe
      • like
    • CVVC
      • paid
  • Short vowels
    • VC or CVC
      • it
      • hot
  • R-controlled
    • Vr
      • art
    • CVr
      • car
  • Digraph/diphthng variations
    • VV
      • saw
      • book
      • boil
      • out

Analogy-based instuction: Children are taught to use their knowledge of letters representing onsets and rimes in words they already know how to pronounce, rather than their knowledge of letter-phoneme correspondences to pronounce unfamiliar words. Children learn to read words in context better than out of context and that “chunking words” by letter patterns is what good readers do.

Embedded phonics instruction: Often associated with holistic, meaning-centered teaching.

Guidelines for Contemporary Phonics Instruction:

1. Phonics instruction needs to build on a foundation of phonemic awareness and knowledge of the way language works
2. Phonics instruction needs to be integrated into a total reading program
3. Phonics instruction needs to focus on reading print rather than on learning rules
4. Phonics instruction needs to include the teaching of onsets and rimes. Phonograms or rimes have been found to be generalizable. There are 286 phonograms that appear in primary grade texts, 95% were pronounced the same in every word in which they are found
5. Phonics instruction needs to include spelling-based strategies

Strategies for Teaching Phonics

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Making Words: Flip books make students aware of their word-making capability when they substitute different consonants at the beginning of a rime. Consider these steps:

1. Decide on the rime that you wish students to practice, ad develop a rime card for each of the students
2. Develop a set of consonant letter cards for each student that can be used to make words with the rime that has been targeted for pratice
3. Direct students to use the letter cards to make a word
4. Have students change the first letter and make a new word
5. Repeat through the activity until all letters are used

Word Walls: Adapted for a variety of word study purposes at different grade levels. Kindergarten classrooms often begin word walls by listing the letters of the alphabet in large, bright letters. High-frequency words, words that occur repeatedly in text, are added to the wall underneath the letters of the alphabet. Middle-level teachers may include more homophones, compound words, or commonly misspelled words for students to reference.

Using Meaning and Letter-Sound Information to Identify Words

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Modified Cloze Passages: Can be constructed from materials that are at first relatively easy to read. Gradually, the difficulty of the reading material can be increased. Teachers often create their own materials which seem to be more effective as the teachers are in the best position to gear the material to the needs of their students.

Cloze activities can contain 1-20 deletions in a passage. If cloze activities seem too hard, choices can be given for each blank.

Cross Checking and Self-Monitoring Strategies: Help readers combine letter-sound and meaning information to make sense while reading. Cross checking simply involves rereading a sentence or two to “cross check,” confirm, modify, or reject, probable pronunciations of unknown words encountered during reading. If the sentence makes sense, the meaning confirms the reader’s cross-checking; if the sentence doesn’t make sense, the reader tries again. Cross-checking is crucial in learning to read, especially at the earliest stages of development. Another way to help children self-monitor is to discuss with them what to do when they come to unknown words, encourage them to use meaning and letter-sound information.

Using Structural Analysis to Identify Words

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Structural Analysis involves identifying words through meaningful units such as prefixes, suffixes, and root words. The smallest meaningful unit of a word is a morpheme. This also includes inflected endings, which are suffixes that change the tense or degree of the word but not the meaning:

• ing as in going
• d as in saved
• ed as in looked
• er as in smaller
• s as in books
• es as in dresses
• ly as in slowly
• est as in tallest

Stuctural analysis also includes compound words and contractions.

Vacca, J. L., Vacca, R. T., & Gove, M. K. (2012). Reading and learning to read (8th ed.). New York: Longman.

Classroom Application

I loved all the different strategies for word identification. I have seen flip books used before for making words with similar rimes, I like the idea from the book to use different cards to make different words as a group and talk about their meaning. I think it is also important to know all the parts that words can have such as diphthongs and digraphs so that they can be taught to the students included as a reading strategies.

Trends in Assessment

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High-Stakes Testing

Consequences of this testing, good or bad, are based only on the performance on the test. This test is intended to provide the public with a guarantee that students can perform at a level necessary to function in society and in the work force. Relied on to improve instruction and benefit the students and not to punish schools or students.

Authentic Assessment

Students are doing reading and writing tasks that look like real-life tasks and students are primarily in control of the reading and writing tasks. Students develop ownership, engage thoughtfully, and learn to assess themselves.

Retelling can be part of this. Narrative retelling encourages young children to think about stories and begin reasoning skills. Children begin retelling a story by telling the audience about their favorite parts of the story. They will then gradually move from discussing preferences to discussing identifiable and important parts of the story.

Information gathered from assessment should be useful in planning classroom instruction and guiding students to become reflective in order to help them assess their own strengths and weaknesses. This assessment becomes formative assessment. The information gathered is used to adapt instruction to meet students’ needs.

Formative assessment helps readers to think about their own learning and use self-assessment strategies. Students will answer questions such as:

• Where am I going?
• Where am I now?
• How can I close the gap?

Having students take an active role in the assessment process broadens the view of literacy development.

Some tools to help teachers authentically assess students include:

• observation techniques
• anecdotal records
• checklists
• interviews
• conferences and conversations with students
• writing folders
• portfolios

Formal Assessment

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Pressures for accountability have led many school districts and states to use formal reading tests as a means of assessment.

Standardized Tests

Standardized reading tests are machine-scored tests that sample reading performance during a single administration. These are useful in making comparisons among individuals or groups at the local, state, and national level. A normal referenced test is constructed by administering it to a large group of students in order to develop a norm. Norms represent average scores of a sampling of students selected for testing according to factors such as age, gender, race, grade, or socioeconomic status.

All assessments have a reliability and validity to them. Reliability refers to the stability of the test. The validity refers to how well the test measures what it is designed to measure.

Types of Test Scores

A raw score reflects the total number of correct items on a test. A grade equivalency score provides information about reading performance as it relates to students at various grade levels.

Types of Assessment

Survey tests represent a measure of general performance only. It does not yield precise information about an individual’s reading ability. Diagnostic tests are a type of formal assessment intended to provide more detailed information about individual students’ strengths and weaknesses.

Criterion-Referenced Tests

The mastery of reading skills should be assessed in relation to specific instructional objectives. Performance on a criterion-referenced test is judged by what a student can or cannot do with regard to the skill objectives of the test. The test taker isn’t compared to anyone else. This type of test is used to make instructional decisions about reading skills development.

Informal Assessment

Informal assessment also doesn’t compare the performance of a tested group or individual to a normative population. Instead, informal assessments may be given throughout the school year to individuals or groups for specific instructional purposes. One of the best uses of informal assessments is to evaluate how students interact with print in oral and silent reading situations.

Informal Reading Inventory (IRI)

An individually administered reading test. Usually consists of a series of graded word lists, graded reading passages, and comprehension questions. IRI information can lead to instructional planning that will increase students’ effectiveness with print.

Determining Reading Levels

The following reading levels can be determined for individual students by administering an IRI:

• Independent Level: The student reads fluently with excellent comprehension
• Instructional Level: The student can make progress in reading with instructional guidance
• Frustration Level: The student is unable to pronounce many of the words or is unable to comprehend the material well

Analyzing Oral Reading Miscues

Oral reading errors are also called miscues. Miscues are a deviation or difference between what a reader says and the word on the page. Miscue analysis can be applied to graded passages form an IRI or to the oral reading of a single passage that presents the student with an extended and intensive reading experience. To analyze miscues, you should ask at least four critical questions:

1. Does the miscue change the meaning?
2. Does the miscue sound like language?
3. Do the miscue and the text word look and sound alike?
4. Was an attempt made to correct the miscue?

Running Records

An assessment system for determining students’ development of oral reading fluency and word identification skills and strategies.

Analyzing Running Records

In order to determine appropriate material connections and instructional decisions from running records. The teacher calculate the words read correctly, analyze the student’s errors, and identify pattern of errors. The teacher pays close attention to self corrections. Running records provide insights into students’ strengths and weaknesses by allowing teachers to analyze patterns of miscues.

Other Informal Assessments

Words Correct Per Minute assessment involves students reading aloud for one minute from materials used in their reading lessons. The teacher also crosses off any words that were read incorrectly.

Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills includes a series of oral reading skill assessments. This includes:

• letter naming fluency
• initial sound fluency
• phoneme segmentation fluency
• non-sense word fluency
• oral reading fluency

Portfolio Assessment

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Portfolios are collections that document the literacy development of a student and include evidence of student work in various stages. The following elements may be included in a portfolio:

• Varied types of work, often completed over time
• Written and artistic responses to reading
• Writing in various genres
• Teacher-assigned and student-generated work
• Notes in a reading log or response journal
• List of books read, updated regularly
• Students’ self-reflections

Anecdotal Notes

These capture the gist of an incident that reveals something the teacher considers significant to understanding a student’s literacy learning. Anecdotal notes are intended to safeguard against the limitations of memory. Will aid the teacher in classifying information, inferring behavior, and making predictions about individual students or instructional strategies and procedures.

Checklists

A checklist consists of categories that have been presented for specific diagnostic purposes. They can be relatively short and open-ended or longer and more detailed.

Interviewing

Through interviewing, the teacher can discover what students are thinking and feeling. Periodic student interviews can lead to a better understanding of:

• Reading interests and attitudes
• How students perceive their strengths and weaknesses
• How they perceive processes related to language learning

Vacca, J. L., Vacca, R. T., & Gove, M. K. (2012). Reading and learning to read (8th ed.). New York: Longman.

Classroom Application

There were so many different types of assessment listed in this chapter that I will use in my classroom some day. The informal assessment options were very interesting because they will be something I have more control over choosing instead of formal assessments which seem to be chosen more by the school district. Running records and observations will probably be the two assessments I use most.