ENGED 370 – Virginia Wilson Chapter 1 – Knowledge and Beliefs about Reading

Belief System: What teachers believe about reading and learning to read is closely related to what they know about literacy learning and the teaching of literacy. Literacy learning can be done through:

1. Personal Experiences – past and present as readers and writers
2. Practical Experiences and knowledge of their craft as they work with and learn from students
3. Professional study that allows them to develop and extend their knowledge base about teaching and learning literacy

Intertextuality: is a word used by literary theorists to describe the connections that exist within and between texts.

Systematic Instructional Approach: includes direct teaching and a logical instructional sequence. ex. (teaching letter-sound relationships in a direct and systematic manner but relying more on explicit instruction – make it a practice to model skills and strategies that children need to decipher unknown words, explain why it is important for students to learn the skill or strategy under study, and guide students in their acquisition of the skill or strategy.)

Transliteracy: is the ability to read, write, and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media. (Being able to use, locate, and evaluate information from a web page; participate in an online discussion; listen to a podcast; and develop a video production are examples)

Jean Piaget: his theory of constructivism provides a compelling explanatory framework for understanding the acquisition of knowledge. (Child Psychologist of the twentieth century) theorized that children do not internalize knowledge directly from the outside but construct it from inside their heads, in interaction with the environment. (we acquire knowledge by building it from the inside as we interact with people, processes, ideas, and things)

An Autobiographical narrative is a powerful tool that helps one link their personal history as a reader to instructional beliefs and practices. Teachers who engage in narrative inquiry explore mental pictures of memories, incidents, or situations in their lives so they can reflect, make connections, and understand why some decisions are made.

Practical knowledge is characterized by the beliefs, values, and attitudes that you construct about readers and writers, texts, reading and writing processes, learning to read and write, and the role of the teacher in the development of children’s literate behavior. (Field experiences and student teaching are vehicles for acquiring this knowledge)

Professional Knowledge is acquired from an ongoing study of the practice of teaching. (the books and journals teachers read, the courses and workshops they take, and the conferences they attend contribute to the vision they have of reading and learning to read)

Literacy Coach: experts in reading and learning to read that provide professional development opportunities and resources to help develop expertise in the classroom. (the main role of a reading coach is to support teacher learning. But they also develop curriculum with colleagues, make professional development presentations for teachers, model lessons, provide resources, and visit classrooms to provide feedback.)

Multidisciplinary perspectives on reading and learning to read enrich and broaden the knowledge base so that teachers are in the very best position to use their professional expertise and judgment to make instructional decisions.

The Alphabetic principle suggests that there is a correspondence between letters (graphemes), which are the basic units of writing, and sounds (phonemes).

Orthographic knowledge: skilled readers chunk words into syllables automatically, in the course of perceiving letters. They can do this because of their knowledge of likely spelling patterns, or orthographic knowledge. This knowledge is so thoroughly learned that skilled readers devote less attention to encoding and put less energy into identifying words.

Because words are the primary units of written language, helping beginners develop word-reading skill is one of the important instructional responsibilities of teachers in learning to read. Other print conventions – directionality, upper- and lowercase usage, and punctuation – all need to be considered and will affect students’ ability to form words and read accurately and fluently.

Schema Theory and Reading Comprehension – Schemata reflect the prior knowledge, experiences, conceptual understandings, attitudes, values, skills, and procedures a reader brings to a reading situation. (Students use what they already know to give meaning to new events and experiences)The more we hear, see, read, or experience new information, the more we refine and expand existing schemata withing our language system. The more schema we have, the easier it will be for us to comprehend what we are reading. They go hand in hand. When a good fit between the two occurs, schema functions in at least three ways to facilitate comprehension –

1. First schema provides a framework that allows readers to organize text info
2. it allows readers to make inferences about what is/going to happen in a text
3. helps readers elaborate on the material (they engage, in cognitive activity that involves speculation, judgment, and evaluation)

Metacognition – refers to knowledge about and regulation of some form of cognitive activity. In the case of reading, it refers to:

1. Self-knowledge: the knowledge students have about themselves as readers and learners
2. Task-knowledge: the knowldge of reading and the strategies that are appropriate given a task at hand
3. Self-monitoring: the ability of students to monitor reading by keeping track of how well they are comprehending

Implicit teaching: a message to a reader that the reading is supposed to make sense. Can be used to see if a child understands the context of a word in a sentence or the sentence itself. (ex. if a child provides a word other than the unfamiliar word bu preserves the meaning of the text, the teacher would be instructionally and theoretically consistent by praising the child and encouraging him to continue reading)

A teacher can make the implicit messages about reading strategies Explicit teaching by modeling, demonstrating, explaining, rationale-building, thinking aloud, and reflecting on the text.

Cognition and Language are crucial components of human development, and most children understand and use all of the basic language patterns by the time they are 6 years old.

• Jean Piaget believed through cognitive development that children’s language acquisition is influenced by their environment, and how they explore, interpret, and give meanings to the events they experience. His belief is that the child needs to interact with immediate surroundings and to manipulate objects in order to develop.
• Lev Vygotsky also believed that children needed to be active participants in their own learning. But he also felt that as they grew older, they began to regulate their own problem-solving activities through the mediation of egocentric speech. Basically, children carry on external dialogues with themselves which gives way to inner speech.

A pyscholinguistic view of reading combine a psychological understanding of the reading process with an understanding of how language works. (readers act on and interact with written language in an effort to make sense of a text) Readers search for and coordinate information cues from three distinct systems in written language: the graphophonemic, the syntactic, and the semantic.

1. Graphophonemic system: relies upon the print itself in order to provide readers with a major source of information – the graphic symbols or marks on the page represent speech sounds.
2. Syntactic system: depends on readers possessing knowledge about how language works. Syntactic information is provided by the grammatical relationships within sentence patterns. (readers use their knowledge of the meaningful arrangement of words in sentence to construct meaning from text material)
3. Semantic system: system of language that stores the schemata that readers bring to a text in terms of background knowledge, experiences, conceptual understandings, attitudes, beliefs, and values.

Models of Reading-

1. Bottom-up Models – assume that the process of translating print to meaning begins with the print. the process is initiated by decoding graphic symbols into sounds. The reader first identifies features of letters, then links them to letters, combines to form spelling patterns, then words, sentences, paragraphs, and text level processing.
   • Automaticity – the concept suggests that humans can attend to only one thing at a time, but may be able to process many things at once as long as no more than one requires attention.
2. Top-down Models – assume that the process of translating print to meaning begins with the reader’s prior knowledge. The process is initiated by making predictions or educated guesses about the meaning of some unit of print.
3. Interactive Models – assume that the process of translating print to meaning involves making use of both prior knowledge and print. The process is initiated by making predictions abut meaning and/or decoding graphic symbols .

Classroom Application: Well there was a ton of information in this chapter! I really like the idea of using a systematic instructional approach to teaching because it involves both implicit and explicit techniques in teaching. I believe that children all learn differently and if I can use both to work with my students on reading then they will have more than one way to approach a word or sentence in a book. This would lead into my techniques for teaching students to read, I would use the interactive model which would encompass both the Bottom-up method and the Top-down processing styles. When I would read from the big books in front of the classroom, I would choose books that would challenge students to use both models. I would ask questions that would in-return elicit “educated guesses” from students. And other times I would ask students to “decode” the features of the text to form letters, words, and sentences. This way I am arming my students with multiple ways to think about text and to understand its meaning.

Notes from Video on Phonological Awareness – The big picture. The broader awareness of sound. Incorporates rhyming, singing, chanting, hearing sounds, illiteration (peter piper picks peppers…) syllables (slapping them, counting them)

Phonemic Awareness – smaller category of phonological awareness. Only works with phonemes. All Auditory.

Phonics – introduces print, visuals, text, rules, patterns.

See pdf’s attached in Eng Ed 370 Folder on laptop. Three Cueing System, Phonological Awareness, and Developmental Spelling stages. Saved in Fall 2020 Folder for school.