My perceptions of content literacy and the adolescent reader are that the majority of today's students are not reading up to their grade level. In addition, students would rather do anything but read. From my point of view as a voracious reader, I find this incredibly sad. Students who are wasting their days playing mindless video games and watching meaningless television shows have absolutely no idea what they are missing out on. Reading can be such an unbelievable experience. The reader can go any where and be anything. In my opinion, the experience of reading a book can be more invigorating than any video game or television show.
My experience involving content literacy while teaching business education at Georgia College Early College was that the students did not even know basic terms and vocabulary. My teaching partner and I found ourselves giving remedial vocabulary lessons just to be able to teach our lessons. The lessons would then involve content vocabulary. We were experimenting with how best to have the students learn the vocabulary. For example, should we just have a hand-out or should we have the students copy the definitions from the overhead, or should we give them homework to go look up the definitions.... Copying from the overhead seemed to work best, but it was very time consuming.
Effective reading in my discipline involves having a somewhat advanced vocabulary, I have found having a dictionary handy and even the internet available so I can look something up if I need clarification is essential. In the future, I would want to have several dictionarys available to the students so they can look up the words they don't know. I would begin by teaching students how to look up a word in the dictionary and then decipher its meaning. In addition, I would make sure the content vocabulary in that unit is explained. I would also like to have an open-door policy with my students so that they feel comfortable asking me about anything they don't understand.
Gina,
ReplyDeleteI love your first paragraph! I love reading too, and struggle sometimes with the focus today in our culture on TV, internet, and other more advanced technologies. I still watch my fair share of TV, spend lots of time on the internet, but always feel I am missing out and can't wait to sit down with a good book. It sounds silly but life seems so much more simple when it's just you and your book. I also think your plans to teach your students how to look up words in the dictionary are great! After reading our article on Effective Literacy Instruction, what stood out to me the most was that students often just need a "push" to overcome barriers in their literacy in specific contents. For example, in a business class, a student might initially be intimidated by the material and all the fancy terms. However, when you take time as a teacher to really help students start at the most basic level and build on their knowledge, it can make all the difference in that student's experience- both his perception of his own abilities and his motivation to learn and engage in the material.
When I was growing up the words I always hated to hear from an adult were "look it up." Today I find myself using these words with my students and cringe internally but I still see the value to having to look something up. I think that allowing students to have access to materials to explain the words to them (as well as your knowledge) is a great idea. A lot of the time I was too intimidated by my teachers to admit that I didn't understand a word, especially when the other students were all nodding sagely in agreement to something I didn't get.
ReplyDeleteI think that in reference your question about how to get students to know the vocab., I would assign them homework to do definitions (because it's easy homework that keeps them engaged in the subject matter) and then maybe give them a handout in class with some terms you didn't ask them to define. This way, no one group is doing all the work and if you go over the terms assigned for homework as a class, it might spark a student who didn't understand it the night before.
I agree that students today do not read enough, and that is a good reason why their vocabulary is not where is should be. I like having the dictionaries on hand, but also try teaching the children to attempt to infer what the word means from the context of sentence. When trying to get them to learn new vocabulary, I like the homework of looking it up, but also maybe try to get the students to use it in a sentence so they can see how the definition works.
ReplyDeleteLooks like everyone is ready to discuss vocabulary this week ;-) Remember how your read the letter in class. It almost helps to show students different strategies. For example, if a text has quite a few new vocabulary words, read it through once - like many of you did - to get that context and GIST. Then identify words that are new, perhaps get context clues or look them up in the dictionary, or any combination. Then, re-read with the new meaning. Students often consider re-reading anathama. That's also sad because it is such a useful strategy for comprehension. I wonder why that is?
ReplyDelete