Reflect on literacy (or lack thereof) in your classroom. What have you tried in terms of literature and reading? Were the assignments successful? What are your hopes in terms of literacy instruction? What are the hurdles you are facing?
I probably should have done the entry on Faulkner, mainly because I think one of the quotes on my door is from that essay, but.... time is tight this week. So I didn’t want to spend it hunting down that text.
I’ve found that the level of literacy varies greatly from student to student. Students can be roughly grouped into categories, honors students, non-honors readers, students who can “read” but not read, and non-readers.
All the students in my honors class (about a third of my students), can read. Many of the students in this class will read for pleasure. So far, I hadn’t given them much to read that really stretched them. The biggest difficulty they’ve had was some of the more difficult reading comprehension questions I used for PSAT practice, and that was partially the result of the difficulty of the questions and not the passages themselves. They also had trouble completing the reading section of the PSAT in the time given. They also lack a lot of background knowledge that results in some comprehension difficulties. If the don’t know anything about a topic, then they are less likely to be able to predict what will happen. Authors of passages on tests like the ACT/SAT make assumptions about what their audience already knows about the subject that my students might not know. Unfamiliar place names, person names, or terms seemed to slow them down (even if you don’t have to know them to answer the questions). I hope to incorporate more ACT type reading to get them ready, but I haven’t done this yet.
In my other classes, reading ability is much more limited. Most students can read aloud the majority of the words in the texts we read. Fairly often however, they are tripped up by a word that surprise me. Many of my students didn’t know the words “gigantic” and “foreign” for instance. Even more than the honors students, they are hampered by a lack of background knowledge in whatever we read. Since they will be taking the state test in history, I try to use texts that are from the time periods covered (1877 to the present). The fact that I am exposing them to history that is new, or at least mostly new to them is good I think, BUT it also holds up comprehension. Giving them vocab lists beforehand and relevant historical and cultural information helps somewhat, but there are too many unfamiliar words in each chapter for me to assign all as vocab words for them to learn.
By far the biggest problem is understanding what they’ve just read. Even if they know all the words, they have trouble getting meaning out of it. For instance, a lot students incorrectly answered a chapter question in Night about the conditions of the train with information from a paragraph where some men repeat rumors about the condition of the camps. The have trouble noting what each part of a chapter is talking about, or finding answers in the text, especially if the answer is scattered throughout a page or two. This is a hurdle I’m not sure how to best approach other than giving them more practice with varied and increasingly complex texts. reading with inflection, books on tape, and stopping and getting everyone caught up on what’s going on. I’ve also got them to predict more recently, which seems to help.
There are a sizable number of students who, in addition to having the aforementioned difficulties, that still have trouble with pronouncing words from the page. To their credit, they don’t mind reading out loud to the class from time to time, but it’s painful to listen to. These students generally have not passed their English II test, and so that might account for their motivation to improve their reading ability. For them, the task of reading silently is pretty overwhelming, but since this is the best way for the reading students to get some practice in, I’m torn about what method to rely on most.
I think that some of these problems might be a result of a lack of being made to read in other classes in lower grades. Ideally, students should read and write regularly in every class except math, but I don’t know if this is the case in middle school. Also, having parents who encourage reading and read to/with their children probably makes a huge difference. I can’t do much about those factors now, but I would be interested in research about the factors that influence reading ability development.
(Yesterday there was a kid who looked about 10 sitting by the cashier at the Batesville Dominos reading the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I asked the man working he was his son, and he said no, he was the owner’s kid. I told him to pass along how happy I was to see a child reading).
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