For my first post about my reading, I choose to talk about
the importance of us as teachers understanding that we have the power to help
our students’ gain good reading and comprehension skills. Within this
understanding, we must begin by assisting our students in the comprehension of
words and helping them obtain good thinking skills that are required during
their reading.
For the subject I will be teaching, which is Theatre and
Spanish, I do believe that all of which Tovani speaks of in the first chapter
of his textbook does apply to it. Theatre and Spanish both deal with a lot of
literature. I want my students to be able to understand what they read,
especially since they will be interpreting in occasions what they read, be it
for a play, a monologue and what not. For the second subject I’ll be teaching, I
can also apply all of this, which reminds me about the Primary and Secondary
Discourses spoken about in James Gee’s article. The better we teach our
students how to learn, “…teach kids how to be strategic readers is to help them
become more thoughtful about their reading”, and better progress they will have
during their whole education.
I have, like everyone
else during our grade school years, struggled with the understanding of certain
readings I was required to do (especially since I spent some five years out of
the country); nonetheless I was given great teachers during my high school
education, that helped me get back right on track. To add to this, Tovani
accentuates in her writing that one of the main tasks that students need to do during
their reading is to identify “terms” that they aren’t familiar with to see what
they mean. “This activity help[s] students learn to slow down and look for
definitions of unfamiliar terms, a useful strategy for reading any textbook”
(pg: 7), which was a strategy that two of her colleagues, Amy and Ann utilized
to help their students in biology and English. I think that this strategy
reflects an answer to “What is the difference between learning
to read and reading to learn?”
I like that idea of "learning to read and reading to learn". They can both have positive applications for education, but clearly if spinned "reading to learn" has a negative connotation...but not really necessarily...does that make any sense? I was NOT a big reader as a child and I do not know why, I love books, but get impatient reading them at times, I tend to skim for meaning.When I have gotten what I want, I go to the next book. Why is this??? Hmmmm.
ReplyDeleteGreat point brought up about learning the terms. We have done that process in this class with reading unfamiliar and difficult text with terms specific to the articles. If I had not gone through and extracted the terms that I did not know and put meaning to them there is no way I could have put meaning to some of our articles. By doing so and going back and re-reading the article it help to find meaning in what the author was trying to say. Not to say that I got it all.
ReplyDeleteI am completely on board about teaching the students to look for terms they are not familiar with and finding what they mean. I am going to be a science teacher and I know this will be something I will encourage my students to do. Science has a lot of terms that can be confusing at first, but once you learn the stems and affixes it becomes much simpler to learn terms.
ReplyDeleteYour point about helping them obtain good thinking skills is directly linked with my own text. In one of the early chapters my author discusses the need to show students how good readers think. Using various methods and strategies we can show students the importance in identifying these words and becoming familiar with them. As you pointed out, this is the only way to truly master a new secondary Discourse. Without increasing our comprehension we are left with an inconsiderate text that we can little or nothing from.
ReplyDeleteGreat post Laura. I really like the quote from Gee that you included and I agree with your interpretation. That one of our goals as teachers should include how we need to help students become more thoughtful with their reading. How this will help with comprehension and understanding.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, as time consuming as it is, I usually try to keep a dictionary app close at hand when I am reading. I love the ease of switching between the definition and the thesaurus. Not like the old days, and having to flip through pages of a giant book!