RED 7743 Notes Day One

RED 7743 Reading and Writing Processes
Dr. Susan Wegmann
January 24, 2011
Agenda
Read aloud – Out of the Dust
Enrique Puig, Inter-rater reliability exercise
Beginning Assessment
Allington and McGill-Franzen
Alexander and Fox
Goodman & Goodman
Commonalities
Inquiry Paper and Presentation discussion
Allington and McGill-Franzen
Scientific Inquiry (turn-of-the-century)
Factory metaphor (Cubberly, 1908)
Gray and Thorndike – graded reading materials and controlled vocabulary
Early 1900s - Oral recitation
1920s-1930s – Silent reading/comprehension
Basals reflected childhood experiences, rather than moral tales
1950s – press toward phonics instruction (stultifyingly uninteresting)

Allington and McGill-Franzen (cont)
1957 – Sputnik
1960s – desegregation influenced US government to become more involved in schooling
1965 – Elem and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) provided for reading teachers in low SES schools
“Schools could be sanctioned for not following the rules, but could not be legally sanctioned for failing to teach students.”
In essence, according to Allington and McGill-Franzen, ESEA was a good idea that was implemented poorly.
Allington and McGill-Franzen (cont)
1970-1980s – Minimum competency testing implemented
NAEP established in 1971, measures minimal skills
States learned to “play the game” – retentions increased, test-preparation increased, identification of students with disabilities increased, outright falsification increased,
1990s – National Standards, National testing proposed
A Nation at Risk (1983)
Becoming a Nation of Readers (1984)

Allington and McGill-Franzen (cont)
Controlled vocabulary basal reading
Skills mastery curriculum models
Schema theory comprehension
Literature-based instruction
Process Writing and Language Arts (80s & 90s)
Tradebook reading and writing
Full circle!
Allington and McGill-Franzen (cont)
First Grade Studies (Bond & Dykstra, 1967)
Students learn to read with a variety of materials and methods.
Teacher emerged as most important component (Bembry et al., 1998; Pressley, et al., 1999; Sanders, 1998)
Emergence of non-classroom teaching personnel
Expansion of special education
McGill-Franzen purports that all children can learn to read, and should be expected to read.
Allington purports that reading research has been limited in scope to students who struggle.
Allington and McGill-Franzen (cont)
1980s Banishment of “print” from Head Start Classrooms (backlash of skill-and-drill)
Direct Instruction: varied definitions
Explicit
Some say, “highly scripted.”
Effective teacher: knows when to be explicit
Enacted curriculum important
Basal reading series “dominates instructional time.” (Betts, 1949 mentioned same issue!)
Allington and McGill-Franzen (cont)
Cuban, 1990 notions of a “real school”
Discourse IRE pattern
Giving it up is like “Getting new bones” (Langer)
Poor children
Most likely to fail current US standards
Overrepresented in Special education
Most likely to be retained and leave w/o diploma
Success for All
The new “fall guy”
Worked in instances where there was no cohesive reading program in place – of course it showed improvement.
Allington and McGill-Franzen (cont)
Darling-Hammond – expertise of teachers matters
Role of Technology in teaching to read
Access for all?
Glorified textbooks and worksheets?
Alexander and Fox (2004)
Five eras
Six Emergent Premises Learned

Alexander and Fox (cont)
Five eras


Alexander and Fox (cont) Six Emergent Premises and Lessons
1. Membership within the reading community is flexible and alters the basic identity of that community and its orientation toward research and practice
Alexander and Fox (cont) Six Emergent Premises and Lessons
2. Prevailing trends within the research literature reflect the influence of sociopolitical forces outside the reading community.
Alexander and Fox (cont) Six Emergent Premises and Lessons
3. There is a recurrence of issues and approaches to reading research and practice across the decades.
a. whole-word or phonetic instructional approaches
b. balanced approaches
Alexander and Fox (cont) Six Emergent Premises and Lessons
4. “When we look across the eras of reading research . . . it becomes apparent that each is distinguished by the relative weight placed on body, mind, or society when understanding the nature of learners and learning.
Alexander and Fox (cont) Six Emergent Premises and Lessons
5. The field of reading research is not simply changing, but maturing.
Alexander and Fox (cont) Six Emergent Premises and Lessons
6. An overarching, general theory of reading across the lifespan is needed, or the field may be seen as conflicting, rather than complimentary.
Goodman & Goodman
Overarching philosophy:
All people make mistakes; the mistakes inform us about what people know/don’t know.

Miscue, rather than errors.
Reading aloud provides information about linguistic performance, and “provides a powerful means of examining readers’ process and underlying competence.

Goodman & Goodman (cont)
“What is said in oral reading is not what the eye has seen but what the brain has generated for the mouth to report” (p. 107, Goodman & Goodman, 1981).
Two prevailing questions: (p. 109)
Why did the reader make this miscue?
Does it make sense in the context of this story or article?
Use oral re-tellings to ascertain comprehension.

Goodman & Goodman (cont)
The Reader: An Intuitive Grammarian
Comprehension
Syntax

Interrelations of all the Cueing Systems (grammatical, graphophonic, semantic, and pragmatic)
“Our research demonstrates that the least proficient readers we studied in the 6th, 7th, and 8th grades use graphic information more than the most proficient readers.”
Goodman & Goodman (cont)
“Miscues reflect readers’ abilities to liberate themselves from detailed attention to print as they leap toward meaning” (p. 119, Goodman & Goodman, 1981).
“Miscues are the windows on language processes at work” (p. 122, Goodman & Goodman, 1981)