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While teachers are preparing students to participate in the world of college and career, they are also helping them become better readers for participation in personal interests and in civic life. And when it comes to motivating students to become engaged in their literacy development, these personal and civic engagements are sometimes initially more important than reasons related to career and college. This seems even more so in a world of technology and online communications. Personal and civic interests are also crucial in helping develop lifelong learning.
Career–Focused Reading Instruction in English
Reading practices in English class can focus on career-specific areas, such as reading like a journalist, author, editor, lawyer, critic, etc. According to employment websites, such as Monster.com and Careerbuilder, people with a strong background in English studies often hold positions such as social media manager, technical writer, lawyer, grant writer, librarian, editor and content manager, or nonprofit executive director. These positions emphasize critical reading; intertextual understanding; reaching unique as well as diverse audiences; and appreciation for metaphor, allusion, and narrative.
Reflect: How often do you talk with your students about the role of English class in helping them prepare for work in the real world? List as many places in the world of work as you can where English skills are prominent. Reflect on how you can share this information with your students.
Video and Reflection: Watch English in the Real World: A Sports Journalist, in which Ken Shulman shares his experiences reading and writing as a journalist. You may want to take notes on the questions below.
Reading Within, Across, and Beyond the Classroom
Reading and writing practices in English studies have both discipline- and career-specific content or focus as well as content that transcends college and career focus. In order to read well, students need to read beyond instruction-based reading for school. Students engaged in voluntary reading have a greater inclination to read and tend to do better in instruction-based reading. They also have better study habits. Voluntary reading supports school reading because it grows students’ vocabulary and background knowledge base—which is key for all readers (Krashen, 2004). Because voluntary reading supports school reading, it is important to promote reading that engages students and that will cause them to want to read on their own and in their free time. However, such reading may not always conform to the type of reading that is promoted in schools. Students may want to read humor, comics, fantasy fiction, etc. It is important not to confuse efforts to engage students in voluntary reading with instruction-based reading expectations. And it is important to recognize how reading that engages students is promoting their academic reading ability and further developing their understanding of their world.
Reflect: How do you incorporate independent or self-directed reading? Describe three ways you can introduce and encourage reading for pleasure among your students.
Reading the Word and the World
After Paulo Freire was exiled from Brazil and invited to Harvard University, he and his then research assistant, Donaldo Macedo (now at U-Mass Boston), coined the phrase “reading the word and the world” in their book Literacy (1987). They stressed the importance of engaging context, language history, and social justice, exploring and understanding contemporary and historic social and political relationships and processes as important factors in learning to read and write. Reading the world also implies looking at language or details left unsaid or missing; looking at who benefits from what is written or said, and who is harmed by written and spoken language. The idea of reading the word and the world has taken great hold in rigorous, critical literacy research and teaching. Project-based learning or inquiry learning strategies and processes can be a way of enacting reading the word and the world.
Reflect: How do you help students understand the social and political implications of their reading? List as many ways as you can think of where reading and writing are used to disempower communities.
The previous section explored some contextual, instructional, and social topics related to reading in English studies. This section will describe some strategies that incorporate or address ideas that were highlighted. They are grouped by language experiences, close reading strategies, and intertextual reading. These strategies will help you work with all students, enhance their awareness and understanding of academic language, read challenging texts, and appreciate the relationship among texts that are thematically based or conceptually related. The strategies are especially helpful for English language learners.
Language Analysis Strategies
Contrastive Analysis
Reflect: How many languages do your students speak? List as many as you can, including varieties of English.
Studying Cognates
Sorting Interactive: Learning About Language Through Cognates
Teaching Greek and Latin root words, prefixes, and suffixes helps students develop vocabulary for reading, writing, speaking, and thinking. This is especially helpful when the words have a related meaning. Including a list of Spanish cognates in the content can help students learn academic English, whether they are ELLs whose first language is Spanish or simply students of language. The following activity highlights Spanish and English cognates that share Latin root words and have a related meaning. Because each word has layers of meaning, especially when used in actual communication, the activity can be adapted with more words, more complex words, and opportunities to use the words in conversations, in presentations, or in writing assignments. Click here to begin.
Reflect: How can you display or refer to cognates in your classroom? What are other first languages of your students that have cognates with English? What is an example?
Close Reading Strategies
Close reading is a careful and purposeful reading and/or rereading of a text, using text-dependent questions to guide reading toward a specific purpose that the teacher sets at the beginning. The teacher can set a purpose to focus on an author’s use of language in order to enhance the contrastive analysis and cognate activities discussed in the previous section, or it some other area such as figurative language or aesthetic appreciation. Close reading can also involve different kinds of annotation and partner talk.
Key Word Notes
Critical Response
Questioning the Author
Identifying Theme Through Close Reading
Video and Reflection: Watch Identifying Theme Through Close Reading to see how a teacher prepares her students for a close reading. You may want to take notes on the questions below.
Annotating Text
Annotation is an important tool in close reading. Annotation involves selecting symbols to represent different reading experiences (such as a question mark when you have a question or encounter confusing information, and a plus sign for new information, etc.) and recording those symbols near areas of the text where that experience occurs when reading. Annotation is not an end in and of itself. Annotation helps extend the conversation orally or in writing to help expand understanding.
Annotating Text Activity
You will now complete an activity in which you will begin by annotating a reading—an excerpt from Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave—then expand the annotations into a written response about the passage.
Reflect: Describe the annotation techniques during close reading that you prefer, and how you use them to gain a deeper understanding of the text.
Intertextual Reading Strategies
Every text can be connected to another text. With each additional reading, we expand, nuance, or reinforce our understanding of concepts presented in the reading. Three strategies for reading intertextually include:
Literature Circles
I Search
Video and Reflection: Watch Comparing the Language of Multiple Sources to see a teacher help students understand ideas about American identity by bringing together poetry reading and the preamble to the U.S. Constitution in his English class. You may want to take notes on the questions below.
Instructional format refers to the way the teacher structures a lesson. When establishing the instructional format, the teacher should be purposeful (how will the activities in the lesson plan support the instructional goals?); dynamic (how will the teacher ensure the pacing of the lesson does not drag on and take up too much time?); stimulating (how will the lesson incorporate novelty to ensure fresh attention from students?); and ritualized (how will students have a sense of familiar structure?). Several different instructional formats are described below. They should be applied based on the instructional goal.
Large-Group Instruction
Large-group instruction is often overused. This is generally because teachers feel they have extensive knowledge and information to impart to students. While large-group instruction is important for some instructional goals, students can get lost in excessive amounts of teacher talk from the front of the room. Instead of being the primary and most frequent approach, it should happen in small chunks and at various times during the teaching/learning process. Teacher talk should be supported by visuals and other supports or illustrations in order to make the communication comprehensible (Krashen, 1989). While these external supports are helpful for English language learners in particular, all students can benefit from this full presentation of ideas. Teachers can and should read to their students in large-group format as a means of student engagement and also to model language use and expression and verbalize and model their cognitive process to students while reading. This process can be supported with visuals strategically placed around the room to reach all students. Teachers can model close reading practices, supporting their demonstration with PowerPoint presentations or other visuals. Large-group instruction is also an appropriate format for book talks, where teachers or librarians introduce books to students that they might find interesting. Book talks are not only an opportunity for teachers to introduce books, but also to model the process of selecting a book for personal reading.
Small-Group Discussions
Small-group formation should be purposeful, flexible, and dynamic. Teachers should have a specific academic purpose or task for grouping students in a particular way. The grouping should be flexible so students don’t feel stuck or tracked, especially if the temporary grouping structure is based on ability level. Group structures should vary from pairs, triplets, and quads. The purpose and activity should also vary.
Don’t worry if some initial conversation appears off topic. This is how students process, build community, and survey context. Adults do this very thing when they are initially grouped together to perform jury duty, practice salsa in a dance class, or carry out some other formal function. To help students stay on track overall, they should also be given explicit instructions and roles in small-group work. They should also have time to practice the task given in groups before they are assessed. Roles are assigned in order to teach students how to discuss their reading and ideas. You can refine the roles as needed to promote fluid academic discussion or allow them to be abandoned when they impede discussion. The idea is not simply to provide students with something to say regardless of how closely they connect to other discussants, but to help them have academic discussion with others.
Reflect: List examples of when you provide large-group instruction, and why. Then, list examples of when you have provided opportunities for students to work in small groups, and why. How do the two grouping formats support student learning?
Blended Learning
Blended learning combines live teacher instruction with online tutorials, simulations, WebQuests, and other kinds of work on computers. There are many different forms of blended learning. Some teachers simply rotate groups of students from small-group instruction with the teacher, to the computer, and back to the teacher. Others integrate work with computers and other handheld technology into their instruction more seamlessly. For example, surveys can be taken via cell phone during class discussion, and students can look up references online during a presentation. Blended learning also allows students to engage in a number of different modes of instruction for review or to move beyond the teacher’s lesson for the day. For example, students may watch a video of an earlier teacher presentation, or a presentation on the same topic given by someone else.
Reflect: What would it take to transform your current working environment into a blended learning environment? How would it change your curriculum? How would your students’ reading be supported or enhanced with regular intervals of concentrated reading instruction online? Write a two- to three-paragraph response to these questions.
Project-Based Instruction
Project-based learning focuses on learning by doing. When using project-based learning for a reading activity, the teacher facilitates an action-oriented experience that requires students to read with the purpose of advancing their understanding of something and then presenting what they learned from the experience. Project-based learning and inquiry learning (discussed above) have similar elements. Often, project-based learning is focused on solving a problem. Problem posing (Freire, 2000) is similar to reading the word and the world; however, it is important to note that Freirean inquiry is explicitly focused on reading and interpreting the world for injustices and taking action toward social change. Students first identify problems from reading texts such as a newspaper, blog, website, journal, or even literature. They then talk to each other and consider other sources of information before narrowing their focus. Students read a wide range of information to ensure that they have not overlooked ideas in their suggested plan for addressing the problem. The research project must in some way seek to alleviate the problem and must be presented in a formal way.
Some teachers have students locate future problems in science fiction or speculative fiction texts. They then work their way backward to locate possible seeds of these problems in current news media sources. They read additional sources to explore possible ways to alleviate the future problem. When they narrow their focus to one possible solution, or invent a whole new solution from synthesizing readings, they compose letters to policymakers summarizing their reading and advocating their solution that synthesizes evidence from multiple sources.
Reflect: What kind of short- or long-term projects have you planned; seen a colleague enact; or imagined for an American literature, humanities, global literature or journalism class? When and where do you introduce reading into the project? When is it an organic part of students’ projects? What kinds of reading do students read? Respond to each question and then share your responses with a colleague.
Online Instruction
Reading in English online and teaching reading in English online offer a range of experiences and elements that can engage learners differently from face-to-face and print texts alone. Multiliteracy experiences with visual, print, sound, moving images, manipulation of font size, built-in dictionaries, etc., can stimulate learning and support fiction and nonfiction reading.
Apply: Answer the following questions in a short essay. How do you incorporate technology into your classroom environment and instructional activities? What aspects of technology support your students in developing reading and writing of literature? How can you use technology to enhance your students’ intertextual reading?