Vocabulary Instruction

Time catapulted on - I loved that word from the day it appeared on my weekly vocabulary list and I put it in a sentence to read aloud.  From the moment I heard it on my tongue, it was somersaults and fireworks to me.  - Herschler, The Darkest Corner

As teachers, I'm sure we all wish that our students would have such a powerful experience with our vocabulary words.  In reality, what most likely happens, is students study the list of words they are assigned, memorize the definition, and either pass or fail the matching test we assign.  In this chapter of my book, Janet Allen challenges this outdated method of vocabulary, and challenges educators to make vocabulary instruction more meaningful.  She provides strategies to make students' interactions with those vocabulary words more meaningful.

According to Allen, Four of the key components of effective vocabulary instruction are:

• teaching individual words
• teaching strategies for learning words independently
• fostering word consciousness
• providing frequent, extensive, and varied opportunities to engage in independent reading

When teaching individual words, Allen states that one of the most important aspects of this is choosing which words to teach, something I'm sure all educators have struggled with.  Allen provides these guidelines to help with that decision:

• words that will be important for comprehension
• words that can be defined in terms known to the student
• words that are useful and interesting
• words that are of general interest but not crucial to the text

Once the words have been selected, Allen provides a variety of strategies and ideas to help make instruction meaningful.  One key point that is emphasized is the idea that "multiple encounters with a word...affect both the memorability and the usefulness of the word" (p. 96).  She gives a suggestion of beginning vocabulary instruction with a fill-in-the-blank activity.  In this activity, you copy a passage from a text, leaving out words you want them to fill in based on the context of the activity.  Students complete the activity, filling in the words and discussing them.  She then goes into a possible sentence activity, in which students work with a partner to write sentences they think they might encounter that contains the words from the fill-in-the-blank activity.  This provides students two opportunities to work with those words, before even encountering them in the reading. 

All in all, this chapter really opened my eyes with the theory and activities behind vocabulary instruction.

New Faces in Young Adult Literature

Teri Lesesne begin this chapter with a reference to Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changing." The Dylan song was written as a political statement to "wake up" adults to remind them that things were changing and they needed to either get on board, or get out of the way of those who were willing to step forward. Lesesne asserts that, as in Dylan's era, times now are changing also, and along with that, "adolsecents themselves have changed" (p. 62). Since adolescents have changed so much, "It makes sense, then, that the books we offer this new generation should also reflect this paradigm shift in how adolescents negotiate their interaction with one another, their way through school and life, and their reading" (p. 62). 

 Throughout the chapter, Lesesne references many recent works that have been written to mirror the lives of today's adolescents, often dealing with realistic topics, such as prescription drug abuse, bullying, sexual orientation, and illness. While some of these topics may be difficult to deal with, by discussing them in the classroom, we can help students think critically about those difficult topics. Students may see their own lives and/or emotions in those of the characters, and Lesesne points out "that in discussing the alienation the bullying characters feel or the embarrassment those bullied often suffer, we give teens with those same emotions a safe context for discussing how 'those characters' feel without having to admit they may be describing themselves." 

 I know that this chapter was very exciting for me, as I have always tried to offer literature which I think my students will be interested in and relate to. I have had many students who are reluctant readers beg not to stop reading when I find a book that captures their interests, so I do believe selection of literature is vital, but unfortunately something that is taken away from teachers in the interest of "prescribed" reading programs.

Lesesne also offered some excellent resources, including her book I will definitely check out, "Making the Match: The Right Book for the Right Reader at the Right Time, Grades 4-12." Lesesne also has a blog: professormana.livejournal.com.

Tom Sawyer's Philosophy

Chapter 5 of my book was authored by Robert Probst and was titled: Tom Sawyer, Teaching, and Talking. In the chapter, Probst asserts that many students who are in are classrooms to learn, are often passive learners. Yes, many will do the work in order to get the grade, or move up to an advanced placement class, or even to make their parents happy, but often those learners are just jumping through the hoops for that extrinsic reward, not because they enjoy or are excited about what we are teaching.

Sound familiar? Unfortunately, some of the scenarios Probst described did sound familiar. He addresses the problem, and points out that many times, through the work we assign, we are adding to this problem, as much of the work asks students to focus on "...recitation, rather than authentic discussion, as the common mode of discourse in most classrooms (pp. 46)." Part of the problem is that we are doing too much of the work for the students! What? Teachers do too much, sounds crazy, right? If our final goal is to have students become life-long readers, Probst asserts that we must teach them to have authentic discussions about literature, and to give them more ownership of those discussions, rather than always guiding them through our own questions and ideas. Hence, the Tom Sawyer reference, have students do more of the work than we are doing. 

Obviously this idea takes some, well for lack of a better word, training. We should serve as facilitators to guide students to, first of all, create authentic questions, and then use those questions to guide discussions in small groups and whole class discussions. If you are like me, my first reaction was to doubt that my students would be capable of producing those thought stimulating questions that I have been "trained" to do through my years of schooling and experience. However, Probst provides some ideas that seem surprisingly easy and manageable to help students get to the point where they are producing thought stimulating questions over literature.

One idea is to initially have students share their questions out loud and write versions of them on the board (I envision kind of guiding the questions, possibly adding to or altering them if needed, but maybe that's me being too in control, I'm not sure). The class would then be broken into groups to analyze and answer the question before sharing with the whole class. Another idea is to have students create questions, then put them in groups to present and discuss questions. The third option is to collect questions students have created, then sort the questions into stacks. These stacks will then determine the groups, and again students will meet and discuss.

I decided to use a version of these ideas in my class today. As we read a chapter in our novel, students recorded two questions on an index card, one on each side. I then had students walk around the room until I felt they were "mixed" well. I then had students stop and talk to a person who was close by. Each student shared one of the two questions from their card and they discussed. We then mixed again, and students shared the other question with a different classmate. As it was our first time doing this, I was very pleased with some of the questions students created and the discussions which were held. I'm excited to have students take even more ownership in their discussions!

Building Writers and Questioners

Although I hit on the fact that this book has numerous contributors, I did not give each contributor the credit they deserved in my last post, so I'm going to try and do a better job doing so in my posts from here on out. Chapter 4 of the book was written by Ruth Shagoury. In this chapter, titled, The Need to Write, the Need to Listen, she details her experience working with a student, Zerina, who had just moved from war torn Sarajevo. Understandably, Zerina was initially reluctant to share her writing with her peers, as it contained vivid and devastating memories of her life in a war zone, never knowing if she would be alive from one day to the next. However, with the continuous encouragement of Ruth Shagoury, her classroom teacher, and her peers, Zerina was finally encouraged to share this powerful writing. Through sharing this experience, the author ascertains that though she "cant' understand the horrors of war that too many children of the world now expereince, I can strengthen my resolve to build relationships with all my students - even the prickliest ones - and teach with my heart as well as my mind (pp. 40)." I thought this was a great reminder for teachers. When we get so bogged down in data, testing, evaluation, you name the numerous things we are accountable for day in and day out, we need to remember that the students, and our relationships with them, and how we use those relationships to build their academic skills, critical thinking, writing, and understanding are what is most important. Students come with an array of experiences, sometimes knowing about things one their age should not know about. But, if we do what Ruth Shagoury suggests, and teach with our hearts as well as our minds, we can help them to have control over a small part of their lives, what they do and accomplish while in our classrooms.

Shift in Teaching Literacy

So, as my book is pretty long, I don't think going chapter by chapter for each blog entry will work.  Rather, I'm going to try and read a chunk of the text, a couple of chapters, and share the information from a couple of chapters at a time. The first few chapters of the book have been fascinating.  Each chapter is written by a different author, therefore offers a unique perspective on the importance of teaching literature.  Despite some differences in the authors' perspective, there were a couple of consistent themes throughout the first couple of chapters. One common theme has been the overemphasis on testing. Obviously, as educators, we are all aware of the effects this phenomenon has had in our classrooms. We are left with less professional autonomy, and there is an enormous amount of pressure (usually unspoken) to teach the content that will be on the test, as the test "data" is really used as the ultimate measure of our performance as professionals. We all know that one key to engaging students in reading is to pick high interest reading materials. This is something many teachers are not allowed to do as they are forced to teach reading "programs" that assure they will improve students' scores. Rather than moving into the age of digital literacy (which many of our students have done without our help and guidance) we are stuck covering the same materials and content, that which will be tested. And we wonder why students are not engaged and motivated when we teach reading and writing? These tests and the resulting data has also negatively impacted many students, especially the lowest performing students. Chapter 1 relayed the story of a student who had made tremendous improvement in his scores one year, however, since he was not deemed "proficient," he was placed in a remedial reading class, which took the place of one of the electives he chose during registration the year before. What kind of impact does this have on a students motivation and enthusiasm? I look forward to reading the next few chapters and sharing information and thought about those with you. Until next time...

Getting Started

Hey there classmates. My name is Natalia Martinez, and I am a seventh grade language arts teacher in Las Cruces. I currently teach three regular sections and two sections of honors classes. I am in my ninth year of teaching, all of which has been done at the same school, which is also the school where I did my student teaching. So obviously I love my school, I love the kids we get, the community we serve, and the closeness among the staff there. On a personal note, I have two children, a daughter who just turned four, and a son who is 15 months old. They bring me so much joy! They both have fabulous personalities, and coincidentally (or maybe not so much) love to read books like me! The book I will be blogging about is actually not one from the list Dr. Pence provided, rather one I came across on my own, which looked really interesting. The book is titled Adolescent Literacy: Turning Promise into Practice. The book was written by a very wide variety of experts in the filed of literacy, and edited by Kylene Beers, Robert E. Probst, and Linda Rief. The book was a project headed by Kylene Beers in order to create "an edited collection where many voices came together to explore the many facets of adolescent literacy: reading, writing, motivation, young adult literature, English language learners, multimodal literacy, civic responsibility, digital literacy, vocabulary, comprehension, and assessment, to name a few." As you can see from that description, the book has a lot to offer about a wide variety of issues related to adolescent literacy. I have already read the first few chapters, which are phenomenal, and I am excited to continue reading, and to share, through this blog some of the wonderful thoughts and ideas related to this topic which is near and dear to my heart. Until next time!