Explicit instructional approach: practices that are intentionally teaching a concept, that allow teachers to help students develop metacognitive awareness and strategic knowledge.
Implicit instructional approach: concepts that are unintentionally taught that students may learn.
Systematic instructional approach: practices that are carefully thought out, build on prior knowledge, build from simple to complex, and are designed before activities and lessons are planned.
Autobiological narrative: linking personal history as a reader to instructional beliefs and practices. This helps inquire into the past to better understand what you do in the present and what would would like to do in future classroom situations. This explores memories, incidents, or situations in their lives.
Professional knowledge: knowledge gained from an ongoing study of the practice of teaching. Teachers build a knowledge base that is rooted in current theory, research, and practice.
Literacy coach: the role of a literacy coach is is to support teacher learning. They provide expertise in reading and learning to read, professional development opportunities and resources. They help develop expertise in the classroom.
Alphabetic principle: how the alphabetic writing system works. It suggests that there is s correspondence between letters (graphemes) which are the basic units of writing and sound (phonemes).
Orthographic knowledge: the knowledge of likely spelling patterns.
Schemata: prior knowledge, experiences, conceptual understandings, attitudes, values, skills and the procedures that a reader brings into a reading situation.
Metacognition: thinking about your thinking and your cognitive processes.
Graphophonemic system: the graphic symbols or marks in the page that represent sound.
Syntactic system: the order or words and language.
Semantic system: background knowledge, experiences, conceptual understandings, attitudes, beliefs, and values.
Schema theory and reading comprehension
Students use their schemas to create meaning to new experiences. These two terms go hand in hand because for comprehension to happen, students must activate a schema that fits with information in the text. This is why we activate schemas before activities by asking students questions like: “what do we know about this topic”. Some readings will be difficult to understand if certain schemas aren’t activated.
Piaget
Piaget spent most of his life observing children and their interactions with their environment. His theory of cognitive development helps explain that language acquisition is influenced by more general cognitive attainments. He believed that language affects thought, but does not necessarily shape it.
Vygotsky
Vygotsky viewed children as active participants in their own learning. In early development, children bring to acquire language competence; as they do, language simulated cognitive development. He believe children carry on external dialogues with themselves, which eventually gives way to inner speech. Piaget and Vygotsky both believe children must be actively involved in order to grow and learn.
4 steps of literacy development
- Beginning: students demonstrate little to no receptive or productive English skills.
- Early immediate: students continue to develop receptive and productive English skills. They are able to identify and understand more concrete details during unmodified instruction.
- Intermediate: students grow language skills to meet the communication and learning demands with increasing accuracy. They understand more concrete details and begin to understand abstract concepts.
- Early advanced: students begin to combine the elements in English language in complex and demanding situations and are able to use English to learn in content areas.
3 models of reading
Models of the reading process often depict the act of reading as a communication event between a sender and a receiver. The writer has a message to deliver to the reader, who needs to interpret the meaning.
- Bottom-up models: assume that the process of translating print to meaning begins with the print. This is initiated by deciding graphic symbols into sounds. The reader identifies features of letters; links these features together to recognize letters; combined letters to recognize spelling patterns; links spelling patterns to recognize words; and then proceeds to sentences, paragraphs, and text-level processing.
- Top-down models: assume that the process of translating print to meaning begins with the readers prior knowledge. The process is initiated by making predictions or “educated guesses” about the meaning of some unit of print. Readers decide graphic symbols into sounds to “check out” hypotheses about meaning.
- Interactive models: assume that the process of translating print to meaning involved making use of both prior knowledge and print. The process is initiated by making predictions about meant and/or decoding graphic symbols. The reader formulated hypotheses based on the interaction of information from semantic, syntactic, and graphophonemic sources of information. (Essentially this is a combination of the two other models)
RTI and the 3 tiers
RTI means response to intervention, derived from IDEA. This is a systematic approach to identification an instruction of struggling readers. With RTI, the identification process for leaning disabilities shifts from a focus on the discrepancy between achievement and intellectual ability to the emphasis of early support and intervention. The focus of this process is on providing interventions and assessments to develop reading and writing skills and strategies for all students.
Tier 1: all students are provided research-based instruction differentiated to meet each students needs. Intervention is considered preventive and proactive.
Tier 2: more intensive work is provided to students who have not been successful in traditional classroom learning situations. Therefore more focused small group interventions and implemented with frequent monitoring to measure progress. Regular classroom teachers receive support from speech SL educators and literacy coaches.
Tier 3: learners receive intensive, individualized intervention targeting specific deficits and problem areas. Special educator and literacy specialists are responsible for the intervention and assessment processes; classroom teachers provide support.
Classroom application
This course and it’s text interests me more so than last year! Last semester we learned what we would be teaching, now we get to learn how to teach those concepts. Learning about the processes and theories that are behind the instruction of reading and writing are very important as I will be learning and using them for the rest of my career!
Payge Rivord 