Post #1 - Module 2

I thought these readings were interesting, I found that they all focused on a different area of how best to help students learn to read. I really enjoyed the article entitled The Pleasure Principle. This article made a great deal of sense to me. What better way to encourage kids to read then to let them find a book to read and simply let them read it for the enjoyment of it. I didn’t realize that the pictures in a book were so important to determining the meaning of an unfamiliar word. I admit, I have helped a student of mine break a word down into its parts to try and figure out what the word was, not realizing that was not an entirely good idea. It’s amazing to me that this process happens very quickly for me as a confident reader. This quote helped me to understand what a reader does to figure out an unfamiliar word, “when recognizing words, a reader might search for information from the letters and pictures; he gathers information from his background knowledge or from the context of the story; he links parts of unknown words with parts of words he does know; and he predicts what a word might be. A reader confronting an unknown word might also crosscheck the meaning and structural information with the visual graphophon-ics cues to confirm a prediction. The reader is constantly keeping a check on himself by self-monitoring—does the word look right? Make sense? Sound right?” Johnson C. H. In the context of this process, no wonder it takes some students quite a while to grasp how to go through the process of figuring out what a word is – this process sounds exhausting. In light of the above quote, this one made me feel better about the process as a whole “Clay (2001) says we cannot teach a strategy but can only encourage students to be strategic by the way in which we teach.” The responsibility of teaching a child to be a reader who can decipher new and unfamiliar words is admittedly quite terrifying to me. The thought of what if I do it wrong, am I going to mess this kid up for life is something that I’m hoping in time I will become more comfortable with working through. For now, I try to take comfort in knowing that it’s a process. I know that in the population of students I work with – Visually Impaired students, one of the more difficult facets to deal with is that this population of students often lacks background knowledge. Often times they are missing that background knowledge, simply because due to their lack of vision, they have not been exposed to many things that our sighted students take for granted. Since I work closely with this population, one thing we deal with is this lack of background knowledge, but that’s a tiny piece in the process that students use to determine new words... The concept of a literacy-rich environment is one that is unique to this population as well, having access to a book either in a font type or size they can read or perhaps even a book in braille is sometimes more difficult to achieve for this population of students. In thinking about my own literacy journey, I realized that I read a lot of audio books, simply because I could get a book in an audio format easier than I could get it in a format that I could read – either large print or braille. I do think that apps like the kindle app or even a few specialized apps, allow for customizing of font types for them to read visually, however this isn’t always an option either. So for this population, sometimes thinking through the process of how they have access to the material being read is just as important as can the child figure out what this word is. Is it a font type or size or is it a matter of too much visual clutter on a page as well. These things are then layered on top of all of the other concerns that go into the process of how to figure out what a word is.