A Journey Through Reading for Understanding

The last dimension explored in this academic literacy apprenticeship is the knowledge-building dimension. To engage with a text, the student needs to have a little background knowledge about the subject to make connections with the ideas. They also need to be aware of the way in which ideas are presented in the subject area classrooms. The first requirement speaks to Rosenblatt’s transactional theory, in which students interact with the same text differently based on their previous experience and education (Ruddell, Ruddell, & Singer, 1994) . The second requirement speaks to genre theory as well as a little bit of Gee’s theory. In the knowledge-building dimension, each subject area is its own Discourse, and the subject area writing follows certain rules and conventions (Gee, 1989) , (Technical Communication Body of Knowledge) . To be successful in the subject area, students need to have some knowledge of the content, as well as an understanding of how ideas are expressed in the su...

Chapter five delves into the cognitive dimension, and this is where we see the authors implement the reading as problem solving approach, introducing each strategy as a tool for understanding difficult texts. As they introduced each strategy, they first practiced it with less challenging texts, so that students became comfortable and confident using it before moving on to more difficult texts. These exercises also included metacognitive conversations. The students were asked to think about and discuss what they did, how they figured out what to do, and what difference it made in their comprehension of the text. Think Alouds Another way that the authors worked to increase their students’ metacognitive abilities was to model thinking aloud the process of reading and using cognitive strategies. After modeling the strategies, the students practiced extensively, in order for them to be internalized until they have become second nature. The book includes a lesson plan for think alouds...

The Social Dimension The authors believed that active participation was essential for their program to work. They needed to create a classroom community that allowed students the freedom to talk about their confusion. They started out offering extra credit to those who did and encouraged them to be as specific as possible as to where and why they were having difficulty. To drive home the point that anyone can have problems with different kinds of texts, they asked the students to bring in something that they understood, but they thought would confuse the teachers. Then the teachers modeled the thought process they used when trying to make sense of the text. Not only did it make the point that different people struggle with different types of texts, it gave the students confidence knowing that they were experts at some kinds of texts. I believe that this also introduced the idea of genre theory and the idea that different texts had different conventions based on things like int...

Now we are getting into the meat of the book. Part two takes the apprenticeship program into the Thurgood Marshall Academic High School classroom. This school had a diverse student body and served one of the poorest areas in San Francisco. The curriculum was rigorous college prep coursework. Some of the students struggled, and this influenced their sense of academic ability. The authors pinpointed their struggle to be a result of reading difficulties. In response, they created the year-long academic literacy course and made it mandatory for all incoming freshmen. They realized though, that eventually, their ideas would need to be embedded into subject area classes. Many instructors who would like to adopt their ideas and strategies will not have the time, resources, or administrative support to create a stand-alone course like this one, and will need to find ways to integrate academic literacy into their existing subject-area courses. The curriculum that they created was designed ...

Chapter two of Reading for Understanding uses the results of educational research to show how and why the authors built their Academic Literacy course the way that they did.  They created this course based on the following assumptions about reading: ·          Reading is not just a basic skill        Reading is a complex process       Reading is problem-solving         Fluent reading is not the same as decoding         Reading is situationally bounded        Proficient readers share some key characteristics (Schoenbach, Greenleaf, Cziko, & Hurwitz, 1999, pp. 17-19) The authors cite Vygotsky’s socially mediated theory of cognitive development as the reason for their apprenticeship model. A social-cognitive view of learning involves a knowledgeable person who models and scaffolds the development of the desired skills until they ha...

Reading for Understanding is a description of a year-long Academic Literacy course given to ninth graders at Thurgood Marshall Academic High School. Their reading apprenticeship program is based on the assumption that academic literacy requires different skills than the reading skills taught at the elementary level. Chapter one of the text frames the problems and challenges that students and teachers face once they reach middle and high school. The authors refer to the   literacy ceiling,   which limits what a student is able to achieve and is based on the degree to which they are able to extract information from academic texts (Schoenbach, Greenleaf, Cziko, & Hurwitz, 1999) . Students with low literacy ceilings will use a variety of coping methods, which can include acting out or developing a disinterested attitude toward school.  Because many think that student reading struggles are simply issues decoding words, a common response by schools is to re-t...

Okay. The blank page of a new blog is always an intimidating thing. I've tried to start a few blogs in my time, but I've never found the right topic or voice when writing in this format. It was very interesting to read about the history of blogs on Wikipedia, and to look at the breadth and scope of blogs out there today. The most interesting thing about blogs to me is the social aspect. I see it as a way to share information about something that you are passionate about, and connect with others who share those same interests or who want to learn more. Based on the types of blogs that I've encountered, I feel like genres have developed in the blogging world, with a loose set of rules and conventions for each genre. The blogs that I read have changed over time as my interests have changed. Several years ago I was into the genre of "mommy blogging," in which moms chronicled their children's lives from conception until they were old enough to ask their moms not ...