Response to Learning to Read the Great Debate

 

One of my favorite lines in a Dr. Seuss begins with

HOP

POP

We like to hop.

We like to hop 

on top of Pop.

The lines themselves were so silly and conjuring up the image of me jumping on my Dad always made me laugh. What I wasn't fully aware of was how the use of repetition and rhyme crystallized the image even more so. It was the joyous nonsense that made reading Dr. Seuss so enjoyable. All of his books captured what childhood was for me: a period of creativity and wonderment with language. Moreover, Dr. Seuss was a master of crafting the perfect image and word together. His drawings are iconic and the way he combines words and images really resonated with me and with many children who were just learning to read.

In Learning to Read The Great Debate,  Jeanne S. Chall gives a comprehensive overview of early basal readers for children. She not only gives an account of how these readers evolved but also the influence that shaped their development. Looking at the pictures of phonics instruction books makes me realize how innovate Dr. Seuss books were. If we look at those books as "phonics" books then Hop on Pop develops phonemic awareness in a way that is so memorable and fun. 

One of the more interesting debates that was presented in Ch. 1 was how many, which ones, and at what frequency should beginning phonics words early readers should be exposed to. 

Some insist that the child acquire a considerable amount of phonics knowledge before he begins reading words, sentences, and stories. Others suggest combining phonics instruction with the reading of stories from conventional basal readers and library books...[p]robably more important is the number of phonic elements and rules to be learned: some give the child a heavier "phonic load" than others (16).

This is very telling and shows the that a child's beginning stages of reading and phonics acquisition is by no means based on a natural progressive scale that is scientifically measured. What I wonder about is how technology affects this process? It seems like children are now increasingly exposed to a wide range of words at the touch of a fingerprint; smartphones, tablets, and interactive toys are all clamoring for a child's attention. How does this affect their reading acquisition?

All i know that, if you wanted to keep ME happy as a kid, all you had to do was give me a Dr. Seuss book.

Response to Language Stories & Literacy Lessons

Literacy embedded in social practices: Alison "reads"

Language Stories & Literacy Lessons by Harste, Woodward and Burke offer compelling research that shows that children have already experienced interaction with text way before they enter a classroom.  One of the implications in the study is that teachers' attitudes can adversely hamper the natural curiosity and experimentation with text due to the restricting nature of skills-based instruction. This type of instruction is devoid of any social context. This point is made clear when the authors looks at the case study of Alison. Alison, they argue, has been a reader for a very long time, even before she stepped foot into a classroom. Through her assumptions about the interpretation of highway signs, Wendy's cups and many other common textual sightings, she has been a "reader" since she was 3 years old.

This has profound consequences for the assumptions the way we approach the instruction of reading and writing. If it is true that students already come prepared with a rich encounter of texts, then how can we exploit that in classroom?

Oftentimes I would sit with my little cousin and we would goof around. She was just getting acculturated into the process of writing, dexterously manipulating a pencil as her chubby fingers wrapped around a no. 2 pencil. I would watch her write her name: Elizabeth. Sometimes half completed with missing vowels, or with the "b" written as a "d." Watching her do it, she would make me read it out loud and sometimes when she would misspell her name I would pronounce it the way she wrote it phonetically and she would laugh. It was a little game we would play: read silly nonsensical things she wrote and make her laugh.

Turns out this little game we would play is actually serious business for kids! Learning about how this process affects a child is key into becoming a developing reader/writer. My little cousin had a nascent phonemic awareness and she was beginning to realize: words on the page actually had a pattern. In the coming years she would grow to discern that pattern. After reading excerpts from Language Stories, it made me wonder about how my cousin was doing in school. She's eight years old now, and I would hate to think that that sense of wonder and curiosity that drove her first experiences with writing and reading is no longer there.