Reading Patrick Shannon on Reading Instruction: Reflections on Politics and Education (original) (raw)
Related papers
Rethinking the Literacy Curriculum
Bailey's Elementary School for the Arts and Sciences, Falls Church, Virginia ings last at least three hours, during which resources and books are shared, discussions take place, and issues are raised. Each meeting is tape-recorded and transcribed for later analysis by the study group. As a tool for representing the “critical literacy” discussions they have been having, the group created an “audit trail”(Harste and Vasquez, 1998; see Figure 1).
Navigating the literacy waters: research, praxis, and advocacy
2008
we wish to thank Dr. Norman Stahl, Chair of the Department of Literacy Education, for his support in providing the time and consultation required for this project, and for his support for the College Reading Association's goals. A thank you also goes to the Dean of the College of Education, Dr. Lemuel Watson, whose support of all scholarship endeavors is clear and consistent. Dr. Stahl and Dr. Watson have both used their time and written communications to inspire all NIU's College of Education faculty to continue their projects in light of the challenging events they experienced in the spring semester of 2008. The NIU secretaries, Brenda Jones and Darla Brantley, have devoted tons of time and energy into pulling together all the jobs that make us successful, and we thank them heartily!
The Literacies Institute: Its mission, activities, and perspective on literacy
Literacy is a prerequisite for full participation in a modern, technological society. For the nation, broad-based literacy is a prerequisite for the effective functioning of democratic institutions at home and for continued competitiveness in an increasingly complex world. We think of the United States as a highly literate nation, and in the sense that nearly all citizens can read and write at a minimal level, it is. But full literacy implies far more than basic reading and writing proficiency. It implies an enculturation into ways of thinking, interpreting, and using language in a variety of complex activities and settings, typical of a rapidly changing and technologically advanced society. Moreover, it implies that this enculturation is widespread throughout the population. In both these senses, the U.S. is only partially literate. A good indicator of our current state of literacy is the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress report on literacy in young adults. This report showed that 95% of the young adults in the U.S. could read and understand the printed word. Yet only a small percentage could carry out moderately complex tasks using their literacy skills. These tasks were relevant to the real world of work and daily life, such as locating and using information in tables, graphs, forms and schedules, or applying arithmetic operations in combination with printed materials, as in balancing a checkbook or completing an order form. There was a dramatic dropoff in the number of young adults who could succeed as the tasks became even moderately difficult. Furthermore, minority subjects performed even less well than non-minority subjects in the study. On tasks such as synthesizing the main argument from a lengthy newspaper column or examining a menu, computing the cost of a specified meal and determining the correct change from a specified amount, only about 40% of the White subjects, 10% of the Black subjects and 20% of the Hispanic subjects were successful. Results such as these highlight a pervasive failure on the part of our schools in teaching the analytic and critical thinking skills that underlie high level literacy, a failure that disproportionately affects low-income and minority students. This failure makes a mockery of the principles of equal opportunity and equal access to schooling, and threatens America's standing as a technologically competitive nation. Previous research on reading and writing in this country has had a limited positive impact on educational practice. This is, in part, because research has tended to fragment the phenomenon of literacy. Studies have isolated aspects such as the texts students produce or read, students' individual cognitive processes while composing or comprehending text, and the social and institutional settings in which literacy practices take place. But ignoring the complex interrelations among the individual, social, and textual creates fundamental obstacles to understanding what it means to acquire literacy skills in school. It provides at best only partial solutions to teachers who
Literacy Instruction in American Schools: Problems and Perspectives
American Journal of Education, 1984
Recent studies of reading and writing instruction suggest that literacy instruction is easily distorted, incorporating measures of achievement that do not reflect students' mastery of the process of understanding, reading materials that are ill-structured and divorced from any real communicative intent, and exercises in subskill learning that remain divorced from the intended achievements. An alternative model of literacy learning, based on the notion of instructional scaffolding, offers five characterstics of interaction that are critical to the success of activities in classrooms. These characteristics suggest that (1) the instructional task permits students to make their own contribution to the activity as it evolves, thus allowing them to have a sense of ownership of their work; (2) the instructional task grows out of knowledge and skills the students already have, but poses problems that cannot be solved without further help; (3) direct instruction in the form of questioning, modeling, or constructive dialogue helps the student develop a successful approach to the task; (4) the teacher's role in the instructional event is collaborative rather than evaluative; and (5) over time, instruction changes in response to the student's internalization of the patterns and approaches practiced with the teacher's assistance. (HOD)
2016
Recent times have seen an increase in the use of literacy, and in many cases, the substitution of literacy where reading was once the term of choice. A deep curiosity about these shifts by professional organizations, a range of stakeholders, and the program descriptions at institutions of higher learning led to this essay. It is guided by three specific intentions: (a) to explore the varying (and often overlapping) definitions of literacy and reading in order to establish their substantive and subtle differences, (b) to ponder the implications of selecting one term over another or using them in combination, and (c) to spark questions for future research that would further clarify literacy, reading, and their individual and combined importance for the education of our nations’ youth. Improving the reading achievement for all students (and adults) has long been a national (and international) priority. More frequently than in previous times, literacy replaces reading as the label to fr...