t the majority are poor or come from minority groups whose members have faced a history of prejudice and oppression (

There are many different varieties of English. Some of these are different dialects spoken in different regions of the country or by different sociocultural groups. Some of them are different varieties of language used by different occupations or for different specific purposes: for example, the language of bookies, lawyers, or video game players.

Children who must learn reading primarily as an instructed process in school are at an acute disadvantage. It would be like learning to cook or play video games via lectures or decontextualized skill-and-drill. Possible, maybe, but surely neither effective nor easy.

If most people learned to cook as well as they learn physics, whole cultures would starve.

Every human is built to learn a native language well; not everyone is built to learn physics well.

phonemic awareness” (the conscious awareness that oral words are composed of individual sounds), then on phonics (matching letters to sounds), then practice with fluent oral reading (reading out loud), then work on comprehension skills. Each stage is supposed to guarantee the next.

Poor children do it as well as rich, if they have access to the cards, games, or figures.

hey all had polysyllabic names

member of a particular social group have anything whatsoever to do with learning to read in school? Isn’t the whole purpose of public schooling to create a level playing field for all children?

children don’t get enough overt instruction on “phonics

We see here, again, the potential importance of modern technologies like video games

Once we see how important being able to simulate experiences in our mind is to comprehending oral and written language, we can see the importance of supplying all children in schools with the range of necessary experiences with which they can build good and useful simulations for understanding things like science. We can also see a potential role for things like video games that allow people to experience and act in new worlds

“The work of childhood is learning to read.”

How does any reader learn the specific meanings of any word. By playing the “games” the word is used in. Reading lots of texts may not be an effective way to learn what words mean specifically, but playing the games they are used in is.

But the bigger paradox here is that reading is, in fact, not an especially good way to learn vocabulary

Here we see the additional factor of ensuring that people feel like they belong to and are a valued and accepted part of the social group within which their learning takes place.

In his work, highly educated college-age African-Americans and women do less well on math tests when, and only when, the tester, however subtly, triggers their fear of negative stereotypes (e.g. African-Americans are “less smart” or women are “no good at math”). Otherwise they perform as well as white males. To ignore these wider issues, while stressing such things as phonemic awareness, is to ignore not merely “politics,” but what we know about learning and literacy as well.

the white-black gap has remained roughly constant for the last 16 years...

Given the amount of parallelism and repetition in her text, clearly Leona is not primarily interested in making rapid and linear progress to “the point.” Rather, she is interested in creating a pattern out of language, within and across her stanzas: a pattern

music was now “scary” and the landscape much harsher-looking than the ones he had previously been in.

“person like us”: that is, a member of his family

The story suggests that gender differences (boy versus girl) are associated with different interests (Transformers versus Cabbage Patches) and that these different interests inevitably lead to conflict when male and female try to be “equal” or sort themselves on other grounds than gender (“a fight on who would be which team”: the actual fight at her party had been about mixing genders on the teams).

This is because schools do not start the academic language acquisition process for these children—a process that has already started at home for other children.

does not allow an emotional word

People think of a language like English as one thing—“a language.” Actually, it’s not one thing, it’s many things.

The fourth-grade slump is made up of kids who can “read,” in the sense of decode and assign superficial literal meanings to texts, but can’t “read” in the sense of understanding, in any deep way, informational texts written in fairly complex language.

Most humans are not, in fact, very good at learning via overt instruction.

proper tools are made available

Literacy (written language) is too new a process historically to have had the evolutionary time required to have become “wired” into our human genetic structure. Written language is, at the very best, 6000 to 10,000 years old—too short a time to have gained biological support. Furthermore, written language was invented by only a few cultures and only a few times, unlike oral language, which has existed for all human cultures for long enough to have become part of our human biological inheritance.

Henry Ford would have been proud.

Technologies are tools that allow us to do certain things.

instruction is a much less efficient process (in all sorts of ways) than learning to play video games via a cultural process (i.e. via becoming a member of the games culture).

Most children learn to read, regardless of what instructional approach a school adopts

It’s the situation that counts.

So what is this early language ability that seems so important for later success in school? According to the report, it is indicated by things like vocabulary (receptive vocabulary, but more especially expressive vocabulary, p. 107); the ability to recall and comprehend sentences and stories; and the ability to engage in extended, connected verbal interactions on a single topic.

The “fourth-grade slump” (Chall et al. 1990) is the phenomenon where some children seem to acquire reading (i.e. pass reading tests) fine in the early grades, but fail to be able to use reading to learn school content in the later grades, when the language demands of that content (e.g. science) get more and more complex.

Many children are exposed to language and other symbols connected to modern technologies and media (e.g. the Internet, video games, text messaging) that seem more compelling and motivating than school language.

ensuring that people feel like they belong to and are a valued and accepted part of the social group within which their learning takes place

The teacher heard her as rambling.

What we are dealing with here is talking and thinking about the (internal) design of the game

He ended up reading on the Internet, in books, and in his video games much more complicated and much more academic-like language than he read in his first-grade school texts.

Some planets that are near the sun are hot; others that are a little farther away are warm.

What is happening here is that a little girl, who cannot yet “really” read, is learning and practicing non-vernacular forms of language associated with school and schooling.

All human beings acquire their first language well, and about equally well as everyone else

Poor children do it as well as rich, if they have access to the cards, games, or figures.

The examples will be familiar to many. They are things like children doing pretend readings of books, that sound like the child is reading a real book, or children reporting at dinnertime on their day in a fashion that sounds like a school report. Some families encourage their children to do these things, while others don’t—some, in fact, wouldn’t be caught dead doing some of these things.

what I have called a cultural learning process is how the vast majority of young people today learn to play computer and video games

So does this mean, as the traditionalists argue, that reading is an instructed process? Does learning to read require lots of overt instruction? Not necessarily.

Learners are given continual verbal and behavioral feedback for their efforts

Even when instruction is good, we find a pattern in such cases where a small number of people succeed quite well and a far greater number succeed much less well. Every human is built to learn a native language well; not everyone is built to learn physics well.

In fact, it seems a bit strange—creepy even—to claim that an African-American child or a poor child might be inherently less able to engage with Pokémon than white or rich children. We do not, however, find such thoughts strange when we think about school learning, though we should.

Why should being poor or a member of a particular social group have anything whatsoever to do with learning to read in school? Isn’t the whole purpose of public schooling to create a level playing field for all children?

What appears to cause it are family, community, and school language environments in which children interact intensively with adults and more advanced peers and experience cognitively challenging talk and texts on sustained topics and in different genres of oral and written language

Poor children suffer the same sort of plight that someone who tries to pass French 4 without French 1, French 2, and French 3 does.

So what is it about school that manages to transform children who are good at learning (witness Pokémon), regardless of their economic and cultural differences, into children who are not good at learning, if they are poor or members of certain minority groups?

You simply have to feel unaffiliated with school and formal schooling for any of a variety of reasons.

Children will not identify with—they will even disidentify with—teachers and schools that they perceive as hostile, alien, or oppressive to their home-based identities (Holland and Quinn 1987). Indeed, I argue throughout this book that learning is all about identity and identification

As long as schools are organized as they are—and they have historically been impervious to change—she will suffer for that

Could Leona’s story-telling language practice have been fruitfully recruited by the school?

Language ability

ome educators confuse the term phonemicawarenesswith the terms auditory discrimina-tion, phonetics, or phonicsand believe that anew label has been invented for an old idea

shark strolling in the park

The Ants Go Marching”

middle sounds

Child-ren appear to be better able to capture and gaincontrol over larger units of sound before smallerunits of sound

purposeful

prioritygoal in kindergarten classrooms.

Because an alphabetic orthography maps speechto print at the level of the phoneme.

honemic awareness is a typeof phonological awareness, that is, the aware-ness of the sound structure of language in gen-eral.

In sum, we encourage teachers to providetheir students with linguistically rich environ-ments in which written and spoken language areused to learn, to communicate, to express ideas,to understand the ideas of others andin which

Scavenger Hunt (letters)

We u rg e t e a c h e r s t o b e w a t c h f u l f o r c h i l d r e nwho are not catching on—after multiple expo-sures—to games and activities such as those pre-sented here. These children may need extrasupport in phonemic awareness development.

Bag Game (cues)

“Down by the Bay”

phonemic awareness instruc-tion should be intentional, not incidental (evenaccidental), in classrooms.

Phonemic awareness supports reading develop-ment only if it is part of a broader program that in-cludes—among other things—development ofstudents’ vocabulary, syntax, comprehension,strategic reading abilities, decoding strategies, andwriting across all content areas.

10 minutes to 30 minutes per session

Itmay be helpful to increase the use of concreteobjects or other cues to represent sounds and toprovide more phonemic awareness instructionthat includes familiar letters. Also, by focusingon sounds that can be elongated, teachers aremore likely to draw students’ attention to thosesounds

Someof them also may be used with older children.

In linguistically rich classrooms, phonemicawareness activities will be incorporated inten-tionally into literature sharing experiences, musicexperiences, movement experiences, and otherexperiences throughout the day.

Itis the qualityof instruction and the responsive-nessof the instruction to the individuals in theclassroom that should have greater considerationthan the amount of time.

the difficulty of the task depends inpart upon the number of sounds (fewer soundsare easier than more), which sounds they are(liquids are typically easier than nasals or stops),and their location in the word (middle sounds aremore difficult to attend to than initial or finalsounds).

They may be asked toblend sounds together to form a word (e.g., Whatword would we have if we put these sounds to-gether? /j/-/u/-/m/-/p/). They may be asked tosegment words into their constituent parts (e.g.,Tell all the sounds you hear in the word dog).

Phonemicawareness development is not meaningful in andof itself. It is important only in the context ofcomprehensive reading instruction.

Adams andBruck (1995), for instance, submitted that songs,chants, and word-sound games are ideally suit-ed toward developing young children’s sensitiv-ity to the sound structure of language. Beck andJuel (1995) posited that time spent on word play,nursery or Dr. Seuss rhymes, and general expo-sure to storybooks contribute to phonemicawareness. Mattingly (1984) encouraged class-room teachers to provide their students with lin-guistic stimulation in the form of storytelling,word games, rhymes, and riddles in order to fa-cilitate phonemic awareness.

phonemic awareness instruction foryoung children should be playful and engaging,interactive and social, and should stimulate cu-riosity and experimentation with language.

Every ChildReading: An Action Plan of the Learning FirstAlliance(1998) identifies phonemic awarenessas one of the most important foundations of read-ing success and recommends that its developmentbe addressed in prekindergarten and kindergarten.

Phonemicawareness—a subset of phonological aware-ness—refers to a sensitivity to and control overthe phonemes.

, the Bag Game, described here forphoneme manipulation, can be used for syllablemanipulation

Make a Word (letters)

qualityof instruction and the responsive-nessof the instruction to the individuals in theclassroom that should have greater considerationthan the amount of time

their location in the word (middle sounds aremore difficult to attend to than initial or finalsounds)

A sequence for phonemic awareness instruction

Phonemicawareness development is not meaningful in andof itself. It is important only in the context ofcomprehensive reading instruction.

Discussion in which stu-dents show a good understanding of and critical thinking about the text often includes listening and linking to others’ ideas, providing evidence from the text to support one’s thinking, and regular student participation

Also, students sometimes forget a lesson overnight or over a weekend, at least temporarily, so when they return to school, they may not remember how to independently enact the strategy they were using effortlessly the previous school day.

The model we recommend for teaching any comprehension strategy is the gradual release of responsibility

Instruction that includes hands-on activities, opportunities to engage in reading for authentic purposes, and texts with a clear structure and vivid, concrete examples is associated with motivated engagement and, subsequently, better recall and learning

Words are not the point of words; ideas are.

we use our knowledge along with our perceptions of what we think the text says to literally build, or construct, mental representations of what the text means.

both models carve out a central role for readers’ prior knowledge in the comprehen-sion process

. One study found that second and third graders whose teachers engaged them in reading and writing texts more like those you would find outside of school, for rea-sons similar to those for which people read and write outside of school, showed higher growth in reading comprehension;

The program’s fun-damental premise is that reading, writing, and language (e.g., vocabulary, discourse) are best developed when they are put to work as tools to help students acquire knowledge and inquiry skill in a specific domain, such as science

Writers of narratives often omit the motives that drive characters to particular actions in a story on precisely the grounds that they expect readers to use their knowledge of stories, life experiences, and human nature to infer those motives.

we need to make rapid progress in this area if we are to prepare readers to be versatile enough to comprehend the his-torically unprecedented range of text available to them

These multiple and varying representations may be responsible for the observed improvement in understanding and memory for key ideas encountered in the text.

the primary focus should actually be reading, for compelling purposes, with teachers guiding and helping students select strategies as needed for students to meet their comprehension goals while working through the tough parts of the texts they encounter.

a student’s reading level varies depending on his or her interest in the text, as well as other factors, including background knowledge, as discussed earlier in this chapter.

the knowledge that students would gain in more vigorous social studies and science instruction would, as Kintsch’s (1998, 2004) Construction–Integration model dictates, fuel comprehen-sion development directly and powerfully.

IDEAS (in-depth expanded applications of sci-ence) model replaces literacy instruction with a two-hour block of inte-grated science–literacy instruction.

the model must correspond with their relevant prior knowledge of how the world works. In short, read-ers must integrate information from the text base (i.e., words, sentences, paragraphs) with available and relevant prior knowledge retrieved from long-term memory and fold it all into an emerging situation model of the meaning of the text at that point in the process.

We must understand how skilled comprehenders con-struct meaning, so we can help students learn to construct meaning in the same way.

then teachers are the tour guides, ensuring that students stay on course, pausing to make sure they appreciate the landscape of understanding, and encouraging the occasional diversion down an inviting and interesting cul-de-sac or byway.

Table 3.1. What Good Readers Do When They Read

Skilled readers are also more motivated and engaged readers, reading more actively and more voluminously, thus further developing their knowledge and skill

Morris and Perney (1984) found that first grader’sinvented spellings were a better predictor of end-of-grade reading than a standardized readingreadiness test.

Students and adult learners move from using but confusing elements ofsound, to using but confusing elements of pattern, to using but confusing elements ofmeaning.

not only represent beginning,middle, and ending sounds within words, but they also learn to deal with more am-biguous sounds

This typeof writing issemiphonetic

What students do correctly—an independent or easy level2.What students use but confuse—an instructional level where instruction is mosthelpful3.What is absent in students’ spelling—a frustration level where spelling concepts aretoo difficult

Designing a word studyprogram that explicitly teaches students necessary skills and engages their interest andmotivation to learn about how words work is a vital aspect of any literacy program

Word study is active, and by makingjudgments about words and sorting words according to similar features, students con-struct their own rules for how the features work.

It is not the case that students abandon sound once theymove to the more efficient use of patterns, or abandon patterns once they move to themore efficient use of morphology.

One of the easiest ways to know what students need to learn is to look at the waythey spell words.

.Students’ learning of spelling and vocabulary is based on their developmental or in-structional level.2.Students’ learning is based on the way they are naturally inclined to learn, on theirnatural course of conceptual learning

when they read good stories, write purposefully, and are guided by knowl-edgeable teachers in word study.

children can become quite attached

adults will recognize their efforts as more pretend than real.

There is converging evidence that reading, writing, and spelling developmentare integrally related.

so students have littleopportunity to manipulate word concepts

By using students’ invented spellings as a guide, teacherscan differentiate efficient, effective instruction in phonics, spelling, and vocabulary.

his con-struct, calledinstructional level,is a powerful delimiter of what may be learned. Sim-ply put, we must teach to where a child “is at.”

As students learn to read andwrite, they appear to literally reinventthe system as it was itself invented.

By building connections betweenmeaning parts and their derivations,we enlarge our vocabulary.

o understand the history of reading research, we need to appreciate theimpact of these varied perspectives on learner and learning that become mir-rored in the research questions posed, the methodologies applied, and the inter-pretations made.

ittle regard for motivation in the form of readers’goals, interests, and involvement in the learning experience (O

e relativedominance of informal knowledge over formal understandings could be becausewhat is learned in a school setting appears of limited relevance and therefore lim-ited value to students (

ere was a shift away from the neurological orphysiological arguments central to that earlier period and more concern fornaturalism in the materials and procedures used to teach reading. O

ssential to unite all manner of language acquisitionand use.

interaction of language as a system and languagein its particular social uses. S

st aschildren came to understand the spoken language of their surrounding communi-ty (Halliday, 1969), they would come to understand its written language givenenough exposure in meaningful situations (Goodman & Goodman, 198

of these movementsturned attention back inside the human mind and away from the environme

William James (1890) endured in the notion that human thought mattered inhuman action and that introspection and self-questioning were effective tools foruncovering those thoughts.

onics in-struction came to be seen as part of the logical groundwork for beginning toread

accountability, primarily in the form ofhigh-stakes testing, and the drive for national standards

Today’s K–12 students in postindustrialsocieties have never experienced a world without computer-based technologies.They regularly surf the Web, send e-mail, and use instant messaging—acts thathave changed the face of information processing and human communication

thereis a significant relationship between learners’ knowledge and their interests

experiential learning and interest

these motivational factors were not consideredin isolation but were studied in relation to other factors such as students’ knowl-edge, strategic abilities, sociocultural background, and features of the learningcontext.

From the standpoint of human interactions, as well, certain sociocultural re-searchers came to the position that knowledge was not merely shaped or colored

unschooled knowledge

impetus to change was the development of a systematic atti-tude of distrust or devaluing of formal knowledge, and of the traditional mode ofscientific inquiry.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of this research period was its fo-cus on the individual mind.

“natural”

Consequently,learning to read, the written counterpart of acquiring an oral language, came tobe viewed as an inherent ability, rather than a reflective act involving the labori-ous acquisition of a set of skills

identification of the requisite desired behaviors

In this theoretical orientation, learning resulted from the repeated and controlledstimulation from the environment that came to elicit a predictable response fromthe individual.

With this analyticview, there was a growing tendency for problems in the reading act to be looked onas deficiencies in need of remediation, just as physical ailments require medicalremedies.

Such an analysis would presumably result in pedagogical techniquesbased on an understanding of the physiological and environmental underpinningsof human behavior (Glaser, 1978)

This baby boomcontributed to both quantitative and qualitative changes to the school population

Such domain-specific or task-specific qualifi-cation of student ability added to the conditionality of learning.

Schools clearly functioned as social institutions centeredaround the interactions of students and teachers.

The goal of learning was no longerseen as the development of an individually held body of knowledge, but rather thecreation of a mutual understanding arising in the social interaction of particularindividuals in a particular context at a particular time.

aspectrum of general text-processing strategies, including summarization, map-ping, self-questioning, and predicting

There was little, if any, consideration of sociocultural or contextual influences onthe processing of linguistic information

Text-based learningwas about knowledge, which was organized and stored within the individualmind, and resulted from the input, interpretation, organization, retention, and out-put of information from the individual’s environment

his new perspective held littleregard for the innateness or naturalness of reading and little interest in the amal-gamation of literacy fields

miscue analysis

Learning to read was not so much a matter ofbeing taught, but a matter of arriving at facility as a result of a predisposition toseek understanding within a language-rich environment.

human beings were biologicallyprogrammed to acquire language under favorable conditions

Language, as with other innatehuman capacities, was to be developed through meaningful use, not practiced tothe point of mindless reaction

Many students who appear to be learning to read well in the early years of school cannot read to learn by the fourth grade.

novices need experiences (diSessa, 2000) to marry to words to give them concrete meanings. This will start them on the path to more general meanings as they have more experiences and find patterns within them

One key reason that some children — often, but not always more privileged children — are successful in school with academic language is their early home-based preparation. Many successful students enter kindergarten with a large and varied vocabulary acquired through regular dialogue with parents or grandparents, being read to frequently, and exposure to a wide variety of experiences in the world. Such interac-tions are crucial

What gives students a good running head start to engage this complex language is a wide-ranging, sturdy vocabulary of complex words in the early years (before age five)

Stated simply, if we don’t create a different approach to literacy in the primary grades, millions of children will never overcome the “slump” that prevents them from becoming fully productive citizens.

The probability that a poor first-grade reader will be a poor reader in the fourth grade is 0.88, and children who are behind in reading in the first grade have only a one-in-eight chance of ever catching up

. Create “a place in every community”: New literacies technology centers

hey can also be used to track how learners learn, moment by moment, so that, eventually, we can give students constant feedback based on our knowledge of various trajectories of learning

The most accurate predictor of school success is the size of a child’s vocabulary at age five of “book” words (words more likely to appear in written texts than in spoken language). This breadth of vocabulary is created by parents talking to children, answering their questions, reading to them, modeling their own pleasure in reading, and offering their children a wide variety of experiences in the world

The fourth-grade slump consistently leads to educational failure. The digital gap leads to a failure to become confidently “tech-savvy,” a 21st-century skill crucial for success, and even for survival

The digital gap: Access to digital media is important, but perhaps more important is access to adult mentoring in the use of digital media. Students need adults to help them learn to leverage technological “know-how” to learn content, produce knowledge, and develop high-level expertise.

Unfortunately, the skills — especially the digital skills — needed to modernize early literacy teaching are not being transmitted in teacher education programs in the United States. We need to radically transform the preparation and professional development opportunities available to teachers in the primary grades.

Sustained research within and across diverse disciplines is needed to shed light on the specific benefits of digital media, and to assess what works best for children from different backgrounds and with different learning profiles.

tech-savvy,” that is, unafraid of technical learning, adept at technology, and able to use it in productive and innovative ways.

they can only be useful if parents, teachers, and more advanced peers help children seek out good learning media and fruitfully draw on their internal design features for learning.

Less-well-off families engaged much less in such mentoring, and consequently, their children gain less school-based knowledge from digital media and print literacy, read less well, are more passive in their activities, have less of a foundation to build on, and, thus, fall further and further behind.

challenge #2: Learning content like math and science at any age must always include language learning. We must more proactively integrate approaches to teaching content, language, and literacy in the early grades

Even our best students can no longer compete.

Because digital media easily, perhaps uniquely, can combine action in relationship with environment, this technology can generate situated meaning — vocabulary used in actual situations, which makes meanings clear and easier to remember — in myriads of settings. Thus digital media, whether in a format custom-designed to be educational or, in some cases, in off-the-shelf products, have the potential to increase the “book” vocabulary, and the concepts attached to such words, for children whose families are unable to do so

What is crucial for learning is not just access to books or digital tools, but access to support and structured mentorship as well.

Learning to situate meanings requires that learners have well-structured, well-supported, well-mentored experiences in the area of interest.

We suggest that the barrier to academic language in school, especially for underprivileged kids, is the overreliance on texts and words to teach new language, texts that they cannot fully understand. One solution — in fact, the one taken by popular culture practices that recruit complex language — is to tie language more to images, actions, goals, experiences, and dialogue as a way to teach deep comprehension of text

impose standards and testing, which has led many schools to focus on the basics, skill-and-drill, test preparation, and standardized skills, often at the expense of teaching students complex language and thinking skills, let alone the ability to use these skills to innovate and produce knowledge

We need to supply such children, within their families and in programs beyond the family, the early school-based language development that more privileged children are getting. This would most certainly include one-on-one talk and reading with adults. This kind of intense in-person support, however, has sometimes proven difficult to sustain in the preschool period among lower-income families.

Academic language encompasses not just a specialist vocabulary, but also a good number of more formal words that occur across many academic, specialist, and public-sphere domains and in a wide variety of written texts, words like “process,” “state,” “account,” “probable,” “occurrence,” “maintain,” “benevolent,” and so forth. Such words do not occur regularly in everyday conversation

children who are behind in reading in the first grade have only a one-in-eight chance of ever catching up

But instead of facing the enlarged needs of the future, our nation has turned many of our schools into test-prep academies focused on assessing standardized skill sets in a world that demands higher-level skills and the ability to innovate. We need a new educational approach.