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Mark, with his usual severity, makes Jesus angry and disappointed, and also turns the insiders into outsiders. They cannot answer this riddle, any more than they could read the Parable of the Sower.

For example, he tells two stories about miraculous feedings. Any creative writing instructor would have cut one of them; but Mark's awkwardness can hardly be dismissed as accidental.

By contrast later scholars ask only what kind of allegory one may expect the evangelists to have inserted into a story that was not in itself allegorical at all. Then they ask what the story meant in its original form, before the salvation allegory got attached to it.

he is Adam, who has left Jerusalem, the heavenly city, for Jericho, the world. The Samaritan is Christ, the inn is the ChW'Ch, the promise to return the Second Coming.

you are virtually obliged to claim that the whole Marean passage is inauthentic or corrupt.

The implica-tion is that the exclusion atises..nat from the speaker's inten-tion, but from the stupidity of his hearers'""so that theJ;>la.D,!c; .~ilieirs.

instead of Mark's uncompromising exclusions -outsiders must stay outside and be damned -Matthew proposes some-thing much milder:

he substitutes for hina the word hod, "because." This is a substan-tial change, involving a different grammar; Matthew replaces Mark's subjunctive with an ·indicative.

In this altered form the theory no longer conflicts with the prefatory remark that Jesus was teaching the crowd, which seems inconsistent with his telling stotjes in order to ensure that they would miss the point.

hose out-side, like K and like us, see an uninterpretable radiance and die.

the Good Samaritan, works hard to make the answer obvious

All require some interpretative action from the auditor;

It means a placing of one thing beside another; in classical Greek it means "comparison" or "illustration" or "analogy." But in the Greek Bible it is equivalent to Hebrew mashal, which means "riddle" or "dark saying," but I gather it can extend its range to include "exemplary tale." Sometimes the Greek word is also used to translate hldah, meaning "riddle."

because no 2 things, can be more equal

Mathematical lunacy: for a short time the symbol for positive and negative was a moon. The equation above is -4 + 6 = 2 Photograph: Joe Mazur

Research has long shown that people with poor vocabularies are poor readers

Learning to read is about learning to read different types of text with real understanding. This is why learning to read and learning content can never really be separated.

At the very least they may demand an argument for “Why school?

Classrooms tend to encourage and reward individual knowledge stored in the head, not distributed knowledge

What is wonderful about computer and video games is that people can interact so directly with the content of the game

There are spaces that are mixtures of the real and the virtual, such as a meeting in which some people are physically together in a room and others are interacting with the group via the Internet or over a video conferencing system

This box is an excellent example of alerting players to the fact that they need to assess their own progress, desires, and learning styles. They need to be proactive, make decisions, think about what they are doing and learning, and take control of their own learning.

Video games are nothing if not vivid.

Let us use as an example experiences of weddings

experiences are stored in the mind/brain, not in terms of language but in something like dynamic images tied to perception both of the world and of our own bodies, internal states, and feelings: “Increasing evidence suggests that perceptual simulation is indeed central to comprehension” (Barsalou 1999a: p. 74).

you have to just actively play the game and explore and try everything. Then, at last, the booklet makes good sense, but then too you don’t need it all that much any more.

the work of childhood is play

knowing the general meaning is nearly worthless, unless you can recognize the word’s applications in specific cases.

he only realistic chance students with poor vocabularies have to catch up to their peers with rich vocabularies requires that they engage in extraordinary amounts of independent reading.

Learning to read is about learning to read different types of text with real understanding. This is why learning to read and learning content can never really be separated. You can’t read a book if the content of the book is meaningless to you.

Sometimes it is because instruction in school has made these varieties of language seem distant, irrelevant, and even frightening

By the mid-1980s integration increases ceased and the society became more segregated instead, a trend that continues today.

she adopts a frame that mimics story book reading as it is often done by teachers and other teacherly adults: “You can read along in your story book. I’m gonna read aloud... Wasn’t it fun reading together? Let’s do it again, real soon.”

When children watch television with an adult who gets them to think and talk about what they are watching, it can be good for the children’s cognitive growth.

often in affluent schools, and in fact get lots of practice with academic varieties of language at school starting in the early grades. By fourth grade they are doing middle-school work

they teach these children to “read” only in the sense of being able to do phonics and dealing with the superficial literal meanings of words mostly in the vernacular.

specialist languages use many devices to connect, contrast, and integrate sentences across stretches of text that are not used as frequently, nor in exactly in the same way, in vernacular varieties of language

People who learn to read the vernacular often have great trouble reading texts written in specialist varieties of language.

experience cognitively challenging talk and texts on sustained topics and in different genres of oral and written language

can’t “read” in the sense of understanding, in any deep way, informational texts written in fairly complex language

taking on the emerging identity

turn learning physics into a cultural and not an instructed process (or not just an instructed process). Why? Because it is clear that deep learning works better as a cultural process than it does as an instructed process

a cultural learning process

Advocates of Whole Language argue that learning to read is a “natural” process in the same way in which the acquisition of one’s native language is a natural process

School can’t compete with that

many children’s Pokémon knowledge is deeper than even this implies

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

purpose of public schooling to create a level playing field for all children?

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

Second, a phrase like “the hottest source of heat in the whole wide world” mixes vernacular

This is a literary device in which nature, or the cosmos, is treated as if it is “in step with” human affairs (e.g. the beauty and peace of a sunset matches the inner peace of the elderly poet resigned to the approach of the end of life)

oday’s reading traditionalists, supported by many linguists, myself included (Gee 2001; Rayner et al. 2001, 2002), argue that learning to read, unlike acquiring one’s first oral language, cannot be a biologically supported process and, thus, cannot be “natural.

Henry Ford would have been proud

Many, but not all, Pokémon can evolve, as they gain experience, into one or two other Pokémon

Do we, for example, teach the same comprehension strategies and text structures at each grade level, or does there come a point at which dividing and conquering these strate-gies and structures by year is more productive?

Evaluating Your Fostering and Teaching of Reading Comprehension

differentiation should be a priority

much comprehension instruction is provided in a whole-class for-mat

careful observation and assessment is needed to ascertain students’ comprehension strengths and weaknesses

Reading aloud, a common instructional strategy, is one widely researched context that is rich with opportunities for teaching vocabulary

Vocabulary impacts comprehension

trying to figure out what authors had in mind in writing a text in a certain way

effective teachers of reading comprehen-sion tend to employ classroom discussion to help readers work together to make meaning from the texts they encounter (

(a) that students learn that text is structured and (b) that they develop the ability to take advantage of any particular text’s structure in learning and remembering its key informa-tion.

certain strategies to become overused to the point of diminishing returns (

high-poverty students is that they spend a good deal more time coaching

called the three of you together

An Adapted Version of the Gradual Release of Responsibility Mode

teaching students comprehension routines that include developing facility with a repertoire of strategies from which to draw dur-ing independent reading tasks can lead to increased understanding

eaching them why, how, and when to apply certain strategies shown to be used by effective readers

Motivated reading behavior is characterized by students valuing and engaging in the act of reading

. We certainly want readers to have opportunities to read texts that are not difficult for them, but we also want readers to have access to texts that challenge them. Although it has long been rec-ommended that we prevent readers from reading frustration-level texts, it is becoming clear that challenging texts, at least as determined by word-reading accuracy, may not in fact be frustrating to students

Texts should represent a range of complexity,

concept development in science (e.g., learning the stages of the water cycle) is viewed as tightly linked to reading vocabulary development

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

efforts to provide readers with opportunities to build domain and world knowledge support their subsequent reading comprehension

The amount of related domain or world knowledge that a reader brings to a text significantly affects that reader’s compre-hension of that text;

active readers.

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

When readers build a situation model, they rely even more heavily on background knowledge and inferential processes than when build-ing a text base.

When readers build a situation model, they rely even more heavily on background knowledge and inferential processes than when build-ing a text base.

situation model can be thought of as an account of what the text means

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

incrementally turning over responsibility for meaning-making practices from teacher to student,

Observe and assess.10. Differentiate instruction

Another key task facing research and development in reading com-prehension is to understand how reading comprehension instruction is best coordinated across entire schools and districts.

a student’s reading level varies depending on his or her interest in the text,

representations are constructed, we can merge, or integrate, the information in those models with the knowl-edge stored in our minds.

Snow, Barnes, Chandler, Goodman, and Hemphill (1991) found that students whose home environments were poor with respect to promoting reading comprehension development nonetheless made adequate progress in reading comprehension if they had strong teach-ers of reading comprehension for two consecutive years.

MCVERRY

ocusing on practices of privacy and openness.

descriptive , as opposed to prescriptive

I just figure out what I need to learn and then I go learn it

Let us play, but guide us.

Students’ spellings provide a direct window into how they think thesystem works. By interpreting what students do when they spell, educators can target aspecific student’s “zone of proximal development” (Vygotsky, 1962) and plan wordstudy instruction that this student is conceptually ready to master.

Word knowledgeaccumulates as students develop orthographic understandings at the alphabetic level,the pattern level, and the meaning level in overarching layers of complexity.

Developmental spelling theory suggests that invented spelling is a window into achild’s knowledge of how written words work and can be used to guide instruction

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

With plenty of reading, writing, and word study, students’ vocabularies continue togrow and branch out into specialized disciplines and interests

As word study proceeds in this stage, the examination of accent or syllable stress be-comes a more central interest

students may substitute a /b/ sound for a /p/ sound, be-cause they are made with the lips in the same way except for one feature: In making the/p/ sound, air comes out of the mouth in an explosive way, whereas with the /b/sound, there is no accompanying explosion of air.

When students are instructed within their own zone of proximal development—at theirown level of word knowledge—they are able to build on what they already know, tolearn what they need to know next, to move forward.

similaritiesin the spelling

Teachers must be clearthat in written English,patterns refer to vowelsounds

In teachingthe alpha-betic code to EnglishLanguage Learners,teachers are sensitive tothe English sounds thatmay not exist in students’native languages, and toletters that may be pairedwith different sounds indifferent orthographies

Eachlayer provides information, and in mature readers and writers,there is interaction among the layers

Wordstudy also comes from what we have learned aboutthe orthographic structure of written words.

Thebetter our knowledge of the system, the better we are at decoding an unfamiliar word,spelling correctly, or guessing the meaning of a word.

players argue and debate at a meta-level about game rules, strategies, and innovations they advocate.

More-advantaged learners in our schools often cannot apply the knowledge they can write down on paper-and-pencil tests to real problem-solving in areas like history and physics

Digital technologies allow us to build worlds full of the sorts of content we have associated with books, but allow young people to enter these worlds and experience directly the connections between words and other symbols and the world. They can see how these connections can be used for problem-solving

The group lagging furthest behind in digital media access is Hispanics.

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

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.

White children spend less time playing video games than Hispanic or African American children.

many of our schools into test-prep academies focused on assessing standardized skill sets

” Teachers will do this by working with digital media, in particular multiplayer games, that invite students into an environment that teaches skills, vocabulary, facts, and different ways of thinking

Sesame Street

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.

teachers should avoidrigid adherence to a sequence

“You may jump the number of times as there aresyllables (some teachers say “beats” or “chunks”for syllables)

clapping when taking attendance for severaldays, clapping the number of syllables as you calleach child’s name. And at dismissal time youmay clap once and anyone with a one-syllablename may leave

Develop a bar graph reflecting the number ofstudents that have a given number of syllablesin their names

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

hecombination of phonemic awareness activitiesand letter-sound instruction has been found to beparticularly supportive of children’s emerging un-derstanding of the alphabetic principle

matchingsounds (especially initial sounds) is one of theeasier tasks, and more difficult may be the abili-ty to blend sounds together to form words

planto move from larger to smaller units of sound.

to overemphasize this component of litera-cy instruction in the initial years of schooling isto limit children’s opportunities for more com-prehensive literacy development.

phonemic awareness instruc-tion should be intentional, not incidental

prioritygoal in kindergarten classrooms. 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

English is considered funda-mentally alphabetic

metalinguistic awareness entails thinking aboutone’s language.

e 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).

riffith and Olson (1992) argued that phonemicawareness activities will not be helpful unlessthey can be placed in a context of real readingand writing.

teachers should avoidrigid adherence to a sequence. It is not the casethat teachers should engage exclusively in rhymeactivities for weeks before they engage in sylla-ble activities. Likewise, we do not believe thatchildren must “pass” one type of operation (e.g.,matching) before having experiences with an-other (e.g., blending). Phonemic awareness de-velopment is not a lockstep process

linguistically rich environ-ments—

e 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). (

Manysuccessful training studies include concrete repre-sentations of sounds in order to make mental ma-nipulations more over

oday’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

reading extends beyond the initial phase of acquisition andacross the lifespan as readers engage in a range of reading-related, goal-directedactivities.

outside the concern for readers’ efferent oraesthetic response to literature or the creation of a stimulating print-rich learn-ing environment, there was little regard for motivation in the form of readers’goals, interests, and involvement in the learning experience

This meant that a global label such as “good” or “poor” student would be per-ceived as too general and in need of qualification. The critical question was“good at what or poor at what”?

Knowledge was not a singular construct, but existed in diverse forms and inter-active dimensions

the goal was tolose oneself inthe text and not specifically to learn fromit.

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

Researchers studied the knowl-edge and processes of expert chess players to understand how experts visualizetasks, anticipate the moves of their opponents, and act to counter those moves.

the focus was more on how those process-es and procedures could be best represented symbolically and transferred intocomputer programs that could approximate human performance (Fodor, 2001).In effect, these individuals were interested in creating “intelligent machines” thatmimicked the problem solving of intelligent humans

The contrast be-tween the everyday language of children growing up in different social settingsand the language demanded in an educational setting began to surface as an is-sue for educational research and practice

a glance backward at where reading research hasbeen may serve to remind us that today’s research and practice are a legacy withroots that reach into the past.

shifting emphasis on the physi-ological, psychological, and the sociological. While reading always involvesphysiological, psychological, and sociological dimensions, each era weighs thesedimensions differently. When we look across the eras of reading research de-scribed in this article, it becomes apparent that each is distinguished by the rela-tive weight placed on body, mind, or society when understanding the nature oflearners and learning.

the most obviousrecurrence is the shifting emphasis on whole-word or phonetic instructional ap-proaches

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

effectivereaders must become capable of assessing credibility, identifying possible biases,analyzing persuasive or literary techniques, and locating and selecting optimalsources.

they continue to growas readers as their linguistic knowledge, subject-matter knowledge, strategic ca-pabilities, and their motivations expand and mature

In this most recent era ofliteracy research, the learner is conceptualized as a motivated knowledge seeker

as these alternative forms of text become more prevalent, literacy researchers andpractitioners may need to reconsider fundamental concepts such as learning, mem-ory, and strategic processing

by social experiences and interactions, but actually existed in those interchangesrather than in individual minds

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

Literacy research now sought to capturethe shared understanding of the many, rather than the private knowledge of theone.

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.

the goal was tolose oneself inthe text and not specifically to learn fromit

the residue afterthe reading

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

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

Conditions for that change included the growing atten-tion to the structure and processes of the human mind and increased U.S. federalfunding for basic reading research

Researchers studied the knowl-edge and processes of expert chess players to understand how experts visualizetasks, anticipate the moves of their opponents, and act to counter those moves.

In effect, these individuals were interested in creating “intelligent machines” thatmimicked the problem solving of intelligent humans

The groundbreaking work by Goodman andcolleagues on miscue analysis was prototypic of this reconceptualization occur-ring in reading diagnosis

meaningful use

increased inter-est in internal mental structures and processes sparked by advances in neurologyand artificial intelligence (Ericsson & Smith, 1991). Both of these movementsturned attention back inside the human mind and away from the environment.

According to James (1890), reading would be best de-scribed as mindful habit.

recalled effortlessly and automati-cally in future work.

When too muchinformationis presented at once, or when theprocessing demands are too great, ourworking memory becomes swamped.

it ismore efficient to return tosmall-stepinstruction when thematerial be-comes difficult.

Itis most important foryoung learners, slow learners, and forall learners when the material is new,difficult, or hierarchical

systematic method forpresenting materialin small steps,pausing to check for student under-stand-ing, and eliciting active and suc-cessful participation from all students.

middle-class mother-infant dyad ill joint picture-book reading

the bedtime story is a major literacy event whieh helps set patterns of behavior that recur repeatedly through the life of mainstream chil­dren and adults.

Familiar literacy events for mainstream preschool­ers are bedtime stories, reading cereal boxes, stop signs, and television ads, and interpreting instructions for commercial games and toys

way~of taking from books are as much a part of learned behavior as are ways of ( f eating, sitting, playing games. and building houses

reciprocal models of reading development

One of the groundbreaking but controversial publications of this periodwas Why Johnny Can’t Read—And What You Can Do About Itby Rudolf Flesch(1955). This book exemplified a growing interest in reading research and its rel-evance to educational practice

hus, earlier dichotomization of reading into“learning to read” and “reading to learn” stages (Chall, 1995) is shifting to a moreintegrated and developmental perspective.

e learner was cast in the role of an active par-ticipant, a constructor of meaning who used many forms of information to arriveat comprehension (Halliday, 1969). 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.