The skills, strategies, practices, and dispositions students need to locate, evaluate, and synthesize in-formation during problem-based inquiry tasks

The Web Literacy Map operationalized writing as “building” because on the Web you create content to make meaning.

The Web Literacy Map, version 1.5, operationalized reading as “Exploring” (see Figure 1), and this was defined as “navigating the Web.”

literacy as a cultur-ally defined social act

However, these frame-works have attempted to make sense of the Web us-ing previous metaphors, rather than understanding the explicit affordances of the Web as a networked medium.

“Let us play, but guide us.”

extensive and not intensive

he best-known efforts here perhaps were Ann Brown and Joseph Campione’s classroom “learning communities” (see Brown 1994 for an overview)

Let me make it clear here though that what people have an affinity with (or for) in an affinity space is not first and foremost the other people using the space, but the endeavor or interest around which the space is organized, in this case

If we start by talking about spaces rather than “communities,” we can then go on and ask to what extent the people interacting within a space, or some subgroup of them, do or do not actually form a community.

i.e. what they do there and what they get from that space (e.g. import or export from it).

social aspect

periods of pleasurable frustration and routine mastery

“principle of expertise,”

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

If the player waits, the tutorial prints a hint about what to do on the top left of the screen and says the hint orally and explains what it means. There are also, from time to time, remarks about how the game works: for example, the remark above about how to see more of the map. The tutorial is a nice dance of the player’s actions and designers’ guidance and instructions

Quick Start tutorial is a space where the player is really playing the game, but is protected from quick defeat and is free to explore, try things, take risks, and make new discoveries.

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

Learning to play the game of being a member of a family of a certain sort taught Brian certain “moves,” some of which turned out to be skills that transferred to school.

geology textbook

The texts that come with games are very hard to understand unless and until one has some experience of playing the game—experience which, then, will give specific situated meanings to the language in the text.

“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

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?

these language practices are done in these homes not just or primarily to give children certain skills, but rather to give them certain values, attitudes, motivations, ways of interacting, and perspectives, all of which are more important than mere skills for success later in school.

So his mother played the game with him, at first reading everything for him and learning to play the game (which is complicated) with him step by step. It was this experience, coupled with much interaction with the Pokémon universe (via cards, figures, books, and the Internet), that both motivated him to want to read and taught him how to read, along with a good first-grade teacher. But the first-grade teacher, for Brian and other kids like him, was the cherry on top of ice cream that had already been served

Language ability

he “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

Typically a majority of the trained children narrow the gap between themselves and initially more advanced students in phonological awareness and word reading skills, but few are brought completely up to speed through training, and a few fail to show any gains at all.

The process involves “masters” (adults, more masterful peers) creating an environment rich in support for learners.

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.

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

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.

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.

.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

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.

The name of this stage reflects students’ dominant approach tospelling; that is, they use the namesof the letters in combination with the alphabetic prin-ciple when they spell

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.

The best way to develop fast and accurate perception of word features is to engage inmeaningful reading and writing, and to have multiple opportunities to examine thosesame words out of context.

Teacher, May We?

Ask the children how they made theirguesses. “Why did you guess wigs/twigs/figs?”

The Hungry Thing

phonemicawareness activities will not be helpful unlessthey can be placed in a context of real readingand writing.

activities that arechild appropriate

manystates in the U.S. are addressing phonemicawareness in standards documents

authority which books and book­related activities have in the lives of both the preschoolers

PreschOOl children accept book and book-related activities as entertain­ment. When preschoolers are "captive audiences" (e.g., waiting in a doctor's office, putting a toy together, or preparing for bed), adults reach for books.

llsing teacher-mothers

Before the age of two, the child is socialized into the' 'initiation-reply­evaluation sequences" repeatedly described as the central structural feature of classroom lessons

condition-ality of knowledge

efferent to an aesthetic stance

he learner was cast in the role of an active par-ticipant, a constructor of meaning who used many forms of information to arriveat comprehension

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 (Harste, Burke, & Woodward, 1984). Just 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, 1980).

humans emerge from the womb with a preexisting template that guides languageuse. “Languaging” was thus perceived to unfold naturally, to follow a develop-mental trajectory, and to involve not just the action of the environment on the in-dividual but also the individual’s contribution in the form of a predisposition orinnate capacity

coherence and sensecould not be achieved by assembly alone

One of the qualitative changes was a seeming rise in the number of children expe-riencing difficulties in learning to read. Such reading problems, although nothingnew to teachers, took on particular significance in the age of Sputnik, as America’sability to compete globally became a defining issue