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.

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

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.

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

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

The Historical Development of 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.

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.

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.

The Era of Conditioned Learning (1950–1965)

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