What is Reading?

1. What is Reading? (And why does it matter what it is?)

2. Definition #1 Reading is extracting meaning from text.

3. The Simple (some would say, “Simplistic”) View: • We read one letter at a time and add these up to identify a “word”: C + E + L + L + O = CELLO • Then we add words up to make sentences: I PLAY THE CELLO. And we add sentences up to make paragraphs, and so on.

4. The Assumptions • English is a phonetic language; therefore • Once students have learned the “sounds that letters make,” all they need to do is practice to learn to read. • If they speak the language fluently, once they’ve learned to decode fluently (have achieved “automaticity”), they’ll be able to shift their attention to comprehending what they’ve read. • Therefore, if students aren’t comprehending, it’s because their language skills are poor or they aren’t decoding fluently. • The way to deal with struggling readers is to have them practice fluency and reduce the difficulty of texts’ language (use shorter, simpler words and sentences)

5. “Readability”: Let’s test these assumptions with a passage from the TractatusLogico-Philosophicus, by Ludwig Wittgenstein • Count out 100 words from 4.061, 4.063, or 4.0641 (depending on where you sit). • Count the number of sentences in each 100-word passage. • Count the number of syllables in each passage (assume one syllable per word; put a mark above the second, third, fourth, etc.) syllables of each word (skip single syllable words). Add all the marks you made + 100. • Compute the average number of sentences for the three passages and the average number of syllables. • Plot these on the chart (next slide) to determine the “grade level” of the reading.

7. Problems with the “Simple” View: • It ignores a reader’s prior knowledge of the content of the text. • It ignores stylistic and rhetorical issues with the writing. • English is phonetic in principle, but often not in practice (so the idea that we read every letter and add them up makes little actual sense).

8. Definition #2: Reading is constructing meaning from text.

9. The Assumptions • Readers’ prior knowledge is critical to both decoding (identifying words and reading fluently) and comprehending a text. • Reading is a “psycholinguistic guessing game” (Goodman, 1981) in which readers recursively: • anticipate what is coming (in terms of words, phrases, and ideas) based on cues and prior knowledge, • sample the text to verify or correct their predictions, • make adjustments in what they know and can predict • Sample more of the text, make new predictions, and so on and so on… • Therefore, if a reader is struggling, it is likely because they aren’t predicting, sampling, and revising as they go; or because of a lack of prior knowledge.

10. An Example P A T CE I L Y HE LL O.

11. Prior Knowledge is Da Bomb • Prior knowledge of content, of the author’s intentions, of language, and of stylistic and rhetorical conventions of writing can all hang readers up. • DID YOU KNOW THIS? • Learning is nearly always a process of making sense of new input in light of what you already knew. • WITHOUT PRIOR KNOWLEDGE, LEARNING IS HARD, HARD, HARD. • This explains why non-intuitive subjects like organic chemistry and calculus or a non-European language like Arabic or Chinese are so challenging. It’s NOT because the content is necessarily difficult; it’s because learners start from ground zero in terms of prior knowledge when they learn them.

12. But So Are Strategies for Reading and Writing and USING Texts to Produce Meaning.And Aren’t You Glad That Is What This Course Is About?

13. So, Let’s Get Started! • The Grandparent of all reading comprehension strategies is the Directed Reading – Thinking Activity (Stauffer, 1958): • Here’s how you do it: • Preview a text with students. Ask them what they expect to read about, based on the cover, the back pages, the title, or the first sentence. RECORD these predictions on the board. • Read with them (using Shared Reading) or silently a short passage—a sentence or two or a paragraph. Revisit the predictions on the board. How many were accurate? How many can you eliminate as possible? And, now that you’ve read a bit, what do you think could come next? RECORD THESE PREDICTIONS ON THE BOARD. • Read on, a bit farther, maybe a page. Revisit the predictions, discuss, predict. RECORD THOSE PREDICTIONS ON THE BOARD. • And so on, lengthening the passages as you go. At the end, revisit your process, summarize, discuss what you learned that you didn’t know before.

14. Why Do Veins Pop-out When Exercising and Is That Good or Bad? Scientific American

15. Contrary to expectations, perhaps, bulging veins during exercise have nothing to do with an increase in either blood volume or pressure in these vessels. In fact, both are known to decrease during stepped-up activity, including exercise.

16. To explain the prominence of veins during exercise, it helps to understand the vascular system and its components. Blood that circulates throughout the body is pumped from the left ventricle of the heart. It first enters into the high pressure arteries, where systolic blood pressure, the highest pressure exerted there, is recorded around 120 mmHg (millimeters of mercury), and diastolic pressure, the minimal pressure exerted in these vessels, is recorded at around 80 mmHg. (Thus, normal blood pressure is typically around 120/80 mmHg.)

17. The blood flows into smaller and smaller branches of arteries called arterioles. As it continues along, its pressure decreases due to the resistance of the walls of the arterioles themselves. The blood then enters the capillaries--the smallest blood vessels--which provide nourishment to, and remove waste material from, active cells. There are more than one billion of these in the human body and they are extremely small and thin. The pressure exerted by the blood as it enters the capillaries is approximately 30 mmHg. This pressure decreases even further as the blood completes its nourishment functions and then leaves the capillaries to flow back toward the heart via the smallest veins--the venules. The venules combine into larger and larger veins until they feed into the right atrium of the heart as the vena cava. By the time blood enters the largest veins, pressure exerted by the blood stream is only a few mmHg and its return to the heart is moved along more by muscle activity and breathing than its own inherent force.

18. When exercise begins, the heart's rate and strength of contraction increases and blood is quickly pumped into the arteries. As this is occurring, systolic blood pressure increases linearly with exercise intensity, rising to nearly 200 mmHg during high intensity aerobic exercise (and to more than 400 mmHg during weight lifting). Diastolic pressure, on the other hand, changes very little with aerobic exercise (although it rises during weight lifting). Simultaneously, the internal diameters of veins and venules narrow in a process called venoconstriction, forcing the flow of blood forward to the heart and enhancing their ability to receive blood coming from the capillaries. Overall, this process helps decrease the pressure in the venules and veins to at most about five mmHg. Venous volume and pressure thereby decrease and are thus not the basis for the bulging. Instead, the process occurring in the capillaries as a result of the rise in arterial blood pressure during exercise causes plasma fluid otherwise resting in these tiny tributaries to be forced out through the thin vessel walls and into compartments surrounding the muscles. This process, known as filtration, causes a swelling and hardening of the muscle that is noticed during exercise. As a result of this swelling, cutaneous veins are pushed toward the skin surface, flatten to some extent, and appear to bulge. Such veins are more visible in persons with less subcutaneous fat. This bulging is neither good nor bad but simply a result of normal physiological mechanisms that result from the rise in arterial blood pressure during exertion.

19. DR-TA RULES!!! • Because it builds on prior knowledge. • Because it’s communal and social. • Because it imitates proficient readers’ “natural” processes. • Because it gives YOU, the teacher, immediate, ongoing assessment about the students’ comprehension, including any misconceptions they might have (but DON’T correct those misconceptions before the students read). • Because it empowers readers to use their own sense-making skills. • YES, it takes time, but the pay off is that EVERYONE will understand the reading (and that means a wonderful feeling of success and fewer management problems).

20. Here’s a variation: CONTENT DR-TA • Have students sit together in pairs (or threes). Each student has their own copy of the reading, but only one sheet of note paper. • Ask students to list on the paper everything they know about a general topic, e.g., “Shortest Distance from Chicago to Paris” • Ask students to list everything they know about a specific related topic, e.g., “Geometry of Curved Surfaces” • Ask students to predict what they’ll read about based on their lists. • Have the students read about the Pythagorean theorem and curved surfaces. As they read, have them mark any predictions they wrote that they read about with a +, mark inaccurate predictions with a -, and add new information that they learn • Have a whole-class discussion about what students predicted and what they learned. Record important facts on the board or butcher paper for later reference.

21. Now Let’s Try This: • Go to: Is Pop Music Evolving, Or Is It Just Getting Louder? (It’s a link on the course website, http://literacy473.weebly.com . Go to “Section MS Calendar” and scroll down to tonight’s date.) • Turn to the people sitting around you and form groups of 3 or 4. Read the first part of the article, online or on the screen. • Generate a “general” topic for the article; • Then, generate a more “specific” topic. • Write these on a small slip of paper and give them to me or Chris to share at the end of class.

22. But, you ask, what if students don’t have much prior knowledge of a topic or the text’s language is really hard? Wouldn’t you know, there are strategies for these situations, too. The WORST thing you can do as a teacher is dumb-down your curriculum or stop reading challenging texts when students struggle.

23. Are We Done Yet? Here Are TheTOP FIVE URBAN MYTHS ABOUT READING • You can learn to SPEED READ. • DYSLEXIA is a common cause of reading problems. • Struggling readers come from families that don’t value reading or education. • People don’t read as much as they used to. • There is a literacy crisis in the United States caused by television and the Internet.