Observing the Reading Process (RMI, Chapter 1 notes)

"If the significance of miscues is not understood, they are likely to be treated as phenomena that must be eliminated"  (p. 8)
"An additional purpose of miscue analysis is to help teachers and researchers evaluate reading material" (p. 4)
Through the Burke Interview (p. 13) teachers can find out how children perceive themselves as readers.
Reading Models

• Bottom-up mdoel
• Top-down model
• Interactive model

• Subskills model
• Skills model
• Holistic

Here's what they look like:


Language Cuing Systems
Semantic cuing system

• The system of meanings in a language
• The question: Does this make sense?

Syntactic cuing System

• Interrelationships of words, sentences, and paragraphs within a coherent text.
• The question: Does this sound like language?

Pragmatic cuing system

• The system of social rules that lets us know what language is acceptable and expected in particular settings. (Social knowledge)
• The question: what might someone say in this situation?

Graphophonic cuing system

• The set of relationships between the sounds and the written forms of the language.
• The question: How do these letters and their sounds help me choose a word that makes sense here?

Goodman, Y., et. al. (2005). Reading Miscue Inventory. Katonah, NY: Richard C. Owens Publishers, Inc.

Tough Questions

Reading Aloud

Research says,

I am spending time teaching kids to read by reading aloud. They learn about comprehension, fluent reading, decoding and sounding out words. Our standards include oral comprehension.

For ELL students, it's giving them more practice with the language.

So children can learn the conventions of print.

Round-Robin Reading

Research says,

The only child that pays attention is the child that is reading.

Doesn't focus on comprehension, but performance.

Struggling readers and ELL students struggle in front of their peers.

It's a high anxiety activity.

Garan, E. (2007). Smart Answers to Tough Questions. New York: Scholastic.

Miscue Analysis (in class)

When evaluating miscues, it's important to

• Syntactic Acceptablilty (Does this sound like language?)
• Semantic acceptability (Does this make sense?
• Meaning change?
• Graphic similarity (high, low, some)

High quality miscues (labeled YYN), those that show the children are making sense of what they're reading, usually have very low graphic similarity.

Low quality miscues usually have high graphic similarity because children are usually focusing too heavily on the graphophonic cuing system.

If a child self corrects, the coding of the miscue changes. Self-correcting is a YYN miscue. It's another reason we shouldn't interrupt children while they're reading. If we do, we eliminate the opportunity for the use of this strategy.

Research Ideas

Right now I'm reading Designing Qualitative Research (Marshall & Rossman, 2006) in preparation for Wednesday's class meeting. As scared as I am about the dissertation process I have at the forefront of my brain, developing ideas about what I want to research. I figured I'd record them here under a common tag, and refer to them later.

As I was reading, I made a connection between the process of asking questions specific to and important for the advancement of a particular field, and the reading I did in Smart Answers to Tough Questions (Garan, 2007) about questions on reading. In this section, Garan talks about how silent sustained reading is important for students to build fluency (especially if they're reading something they like), and to move them to becoming better readers. There is a little discussion about Accelerated Reader and how there is insubstantial research both for and against this particular program. There is criticism that the focus is on extrinsic reward for readers, and the questions asked on the quizzes are all surface, Bloom's Level 1 Remember, type questions.

What I wonder is what programs like this do to the dispositions of young readers--especially when the self-selection of books is limited to those books that are on or above their level. Do they become life-long readers? How many of those students who had poor dispositions toward reading and Accelerated Reader as elementary school students end up in the Read180 program or programs like it at the middle and high school level? Does that program (which includes an AR like quiz program called Scholastic Reading Counts) change those dispositions? Or do the students internalize more because they want their elective back?

I realize that many of these questions are specific to the environment in which I currently teach, but I am sure they apply to other districts as well.

 

Garan, E. (2007). Smart Answers to Tough Questions. New York: Scholastic.

Marshall, M. and Rossman, G. (2007). Designing Qualitative Research.  Los Angeles: Sage.

Miscue Analysis

While RDG 621 is formally a class about literacy assessment and evaluation, the main assessment too that students learn and perform in this class is miscue analysis. Our class is held at New Mexico State's Children's Village, where we spend half the class learning about literacy by interacting with children.

Miscue analysis is a process developed by Ken Goodman (who wrote one of our textbooks). Simply put, it's the process used to determine both a reader's strengths and the strategies the reader needs to work on.

Unlike many assessment tools, miscue analysis is a mixed methods way of conducting research, possessing qualities that are both quantitative and qualitative. On the quantitative side, miscue analysis provides statistical information in the quantity and frequency of miscues. On the qualitative side, miscue analysis tells the evaluator about the quality of a reader's reading.

Right now, I have a working knowledge of the three cuing systems people use when they read. A fundamental understanding of these cuing systems is important when conducting miscue analysis. My goal for the semester is to build my knowledge of these cuing systems so when I am conducting an informal miscue analysis while listening to my students read, I can call up my knowledge of these cuing systems to help me further guide my students.

The three cuing systems are:

• Graphophonic: this system involves the way words are spelled, punctuation, and other print features, as well as the sounds of oral language and their relationship
• Semantic: this system deals with the meanings of words and phrases, how they relate to each other and both the author's and reader's knowledge of the world.
• Syntactic: this system involves the way people organize their words in phrases or sentences in any given language. The grammar of a language, if you will.

Goodman, Y., et. al. (2005) Reading Miscue Inventory. Katonah, NY: Richard C. Owen Publishers, Inc.

Memo on researcher identity

I was perusing my Qualitative Educational Research textbook (p. 470) yesterday and came across a section about using memos to help keep track of my thinking on my journey toward my dissertation. I thought i'd go ahead and give one memo a go.

The purpose of this memo is to begin a conversation with myself about the personal relevance of the research I'm planning and why I care about it.

Lutrell poses four questions to help jumpstart this process.

• What are your passions? What makes you care about the topic or the people, places or things that you wish to study?

I am passionate about young adult literature. There's something that I haven't put my finger on yet about the characters, the settings, the writing that speaks to me. And I am passionate about the adolescents who read these novels, who don't want to read these novels, who struggle with literacy in their native language and/or in a new language. There is an excitement that can't be replicated anywhere else when a self-professed non-reader sends me a text message asking for the release date for the next book in the series he's spent the semester reading.

I'm a reader. I've always been a reader. There are days when I can't help but wonder if my passion for young adult literature came from the fact that as an adolescent, my self-selected reads were adult fiction and the classics.

I take immense pleasure in recommending YA titles to my students, discussing their reading and helping them build their literacy not only in an academic setting but outside of school as well.

• What presumptions and beliefs do you hold about the topic, people, places or things?

I assume that every adolescent can find something to read that they can identify with. I believe that most people need to be at least functionally literate to get by in society without being taken advantage of. I believe that some YA literature is as rich in language, characterization and story as the classics English teaches are required to teach. (Don't misunderstand, I also believe that the classics have merit.)

I assume that many struggling readers want to read better, but they're so used to where they are, and many are embarrassed about being behind, that they're paralyzed. I believe that YA literature is becoming increasingly popular (e.g. The hype behind the releases of the Harry potter books and of Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins) with not only adolescent readers, but adult readers as well.

The other two questions, I can't answer yet, but I'll put them here for future reference:

• What is currently preoccupying your mind as you begin your research?

• What are your predilections and preferences as a researcher?



Luttrell, W. (2010). Qualitative Educational Research. New York: Routledge.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Trying out a new app

I saw on a blog I follow that the blog was posted with BlogPress for iPad. One of my Twitter friends posted yesterday or the day before about clients people use to write their blogs that aren't web based. These two things got me thinking.

I often use my phone to take pictures of student work or to take pictures of notes written on the board during class. It's a hassle to email myself the pictures then upload them into a post, or to download the pictures from my phone and onto my computer then upload them into a post. I could email the pictures directly from my phone, but I haven't figured out how to do more than one at a time (though now that I think about it, it might be pretty simple).

I'm going to try BlogPress for a while, see if live blogging, particularly during my university classes, works for me.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Year One, Fall Classes

The two classes for Year One, Fall are

RDG 621 - Literacy/Biliteracy Assessment and Evaluation

and 

EDUC 576 - Qualitative Research

RDG 621 is cross listed with RDG 511, which I took as a master's student. Of the five texts required for the class, four are the same. The most interesting part of RDG 511 was the mini-lesson in the eye movement lab, which shed some light on how we process what we see when we read. I hope to pull something new from this class, and I hope that the doctoral section is not the add-one-project-and-call-it-600 as master's classes cross listed with undergrad classes were.

As for EDUC 576... The professor was my master's advisor and I liked her. My current advisor says that she's really tough, so I'm expecting this class to be a challenge. I feel unprepared when it comes to conducting and reading research; hopefully this class will help me build the confidence I'm going to need to get through this.