National Reading Panel, SSR findings, & more: ""
I want to come back to this later. I'm currently looking at The Reading Zone (Atwell, 2007) and Smart Answers to Tough Questions (Garan, 2007). I'm interested to see if any of the findings about silent reading can have implications for the study I might conduct in the fall.
Plus, Stephen Krashen is cited on the website.
Franzak, J. (May 2008). On the margins in a high-performing high school: Policy and the struggling reader. Research in the Teaching of English, 42(4). pp. 466-505.
In this article, Franzak sets about to answer the following questions: "What constitutes 'policy' in secondary school reading and literature study" and "In the context of how it is constituted, how does reading/literature policy shape the experience of struggling readers in a traditional high school English class?" (Franzak, 2008, p. 467). She finds there is a disconnect between state/district created policy and its implementation in the classroom, describing implied policy and phantom policies that existed within the district. The focus of analysis is the student participants' understanding of why they read specific literature in language arts class--namely Romeo & Juliet and The Odyssey.
In the discussion of the research, Franzak suggests that the integration of teaching literature and teaching reading needs to be added to teacher education programs as well as educational policy.
This was the NCTE Inbox blog post by Traci Gardner that I thought of while I was reading through Sumara's Chapter 2 "Learning how to create insight".
The post was a response to a report written by Carol Jago (who I believe is the current president of NCTE), which I have attached. Instead of being told the reason to read literaature, the idea is that by answering five questions, people can come to see the importance of reading literature on their own. The five questions are as follows:
1. What piece of literature has stayed with you, even though you haven't read it recently?
2. What character or story has influenced something you've done?
3. What character or piece of literature seemed to relate to a recent news story or personal experience?
4. What character has made you wonder why he or she did/said something?
5. Name something from a work of literature (such as a character, setting, or quotation) that you find beautiful or vivid.
At the very least, it's something to think about.
The original blog post can be found here: http://dft.ba/-fivethings
Carol Jago's report can be found here [PDF]
Sumara, Dennis. (2002). Why reading literature in school still matters: Imagination, interpretation, insight. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoicates.
Baron, N. S. (2008). Always on: Language in an online and mobile world [Kindle DX Reader version]. Retrieved from http://www.amazon.com
"In Always On, Naomi S. Baron reveals that online and mobile technologies--including instant messaging, cell phones, multitasking, Facebook, blogs, and wikis--are profoundly influencing how we read and write, speak and listen, but not in the ways we might suppose. Baron draws on a decade of research to provide an eye-opening look at language in an online and mobile world. She reveals for instance that email, IM, and text messaging have had surprisingly little impact on student writing. Electronic media has magnified the laid-back "whatever" attitude toward formal writing that young people everywhere have embraced, but it is not a cause of it. A more troubling trend, according to Baron, is the myriad ways in which we block incoming IMs, camouflage ourselves on Facebook, and use ring tones or caller ID to screen incoming calls on our mobile phones. Our ability to decide who to talk to, she argues, is likely to be among the most lasting influences that information technology has upon the ways we communicate with one another. Moreover, as more and more people are "always on" one technology or another--whether communicating, working, or just surfing the web or playing games--we have to ask what kind of people we are becoming, as individuals and as family members or friends, if the relationships we form must increasingly compete for our attention with digital media." --from Amazon.com
Reading this text did bring a sense of awareness to the way I interact and the way my students interact with people (or even choose not to interact with people) using technology. It often isn't enough to be engaged in one activity. With the proliferation of mobile technology, it is increasingly more "necessary" to be engaged in more than one activity at a time. But what does this multitasking to do to the quality of the activity we are engaged in, whether it be writing a paper or talking with a friend or parent on the phone?
