Literacy comprehension in preschool students

A recent podcast on Voice of Literacy featured Dr. Katherine Strasser who studies story comprehension among preschool children. Studies have indicated that children who were read to from an early age develop better reading and literacy skills than those who were not read to. Dr. Strasser wants to know why oral reading effects the development of written text comprehension skills.

Whether someone is reading a story or another form of text, the reader must establish connections between sentences and construct a representation of the whole text in order to comprehend what is being read. This task is required both in oral story comprehension as well as written story comprehension. Oral language development occurs more quickly than written language development. Because of this relationship, Strasser comments on the importance of reading to children at a young age. She provided the following example to make her point, “If a student can read Frog and Toad then that student can comprehend Harry Potter.” Parents should read stories with complex emotions and plots and have conversations about character motivations, goals, and problems that arise in the story. Developing these skills early on will help students to apply them once they are able to decode the text themselves. Making inferences, connecting sentences to one another to form a new idea, and monitoring one’s comprehension are all skills that should be developed at a young age. While these tend to be focused on in second grade, Strasser points out that these should even be taught to kindergarten-age students. The earlier students learn and apply these skills, the greater potential for literacy development in the future. Using wordless picture books is another way that Dr. Strasser suggests in helping develop early comprehension skills. This form of literacy does not require a parent to read the book to the child and allows the student to work on his or her visual literacy comprehension. Wordless picture books may also be helpful in assessing a student’s level of comprehension at an earlier stage than his or her decoding ability.

Dr. Strasser stresses the need to focus on comprehension and deeper literacy skills because of the difficulty in measuring these areas. Government mandated tests tend to measure fluency and speed, but these skills can be developed without an equal level of comprehension growth. When speed and decoding are emphasized, students may gain a false concept of reading as decoding rather than as understanding and forming new ideas. Policy makers and principals should acknowledge the importance of oral language development and its apparent connection to reading comprehension by allotting time for teachers to focus on this in the classroom. The difficulty in measuring comprehension does not mean that it deserves less time in the classroom.

In the future, Dr. Strasser would like to form experimental studies to help determine what experiences and interactions with literature help children grow in their ability to form inferences and monitor their understanding as they read.

Fortunately, I have observed a pronounced focus in the classroom on literacy comprehension. Although this area may not be of primary importance on standardized tests, teachers are making concerted efforts to discuss themes, conflicts, character motivations, and plot as they read stories to their students. I make this a focus when I read to students in the classroom as well.

I enjoy reading stories to children but have always leaned toward picture books and never really discussed the book afterward when reading to children outside the classroom. Dr. Strasser discussed the importance of talking about books with children at an early age as well as reading more complex books or novels with children. I had assumed that reading novels to young children might be boring for them because of the lack of pictures; however, Dr. Strasser indicated that these could be just as entertaining for young minds. I will definitely begin to read a greater variety of books to the children I read to outside of the classroom.

Culture and Reading Ability

This week on The Voice of Literacy, Dr. Baker and Dr. Gottardo, an associate professor of psychology who studies reading and culture, discussed the effects of culture on literacy. Specifically, Baker wanted to know what differentiates successful and unsuccessful second language learners. She remarked that many times, second language learners may be diagnosed with learning disabilities when they are just struggling with the difficulties of learning a second language. Gottardo moved on to explaining one aspect of students who are successful second language learners: acculturation. 

Dr. Gottardo first discussed the differences between acculturation and enculturation. Acculturation, Gottardo explained, is identifying with mainstream culture and trying to become part of it. Studies have indicated that the level of acculturation a student has can help predict reading comprehension skills. Enculturation, on the other hand, is identifying with one's heritage culture. Two common misconceptions are that maintaining enculturation hinders the ability to learn a new language and acculturating will decrease identification with one's heritage culture. While this negative relationship has not be found, a positive relationship has been found. 

Acculturation has shown to help students improve their literacy in a second language. In order to understand a text, you must understand the language. But, in order to have a more comprehensive understanding of the words you are reading, you must understand certain aspects of the culture about which you are reading. By encouraging cultural mixing in the classroom, students who are learning a second language will gain a better understanding of the culture and, thus, the language they are trying to learn. This will help strengthen their reading comprehension as well as help students build friendships where they can share their own heritage culture. 

Parents do not need to worry about their students losing touch with their heritage culture due to acculturation. To further ease parents' concern in regard to this matter, some schools are developing after school heritage clubs where students who are learning a second language can also receive instruction in their native language and culture. Additionally, students who are not of the particular heritage are encouraged to attend the clubs to learn new languages and to gain insights about other cultures. 

With the increasing diversity in the school system, I am encouraged to know that acculturation has positive effects on literacy skills while not decreasing enculturation. As educators, we are encouraged to help students embrace their personal cultures while needing to educate them in the language of the particular country we are in. Knowing that doing both is possible without one diminishing the effect of the other is another constructive factor to keep in mind as I develop my lessons to support both cultural mixing and learning literacy skills. 

The Inner Voice

A recent podcast on Voice of Literacy discussed the idea of inner prosody during silent reading. Established readers have an inner voice as they read, an inner voice that has rhythm and melody. Struggling readers may lack this voice and read in a monotone way, actually reading the spaces in a rigid way. The difficulty is that in written language, there is no obvious way to indicate the natural flow and fluctuations of a sentence. It is something that is ascertained over time, as a person gains acquaintance with the language. 

In her studies with inner prosody, Dr. Jennifer Gross suggests a method of helping struggling readers form that inner voice. When people speak, they tend to articulate and place emphasis on the important parts of their point. Gross suggests trying to do something similar with written language. In order to do this, she suggests that certain texts used to help struggling readers should capitalize the parts of a word or sentence that are meant to be emphasized to help children see how the sentence should sound. She provides the example of when a person receives an e-mail in all caps, that person assumes the sender was angry or excited about something and her inner voice senses this distinction. The hope is that struggling readers will learn to distinguish the prosody of written language by seeing it in writing and hearing it when others read, developing their own inner prosody as they read aloud but which continues during silent reading.  

Her experimentation with this unique representation of written language is just beginning, but it will be interesting to see how books written in this way might help struggling readers. 

Source: Baker. F. A. & Gross J. (2014, March 10). The importance and support of intonation during silent reading. Voice of Literacy. Podcast retrieved from http://voiceofliteracy.org.

Filmmakers

Today I had the joy of making a Lego movie with a first grader. Most children would hate coming in for recess, but when I asked the student if he would be willing to come inside to make a Lego movie with me, his eyes lit up. He showed me where the Legos were in his classroom, and we got to work right away. I just pulled random pieces, tanks, and action figures out of the boxes while he looked for specifics: Lego people he had created before, pieces to make an army plane, and a Lego boat he had made previously. He preferred making his own Lego characters made from about four small pieces to using the premade Lego people. He gathered up the parts for the scenes he was planning on creating, his characters, and the setting before we moved to another location to film (where it would be quieter for us).

We set the scene how he wanted to and adjusted the characters and machines some. When he was ready, I began to shoot. I was intrigued by his desire to create a silent film. I asked him if he wanted to characters to say anything or talk to one another and he said no. He was content with the sound the tank and boat made as the crashed together and the visual effect of the bad guy flipping over when the good army guys hit him. He also chose to not name the characters because, “I didn’t want to.” The bad guy, although hit several times, recovered but eventually chose to go hide behind the army base. He ended up getting “stuck” instead which concluded the film as the Lego army men traveled back to the base, happy with their success at defeating the bad guy.

I later added sound effects and edited the film. Seeing the finished product felt great. Knowing, though, how much cooperation, discussion, critical thinking, and creativity would go into this sort of project when done by a group of elementary students made me love the idea even more. Bringing media to students and helping them advance in the things they already love so much is going to push the limits of technology. As students want to accomplish tasks where technology limits them, they will begin developing their own ideas for what technology should do. Students will learn to communicate their ideas verbally and will learn to listen attentively to others as they develop their films. Working one-on-one with a student showed me his personal interests: Legos, action, army, good versus bad, and no dialogue or character names. If I were to place him with other students, how might his boundaries and obvious skill with Legos be pushed to new boundaries? How would he push the skills of others? Implementing filmmaking in the classroom will only begin to show me how.

Playshop

In reading Literacy Playshop, I was introduced to a new form of literacy. Rather than developing a typical spelling words, sentence-making, and proper punctuation curriculum, the teachers in the second chapter chose to use current media to explore storying with students. The curriculum was student centered instead of teacher centered, allowing curricular negotiations with the students. By exploring popular media and stories children were familiar with, Buchholz and Coggin (the teachers) allowed students to hop into their areas of expertise while helping them deconstruct their ideas of what makes a hero or villain.

After observing and discussing movie clips, characters, and character roles, Buchholz and Coggin realized that their discussions were not going where they had hoped. Their students were not coming to the conclusions that the teachers wanted: that gender stereotypes could be crossed and that popular media often creates such stereotypes. But because the literacy playshop curriculum is not one of call and response, the teachers were able to recognize that the students needed to play with the stories to get a better grasp on what they wanted to students to see. They moved onto the next step: storyboarding. Students developed their own characters and wrote down their general story lines. When the teachers realized that this was limited to the extent of the young children's vocabularies, they moved onto the next step, filmmaking. The literacy playshop in regards to media was very flexible in allowing each student to move onto the next step as they are ready to do so. Some were comfortable with storyboarding while others "ran out of ideas" and needed something else to get their juices flowing.

Activities flow easily from one to another depending on each student's needs. Each step also enabled students of differing intelligences to shine. Students who often spent time with individual teachers or were considered "struggling" could take leadership roles in the filmmaking portion, artists could help develop the images of the storyboards, and students could all try their hands at being a cameraperson or an actor. Boundaries were pushed as children tried various positions of leadership and forms of literacy. Additionally, the development of stories with peers encouraged the sharing of stories with other peers rather than just the teacher. As students age, insecurities often stifle this desire to share work with peers. Rather than creating a competitive environment, the literacy playshop allows students to show and develop their strengths and share them with others which could help build their confidence for sharing as they age.

Although the literacy playshop is a unique, new form of literacy that I am just beginning to explore, it encourages a love for storying, the sharing of students' creations and strengths, and a desire to explore new ideas. Rather than stifling students by demonstrating that there is one correct form of writing, it develops the idea of writing as a tool to convey or preserve a message via multiple forms of media.

Listening to those who know your students best

As teachers, we are considered experts in our field. What we deem as important to a child's education is what we will teach them. While we may know how students learn, how to teach mini-lessons, how to correct punctuation, and how to push a student to the next level of reading or writing ability, can we say that we know our students the better than anyone else? In Connie L. White's article "'What He Wanted Was Real Stories, but No One Would Listen': a Child's Literacy, A Mother's Understandings", teachers' knowledge of their students is examined. As a teacher, White encountered parents, specifically mothers, that cared about their children's education and had concerns and knowledge about their children that previous teachers had ignored. The school "experts" considered their children behind in their reading abilities. Was it that? Or were the children just not interested in what they were being told to read and learn? 

White says that parental involvement is key in the classroom. Parent volunteers have become an expectation in many schools, and if parents are unable to volunteer, they are considered uncaring. She protests this argument, indicating that many parents who may want to be involved may be unable to do so because of their work schedules. With this in mind, though, parents who can get involved should be welcomed with open arms. Parents have spent the first years of their child's life with them; they most likely know their children better than the teachers who have them in class for about 7-8 months. Because of this, teachers should open their classrooms to parents and take into serious consideration the comments and questions parents have about their children. In a particular case that White examines, a woman named Betty was concerned about her son's interests because they were not up to par with what the school expected. He was interested in non-fiction. If it could not happen in real life, it made no sense to her son. Why should this be a cause of concern? He was able to read and had excellent farm literacy and experience with farm animals and techniques. How important is it that he enjoys "airy fairy" stories, as his mother called them? She was never interested in fairy tales either. This information greatly helped White reach out to Betty's son, and White was able to incorporate his interests into the curriculum. His unique interests also pointed out the flaws in White's curriculum. She was basing her book discussions on topics she deemed valuable but was not confirming that these topics also mattered to her students. 

To further aid her understanding of her students' home literacies, White met with several mothers once a month and used home-school journals that were written between her and interested mothers. By incorporating these practices, at the request of Betty, students' mothers became well acquainted, communication was formed between White and her students' parents, and White was able to adjust her curriculum to better fit students' unique interests. The home-school dialogue helped White to gain a deeper understanding of the literacy students encountered at home. She learned that several of her students were not "behind" because they were not read to at home because they were read to! They were simply uninterested in what White was teaching. This is not to say that teachers should never teach topics that not every student is interested in because this is just not possible. It merely suggests looking beyond our own interests and the interests of the majority to reach more students. If a student is going to best learn to read by reading non-fiction stories or realistic fiction, then that student should be reading those genres. Students should be exposed to multiple genres in order to help them discover their interests. Learning to read is not about learning to love what the teacher loves but to discover what each student loves and to help him or her learn more about those topics. This should be kept at the forefront of educational practices. Parents can help teachers do this by informing them of their children's interests, learning behaviors, and talents. Once the teacher knows this information, he or she can incorporate students' home literacies into the classroom. The boy interested in farming was able to discuss techniques and farm animals that his mother was able to bring to school. Other home literacies could also be brought into the classroom. This would help students get to know one another better, build confidence in the students who are experts on their home literacies, and teach many new ideas to the entire class in the process.   

Including parents in our instruction may be intimidating at first, but their involvement and knowledge of their children will help foster a class of diverse learners with unique interests and a sense that their education truly matters. 

Source: White, Connie L. (2009). What He Wanted Was Real Stories, but No One Would Listen": A Child's Literacy, a Mother's Understandings. Language Arts. 86(6), 431-439. 

"Vocabulary Practices in PreKindergarten and Kindergarten Classrooms"

Early vocabulary exposure has shown to predict literacy skills down the road. Rebecca Silverman and Jennifer DiBara Crandell sought to explore what prekindergarten and kindergarten teachers were implementing in their classrooms to help promote vocabulary growth and which practices had the greatest effects on children learning vocabulary. Additionally, they wanted to look at the timing of such practices, whether they were during read-aloud time or during non-read-aloud time, as well as which practices helped students with higher initial vocabulary skills and lower initial vocabulary skills. 

In their article "Vocabulary Practices in PreKindergarten and Kindergarten Classrooms," Silverman and DiBara Crandell first reviewed a great deal of research on what vocabulary practices were being implemented in early elementary classrooms. They grouped about seventeen practices into five general categories of practices that teachers used, during read-aloud, non-read-aloud, or both times. The practices included: acting or illustrating to support learning the word (AI), analyzing the word by comparing and contrasting the word, looking at multiple meanings, or providing synonyms and antonyms (AN), contextualizing the word by guiding children to use the word in different contexts than in which the word was introduced (CN), explicitly defining the word in the context in which in appears (DF), and word study in which children are prompted to use a vocabulary word in instruction of spelling, phonics, or writing practice (WS). 244 four-, five-, and six- year olds at 16 different prekindergarten and kindergarten classrooms participated in the study over the course of the year. 16 teachers participated in the study. The teachers attended a presentation on the reviews that Sliverman and DiBara Crandell had found on vocabulary practices and were asked to use certain books (based on teacher recommendation) and focus on target vocabulary words during their instruction. Teachers were asked to teach as they normally would but just to include the requested books and vocabulary words. To pretest and test the students, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test III was administered in the fall and spring to participating students (children were shown four pictures and asked to point to the picture that represented the word). 

Silverman and DiBara Crandell found that Contextualizing (1) and Defining (2) were used the most during read-aloud and non-read-aloud times. Word Study happened frequently during read-aloud time as well as non-read-aloud time while Acting/Illustrating, Analyzing, and Defining occurred more frequently during non-read-aloud time. Acting/Illustrating was positively related to vocabulary growth for students with low initial vocabulary knowledge but not for students with high initial vocabulary knowledge. Analyzing words was used the least, so researchers felt that they could not determine its effects on students' learning. They predicted that analyzing words might be beneficial with students of higher initial vocabulary knowledge because of the exploration of the word and prior word knowledge necessary to do so. Contextualizing benefited both students with high and low initial vocabulary knowledge but had a greater benefit for those students with high initial vocabulary knowledge. Defining words benefited students in the same way that contextualizing words did: benefiting both groups of students but having a greater benefit for students with high initial vocabulary knowledge. Word study benefitted both groups of students when utilized in both read-aloud and non-read-aloud times. Students with low initial vocabulary skills seemed to benefit more from Acting/Illustrating during read-aloud time whereas students with high initial vocabulary skills seemed to benefit more from Contextualizing and Defining during non-read-aloud time. 

Silverman and DiBara Crandell's goals were to add to the research showing effective vocabulary instruction during read-aloud and non-read-aloud times. Based on their findings it is important for teachers not only to consider which practices work for all students (Contextualizing, Defining, and Word Study) but which practices works the best for different students and at which times (Acting/Illustrating during read-aloud for low initial vocabulary knowledge; Contextualizing and Defining during non-read-aloud for high initial vocabulary knowledge). By implementing multiple types of practices in the classroom, more students can benefit from vocabulary instruction in greater ways than if only using one or two vocabulary practices. Since Analyzing words could potentially be another highly beneficial vocabulary practice, more research should be conducted on Analyzing words to help with vocabulary instruction. This practice was shown to be used widely in other studies but was not used enough in this study to indicate its usefulness in increasing vocabulary knowledge. 

Source: Silverman, R., & DiBara Crandell, J. (2010). Vocabulary Practices in Prekindergarten and Kindergarten Classrooms. Reading Research Quarterly. 45(3), 318-340. 

Teaching tips:

-Always try to help all students improve their vocabulary, not just students with low initial vocabulary skills. 
-Ask students what helps them learn!
-Implement various vocabulary practices during each vocabulary lesson so that each students can receive the instruction that works best for them.