Read out loud in my classroom

For the most enjoyable experience please listen to the following song while reading this post. Letter Read

Post 5 Influence of language and literacy development and the teaching of reading.

It was quite a long title chapter for quite a long chapter (about as long as the previous 3 chapters combined). That being said, it was also the most fascinating chapter for me. After the authors get in their customary jab at the traditional phonemic way of teaching reading the get into a lot ideas about how readers organically begin to learn to read and write. How early readers take letters or symbols that they recognize, the M on the McDonalds, the Coca-Cola symbol, and they affix meaning to them. The M may mean hamburgers or chicken nuggets, but it may also reference to a letter in a child’s name. The authors of “Multiple voices, multiple texts.” Are arguing that the natural way for a person to learn is in imitation. In fact, they take a lot of time in this chapter talking about dialects of students and how there is no real ‘standard’ way of speaking and that students follow not only the syntax of the area that they are in but also the patterns of words that they are in as well. This does not mean that a student is less smart than others. In Boston, for instance, a teacher will not correct a student who reads the word yard, as ‘yahd’ but in classes outside of the Boston area a teacher may correct that word. Studies found that this is detrimental to students and in fact, a student who is allowed to, at least partially, use their dialect that they are better readers and perform better on reading tests. There was a lot of discussion in the book about dialect and how it affects the classroom but to in order to make this synapsis short enough I am going to skip to the part I thought was most interesting:

How should I correct my students in the classroom? I am an English teacher, my philosophy is that student who read and writes more do better on reading and writing tests. I ask all of my students to read aloud and I am in the practice of correcting students when they make a mistake whilst reading. These are not dialectic mistakes but instead mistakes that are mispronouncing a word, and this book, which I really like the book, has challenged me in this thinking. In that I wonder at how much I am going to correct my students in all of the areas. The book does say that if a students reading of a word changes the meaning of what is being said than a correction can be made but that it is no necessary otherwise to correct the student and may actually do more harm than good.

            I think that in the future I am going to do my best to do some research on how my population of students (predominately Native American) respond to different types of reading. Studies have shown that some Native American population students need a less structured form of classroom discourse than the teacher led traditional model and I think that this may be the way I want to go. I guess it means I will have to bite my tongue when a student says “Anyways.”