The Literacy Potential of Popular Media Items

Children love to write about what they know. Spend any amount of time with children and it will become obvious that many of them are veritable experts on the toys and characters in popular children's media. When children want to write about popular media themes such as toys or characters from films and television, many teachers tend to react negatively. They may fear that the children will simply be recreating familiar story lines with little creativity on their part. Dr. Karen Wohlwend's research on this topic may alleviate these fears.

Wohlwend found that popular toys and media themes serve as ways to get children writing about things that they are personally interested and invest in. Popular media items can ultimately serve as a useful tool in literacy development. While children may sometimes be reenacting story lines, they are often doing so in a flexible and innovative way, adapting and appropriating them into their own stories. Popular media is an important piece of children's literary repertoires and it may be a mistake to prevent them from using it creatively.

There is certainly room to criticize how toys and other popular media items serve to perpetuate stereotypes of race, class, and gender and the effects these stereotypes may have on children. As Wohlwend suggests, if teachers ban these popular media items from the classroom they have effectively removed themselves the conversation.

Learning Literacy Through Play

With the increasing focus on testing and preparing for tests, children are given less and less time to play. As Dr. Karen Wohlwend suggests in Playing Their Way into Literacies: Reading, Writing, and Belonging in the Early Childhood Classroom, given the high-stakes nature of standardized testing, many teachers "opt for the defensible approach and focus on discrete skills instruction that closely matches test content." It may be hard to blame them. While play may be increasingly viewed as "frivolous,"  Dr. Wohlwend argues that these kinds of activities are a vital part of children's learning.

Through play, children model activities, take on the roles of more experienced readers, and cooperate in literacy activities that are important for their learning. As Dr. Wohlwend puts it, "Through play, children can mediate print texts for themselves and others by pretending to be more experienced readers who use more complex literacy practices, allowing them to play the expert within the classroom community."

Another point that stands out is that play can aid children in developing skills that are necessary in navigating the increasingly diverse nature of modern literacies. As Dr. Wohlwend discussed in a 2009 Voice of Literacy podcast, "We have lots of different ways that children and adults are communicating that don't involve these traditional interactions with the page." In other words, "The definition of literacy is evolving." It is very important that young students are prepared to use modern forms of communication and be able respond to the inevitable changes that will occur in numerous forms of literacy. By allowing children to experiment and work together through play, we can ensure that they develop the literacy skills that they will need.

The Importance of Prosody in Reading Assessment

In a recent Voice of Literacy podcast, Dr. Paula Schwanenflugel discussed the importance of assessing young readers' comprehension with a focus on prosody in addition to accuracy and rate. While the most common forms of assessing reading fluency are measuring the speed at which a child reads and the number of correctly spoken words, these alone may not give us a complete picture of how well the child is comprehending what she is reading. Giving attention to prosody, or the ability to read aloud with natural sounding inflection, intonation, and pacing, and the appropriate use of pauses, may provide a much better measure of comprehension. In other words, if a child can approximate the sounds of natural speech while she  is reading aloud, she probably understands what she is reading.

Dr. Schwanenflugel describes the rubric that she uses in this type of assessment known as the Comprehensive Oral Reading Fluency Scale. This rubric addresses accuracy, rate, and prosody. An interesting element in this form of assessment is the use of spectrographs, or visual representations based on measurements of speech sounds including pitch, pausing, and amplitude. These spectrographs provide a good picture of the child's ability to read aloud naturally and expressively, which Dr. Schwanenflugel says is a strong predictor for comprehension.

Dr. Schwanenflugel makes the important point in  Becoming a Fluent Reader: Reading Skill and Prosodic Features in the Oral Reading of Young Readers,that "prosodic features in spoken language itself may be under development to some extent at the age when most children are learning to read prosodically." In fact, it may not be until the age of 9 or 10 that children fully develop the ability to understand some of the subtler variances in speech. This is certainly worth keeping in mind when pursuing these types of assessments.

In some ways, this approach to assessment seems to almost be common sense to me. In my own experiences working with children, I have found that those who can read aloud in a natural sounding voice are those most likely to understand what they have read. Those children who read aloud in a stilted, monotonous voice may be able to read quickly and even accurately, but they often are not able to demonstrate any understanding of what they had just read. In my opinion, there is a strong argument for including a measurement of prosody in the assessment of children's reading fluency.

The Stakes Are Too High in Standardized Tests

Standardized testing has been a part of public education for a long time, but it is only fairly recently that these tests have become a significant source of problems for both students and teachers. In the past, standardized tests were just one of many ways that teachers could assess the performance of their students. Beginning with the implementation of President Bush's No Child Left Behind and continuing with President Obama's Race to the Top, standardized tests have become a disproportionate factor in determining the futures of students and teachers alike. As Dr. Caitlin Dooley discussed in a 2010 Voice of Literacy podcast, students can be retained based on their score on a single test and teachers are being hired and fired by the test scores of their students. Beyond this, the trends have shown that as schools increasingly emphasize testing, the general level of instruction goes down. Students are being taught how to take tests at the expense of any real learning.

As Dr. Dooley suggests, these high-stakes testing policies will not change until teachers and parents make it clear to legislators that the laws need to change. Perhaps we are now witnessing a tipping point in this highly debated issue. Beginning with the recent testing boycott involving teachers and students in Seattle, the sentiments of which have spread to a number of other states, it may now be a time that we begin to reassess the current focus on standardized tests.

Reading Comprehension

When working with young readers, it is important for teachers to remember that comprehension is the ultimate goal. The aim is not to drill into students a series of isolated comprehension strategies. We want young students to understand what they read, but we must remember that comprehension strategies are simply means to that end. As Johnson and Keier point out in Catching Readers Before They Fall, most readers develop effective reading comprehension skills without really being aware of any specific strategy that they are using. In fact, for proficient readers who have developed good comprehension skills on their own, a prolonged focus on naming and developing prescribed strategies can have the negative effect of slowing down their reading and draining their enjoyment from it. For all other young students who continue to struggle with comprehension, it is important to remember that a reader does not simply use one specific comprehension strategy at a time. A reader will not make much use of strategies such as questioning, visualizing, making connections, or searching for information if she is focusing on one strategy at a time. All of these strategies must work together in order for good comprehension to occur.

While it may be impossible or at least impractical to try to teach specific strategies one at a time, there are ways to integrate comprehension strategies into lessons. It is important to begin by modeling how an authentic comprehension strategy is used, then move through shared demonstrations and guided practice. The end goal is to have young readers be able to self-initiate these strategies. Throughout this process, it is necessary to monitor students' progress with tools such as miscue analysis.

Just as it is important to see comprehension strategies as part of an integrated whole, it is important to assess readers in a way that is not preoccupied with specific numbers. In order to keep our attention on the whole student, Dr. Wohlwend suggests the use of spider charts which give a more unified visual representation of a students strengths and opportunities for improvement. Using this type of chart, teachers are reminded that, like reading comprehension itself, students cannot be viewed as being made up of isolated parts.

Leveled Texts: A Level Playing Field?

As someone relatively new to the world of elementary education, I have only recently been exposed to the use of leveled books. On the surface, it seems like leveling systems should work. A student gets a book from  a particular basket, is given the corresponding mini-lesson, and is assessed with the appropriate test. It makes sense. But I am finding that the way actual children actually read does not easily fit into this kind of prescribed formula.

As Glasswell and Ford point out in Let's Start Leveling about Leveling, reading is a complex act that occurs at the intersection of numerous factors including the reader's motivation, subject knowledge, and vocabulary, the text's content, format, and author's purpose, and contextual factors such as physical setting and emotional climate. Leveling ignores these and many other factors, reducing these interactions to simply assessing oral reading, assigning a reading level, and giving the student a book from a basket. Is it the right book?

My most immediate concern is how leveling can actually exacerbate students' difficulties in reading, particularly those students who are assessed below their grade level and below the reading levels of their peers. As Glasswell and Ford note, if teachers follow the prescribed pacing guide for these students, they will fall increasing farther behind those students who are assessed as reading at or above grade level. While the more proficient readers benefit from the experience of reading  books with more complex language and larger word counts, the struggling readers receive less practice as they continue to read simpler and shorter books. Over time this gap widens. As I have seen, eventually these struggling students find themselves tasked with reading books that are well below there interest level. For these students, reading is no longer engaging or authentic. It becomes a chore they hope to avoid.

As Owocki and Goodman note in chapter 6 of Kidwatching, leveling can inhibit the development of effective reading strategies for students who are only given simplistic, single sentence per page books. Instead, these students may build confidence in taking risks with more complicated books beyond their reading level.

Ultimately, a teacher's judgement of what is appropriate for a particular student may be more useful than the criteria used for leveling. As Glasswell and Ford suggest, the time and effort spent assigning levels to books and students may be better spent on building rich and varied classroom libraries that can provide students with enjoyable and authentic reading experiences.

Use Real Language

To celebrate my son's 2nd birthday,we visited the Indianapolis Children's Museum this weekend. It is a tradition that we started last year and one that I hope to continue (unfortunately, now that he has reached the ripe old age of two I am henceforth required to pay for his admission). As we wandered the museum, I was immediately reminded of my experience during the recent "literacy dig" I took part in and wrote about on January 20th. A children's museum is a prime example of numerous forms of literacy, with a multitude of signs, posters, placards, and video kiosks around every corner. What I found most interesting was observing how language aimed at  younger museum patrons is constructed.

In many cases, the various exhibits were accompanied by text that used straightforward and fairly technical vocabulary. Words like "geologic," "habitat," and "buoyancy" were used without simplifying the language to use words like "rocks," "homes," or "float." Yet, in other instances I found that some language was "dumbed down" in a sense. For example, in the dinosaur exhibit the words "carnivore" and "herbivore" were accompanied by or interchanged with the words "meat-eater" and "plant-eater."

In a conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Baker for Voice of Literacy, Dr. Susan Neuman discusses how simplifying or "dumbing down" vocabulary for young children is an all too common mistake. In fact, Dr. Neuman suggests that using interesting and unusual words is more effective when engaging young children as they tend to "perk up" when they hear these words.While we may often underestimate them, Dr. Neuman suggests that "kids can learn much more difficult words than we assume." In Reading with Meaning, Debbie Miller shares a similar view as she insists, "use real language and standard terminology when talking with children... what you say and how you say it becomes what they say and how they say it!"

This attitude toward vocabulary is one that I personally hold. I make a conscious effort to not "dumb down" the language I use with young children. My son is currently exploring a very active interest in trains (the origins of which are a complete mystery to me). While we were at the children's museum, we spent an great deal of time perusing the steam engine exhibit. He is unfamiliar with the term "choo-choo."