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."

When "Sound It Out" Isn't Enough

When many of us were learning to read, we were often to "sound out" words we were unfamiliar with. This would entail looking at each letter in a word and putting the sounds together. This method works fine for words like "cat" or "dog", but is less effective for words like "rhyme" or "cough". In practice, only about half of all words in the English language can be sounded out. Yet we often still find ourselves relying on this method as we tell young students to "sound out" words as they read.

You can probably read a sentence like, "Arocdnicg to rsceearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are... " and you can probably read a sentence with a _____ in it. This is because you are not simply sounding out the words. You are using a number of strategies that rely on context, familiarity with the English language, and visual clues. In Catching Readers Before They Fall, Johnson and Keier describe these strategies as-

• Meaning: Using background knowledge, information from pictures, and context of the sentence or story. What makes sense.
• Structure: Using familiarity with the spoken English language. What sounds right.
• Visual: Using knowledge about letter/sound correspondence. What looks right.

You are not alone in using these strategies; even very early readers go beyond simply sounding out the words they read. Observe a young student reading aloud and you will see evidence of these strategies at work. The student may substitute words based on the context of the story or elements of the illustrations. "Dick and Jane go to the store" may be read as "Dick and Jane go to the mall." While these substitutions may be incorrect, they will probably make sense and sound right within the text. When the student relies solely on sounding words out, mistakes may result in the text no longer making sense. "Dick and Jane go to the store" may be read as "Dick and Jane go to the stop," which alters the sentence considerably.

The goal is to have students use all of the strategies simultaneously in order to read accurately. They should be able to make predictions based on what makes sense and what sounds right and then correct these predictions based on what looks right. Those of us who are fluent readers do this so automatically that we forget they we are using these strategies as we read. We then tell young students to read by "sounding it out."

"Sounding out" is an unfortunate oversimplification of the actual reading process. We must make an effort to alter this approach for the sake of young readers. As Catherine Compton-Lily writes in "Sounding Out": A Pervasive Cultural Model of Reading, "The greater challenges reside in addressing a dominant cultural model of reading that offers a simple solution to the complicated task of learning to read."

Sound It Out: The Importance of Phonemic Awareness

A child's familiarity with the sounds of words plays a significant role in the development of reading and writing. In Teaching Phonemic Awareness, Rasinski and Padak quote Keith Stanovich who claims that phonemic awareness (knowledge of speech sounds smaller than a syllable and the ability to use these sounds in words) predicts success in the development of early reading "better than anything we know of, including IQ." 

Phonemic awareness (not to be confused with phonics, but rather an important precursor to both phonics and reading development) tends to develop naturally as children engage in language through nursery rhymes, songs, and everyday conversation. Still, there are some children do not develop a level of phonemic awareness necessary for success in phonics or reading. Older students who continue to struggle with reading may have been pushed into phonics and reading before they had developed a sufficient phonemic awareness. For this reason, it is extremely important to be aware of students' phonemic awareness early on with a form of assessment such as the Yopp-Singer Test shown here.

Developing children's phonemic awareness may seem more like play than work. Using songs, word games, and chants all help to develop children's familiarity with the sounds of words. Other activities can be as simple as having children say the names of their classmates, clapping for each syllable in order to draw their attention to the individual sounds.

Reading children's books that focus heavily on rhyme and word sounds (anything by Dr. Seuss) contribute to the development of phonemic awareness. As many of these books may be below the interest level of older students who are still struggling with phonemic awareness, Rasinski and Padak suggest that these students could learn to read to younger students which would be mutually beneficial. Perhaps this in itself is a notable endorsement for the opportunities available in a multi-age classroom.

There may be some things that teachers do that inadvertently hinder students development of phonemic awareness. By rigidly demanding correct and consistent spelling from young writers, teachers may be robbing children of a useful learning activity. Rasinski and Padak note that invented or phonemic spelling gives children an opportunity to experiment and play with word sounds which helps in development of phonemic awareness.

We may take for granted that children learn these things on their own. Many children seem to pick up on the sounds of words in a way that seems almost instinctual, but we may forget how these children are surrounded with rhyming games, songs, and books. It is for this reason that we must give attention to those children who struggle to develop adequate phonemic awareness as it is so important in the development of reading and writing skills. Besides, it never hurt anyone to read a few more Dr. Seuss Books.

Literacy Dig: Reading in the Real World

By the time we have reached adulthood, most of us spend little time reflecting on how we learned to read and write as children. We forget the phonics, spelling, and grammar that was drilled into our young minds. We are too busy reading and writing. Every day, we are reading billboards, composing emails, following traffic signs, and making grocery lists. Through all of this, we lose sight of the literacy we engaged in as children and take for granted the literacy we engage in as adults.

In The Donut House: Real World Literacy in an Urban Kindergarten Classroom, Powell and Davidson describe two types of literacy; the "schooled literacy" that young students experience through textbooks and worksheets, and the "situated literacy" that occurs in real life outside of the classroom. In their article, Powell and Davidson tell of one kindergarten class who was given an opportunity to engage in real-world literature in a meaningful way by visiting a local donut shop, observing the forms of literacy that were taking place there, and then using what they had learned to open up their own donut shop in the classroom with the help of members of the community.

As we go about our daily routines, it is easy to lose track of the reading and writing that happens all around us. Unless we make an effort, we may not see the literacy that happens while we are not looking. I recently engaged in a "literacy dig" with a small group of my classmates in an effort uncover what reading and writing occurs at a typical pet store.

Upon entering the store, I was immediately presented with text. Large signs hung from the ceiling, indicated the different areas of the store. It is clear that the store is arranged so that costumers can easily find the particular thing that they are looking for.

Interestingly, each sign's text was accompanied by a graphical representation. A patron of the store would not necessarily need to be able to read the word "Cat" in order to find the aisle beneath the feline silhouette. This is likely an effort to make the shopping experience easier for everyone, particularly customers who have limited familiarity with the English language.

As I moved around the store I found that, in contrast to the straightforward nature of the signage hung from the ceiling, a great deal of the text found on shelf displays and packaging contained words that may be unfamiliar to many people. The sign shown below contains a number of complex and obscure words that would require a considerable amount of background knowledge to determine their meanings.

Other signs would require a familiarity with the particular store itself in order to understand the text. The small signs showing the prices of various items also referred to a card membership that would not be obvious to individuals who are not familiar with this type of offer.

The store also presented some opportunities in which the customer would be expected to write. A computer-based pet adoption system requires customers to enter information which also requires a familiarity with the use of computers/keyboards. A form for pet training expects customers to enter information and also compose some writing to answer a fairly open-ended question.

In all, this pet store presents patrons with both relatively basic literacy and literacy that is fairly sophisticated. In our normal experience, many of us might be unaware of the intricate forms of literacy that occur in this sort of setting. Taking the time to look shows that even a visit to a pet store contains a great degree of reading and writing.

This pet store would provide a number of literacy opportunities and challenges for young children. On the day that we visited the store, there were very few customers. While other members of my group were able to observe two children in the store, I unfortunately missed this. On the other hand, I was accompanied by a very young child who is nearly two years old. While he is a number of years away from learning to read, he was still able to engage in some literacy activities, being able to decipher the meaning of both the "Bird" and Cat" signs mentioned earlier from the accompanying images. The majority of his attention was focused on the animals themselves (and throwing dog toys). I have regularly worked with this child in what Powell and Davidson would refer to as "schooled literacy." He is currently learning to recognize the letters of the alphabet (of which he can consistently identify eight letters). But as Powell and Davidson would suggest, he is far more engaged in the real-world and authentic experiences that are demonstrated by this trip to the pet store than he is with repeatedly going over plastic letters.

Certainly, a pet store is not far removed from the donut shop described by Powell and Davidson as it presents a number of opportunities to engage children in authentic literacy. Perhaps a classroom pet store would be a good suggestion for future language arts teachers.

Using Community Writing to Teach Within Students' ZDP

As anyone who has spent time in an elementary classroom can attest, the young students invariably represent a wide range of developmental levels. Despite this fact, it is centrally important that teachers engage individual students in lessons and activities that are appropriate for them. In Catching Readers Before They Fall, Pat Johnson and Katie Keier illustrate how community writing activities can involve an entire group of students while still focusing on each student's learning needs.

First, it is important to look at Lev Vygotsky's concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD). The central idea is that children learn most effectively when performing tasks for which they require some assistance to complete. These tasks are said to be within the child's ZPD. Tasks that the child can complete unaided and tasks that the child cannot complete even with assistance do not provide the same potential for learning as those within the child's ZPD.

As Johnson and Keier describe, a community writing activity allows for group participation in which the teacher can direct an individual student's involvement based on her knowledge of that student's developmental level. For example, one student may be asked to write a word that begins with the same letter as his first name as this task would be within his ZPD. Another student may be asked to write a word that the teacher knows she is more familiar with. In instances that involve the spelling of words that are beyond the ZPD of any of the students, the teacher can quickly write the word herself as a way to avoid slowing down the group's writing process. Throughout the activity, both the teacher and the individual students are modeling the writing process for the entire group.

Community writing provides a number of advantages both for teachers and students and could certainly be useful in any classroom.