October 23 Class Meeting

Reading Comprehension

by Rebecca Sullivan

This week’s class meeting focused on research about reading comprehension and different strategies we can used in fostering reading comprehension in our students.  Two of the strategies we focused on and practiced in class were story boarding and blocking.

Story Boarding:

One of the first teaching strategies we investigated was story boarding.  David L. Bruce argues that story boarding is a useful tool to enhance reading comprehension and student engagement in reading.    Research has suggested that the more students are able to manipulated one idea, the deeper their learning will become.  A story board highlights this theory by incorporating multiple learning modalities in its construction.  As a class, we created a story board to represent a clip from A Beautiful Mind.  All participants were engaged in the story board activity, and we discussed how it could be used to describe lab reports, processes, and the main ideas in a unit (as a review before an assessment).

Blank Story Board Template:

Clip from A Beautiful Mind:

Blocking of Reading

Another comprehension strategy we implemented in class was the blocking of reading assignments.  After each block of text, the students pause to reflect upon the reading by jotting in key ideas and/or questions.  We enjoyed this strategy and liked that it forced us to pause and reflect on the reading before moving on.  This also helps students to build the skill of metacognition in pausing to think about what they understand from the text.  At the end of several paragraphs, we discussed with others in a small group.  This could be useful in class because stronger readers could model this skill to the group.

Vocabulary Education 10/16/12

Vocabulary Education

October 16, 2012

The topic of this week’s class was vocabulary education.  The class participated in teaching strategies for vocabulary education as well as discussion about research on the effectiveness of vocabulary education and frontloading activities. 

Research on Vocabulary Teaching

            Throughout this class, there were multiple evidences for the importance of vocabulary education presented.  Research suggests that vocabulary knowledge can act as a predictor of comprehension, is widely associated with intelligence, and used to make judgments about how others use vocabulary.  Students can learn vocabulary in many ways such as reading and direct instruction, and the best method to learn vocabulary is a mixture of both.  Vocabulary includes words ranging from basic words such as “when” and “these” to specialized subject area language such as “mitosis” and “chloroplast”.  It is important to help children learn as many words as possible. 

            Vocabulary has become even more important as writing has gained prevalence in our society.  According to Yancy, reading has previously played a more important role in our society, however with the increase in technology, especially the personal computer everyone is now required to compose a great deal.  These new literacies have changed the way we write.  The author suggests that because of these changes to writing we should change our current modes of composing and modes of instruction for writing in schools.   

Teaching Strategies  

          To begin the lesson on vocabulary we did an activity called "I have... Who has?"  In this exercise, each student is given a slip of paper.  This paper has a word that the student must match and a phrase to read for the next student to match to.  This is a quick way to review vocabulary that the students need to practice and work with. 

           Another great strategy for learning vocabulary is frontloading activities.  Frontloading activities are any type of activity that motivates, prepares, and supports students in learning new concepts, especially vocabulary.  Some examples of frontloading activities include Anticipation guides, Frayer Model, List-Group-Label, Prediction Charts.  

           The final vocabulary teaching strategy demonstrated was verbal pantomime.  In this strategy, small groups of students are given a vocabulary word.  Each student then writes a story to try to have the other students in their class guess the word.  This is a great review activity for end of unit review.  

Academic Vocabulary

          The following video features Elizabeth Coelho of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education discussing the use and instruction of academic language.