How Smart Readers Think (and why others might struggle)
While
reading the chapter this week, I continued to think back to the students I
taught and helped in an after-school program the last two years. They were all
able to read with some of them being able to read extremely well. The problem
that a good number of them encountered in reading the material we were covering
was that they had trouble understanding content area terms. They could easily
pronounce and read words like perimeter and area, but when asked to solve for
one of these terms, they did not exactly know what that meant. Like the chapter
discussed and some of what we discussed in class, they had no problem reading the material. They had general
literacy, but not content literacy. There was a quote from the chapter that
resonated with me. “If we understand that reading is not just ‘receiving a
message,’ but actively building meaning upon prior knowledge, using staged,
strategic thinking, then we will teach differently.” In content areas, this is
such a crucial idea for a couple reasons. Often times we use words from
everyday language to mean something more specific, like in math when using area
and perimeter, so students will have to develop another meaning for these
words. It is also crucial because students will encounter words they have never
seen and instead of supplying a definition, it will take this different kind of
teaching for students to truly comprehend what they are reading. I wish I would
have heard or read this quote when I was trying to teach these concepts to the students.
I think I would have been able to communicate these math concepts more
effectively to them.
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| This gif represents the struggle some students may have with math terminology |
To add on, we as teachers have the responsibility to provide key terms and words and definitions for these words for the context of our class. That way, when a student reads the word “area” in their math textbook, they know that it means a unit of measurement and that there is a formula related to it, instead of associating “area” as just a designated location. There are two meanings for the word and it is up to us to provide the context for them, so that they can rightly associate it. It is our responsibility to make it “click” for them and unlock that schema in their head. We don’t want them to just read the passage and answer questions correctly because they have general literacy, we need them to be able to understand the passage and be content literate. Like the “Cricket” passage that we read in class. We answered the questions correctly because we could read, but we did not understand it or know what it was about because we didn’t have the correct content to associate it to.
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Excellent discussion, guys!
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