Personal Literacy Assessment

Question: How can teachers engage students in reflecting on their approaches to literacy?

Answer/Quote:

(1) What are your earliest memories associated with learning to read?

(2) What are your earliest memories associated with learning to write?

(3) How do you currently approach reading/writing tasks?

(4) How do you feel about yourself as a reader?

(5) How do you feel about yourself as a writer?

(6) How do you use language in different settings?

 Comment: Question #6 requires some explanation. It refers to the various dialects that we use in certain social and academic settings, with the social setting usually involving repetition, “Y’know,” frequent use of “there,” “it,” “get,” “getting,” “thing,” etc. and academic language using Standard English. RayS.

Title: “Understanding Resistance: Pre-service Teachers’ Discourse Models of Struggling Readers and School Literacy Tasks.” M Lesley. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy (September 2011), 25-34.

Teacher Education

Question: What is an authentic English classroom?

Answer: The author defines an authentic English language arts classroom as “…work that is, in some way, meaningful beyond the context of school.”

Then she asks her methods course students the following questions about their lesson plans: What is the point of this activity? What are the students’ purposes for undertaking this activity?

Comment: Good questions for any activity used in an English class. RayS.

Title: “In Search of the Authentic English Classroom: Facing the Schoolishness of School.” Anne Elrod Whitney. English Education (October 2011), 51-62.

Changing University English Dept.

Question: How has the college English department changed?

Answer: Tenured professors are in the minority. Adjunct, contingent and graduate student instructors are in the majority. What are the implications of this shift in the nature of the faculty?

Comment: Speaking as a former adjunct instructor, I see little chance that the majority will wield the power that is in tight control by the minority tenured faculty. I see little chance for a revolution by those instructors in the majority. FYI. RayS.

 Title: Review: The Old Curiosity Shop and the New Faculty Majority.” Jim Cocola. College English (September 2011), 69-84.

WWII Japanese-American Internees

Question: What can we learn from petitions written by interned Japanese American citizens during WWII?

Answer/Quote: “However successful or unsuccessful they may have been in changing the internees’ circumstances, these documents provide evidence for subsequent generations that their Issei forbears were neither passive nor afraid to raise their voices to argue for change in their lives. They contribute to the ‘written legacy’ of resistance desired by Mira Shimabukuro. When these petitions were viewed as historical and rhetorical documents, we can see that the internees in a sense put their lives on the line to make their political arguments. In doing so, they show that they somehow had maintained some belief in a system that had failed them. Perhaps that belief made them the supreme patriots and democrats: they had faith that the written word in America would somehow convey not only their views, but more important, their humanity.” P. 66.

Comment: The NCTE is apparently suggesting the study of writing for resistance. Several articles have featured the writing of indigenous people like the Cherokee, and now this article on the petitions  of Japanese -American internees during WWII. Interesting. RayS.

 Title: “Putting Their Lives on the Line: Personal Narrative as Political Discourse among Japanese Petitioners in American World War II Internment.” Gail Y Okawa. College English (September 2011), 50-68,

Writer as Citizen

Question: Why do we teach writing?

Answer: Well, one reason is to create citizens as writers. That’s at least one of our goals, and we ought to give our students the opportunity to use writing in their role as citizens. Public writing. Participatory writing. The writer as citizen.

Comment: Worth thinking about. I never directly asked students to write letters to the editor, for example, or letters to Congress Persons. It’s authentic writing and I should have. Mea Culpa. RayS.

Title: In the Name of Citizenship: The Writing Classroom and the Promise of Citizenship.” Amy J. Wan. College English (September 2011), 28-49.

Literature and Empathy

Question: Is one of our goals in teaching literature empathy?

Answer: According to the author, if we think empathizing with characters will produce empathetic students is a goal of literature study, we are mistaken. Studying literature cannot produce students who are empathetic. Rather, look to the institutions at which our students study. Do our institutions reflect an empathetic spirit? That spirit will be catching and we have a much better chance of sensitizing students to empathy by example. Reading literature by itself does not produce empathetic students.

Quote: “If respectful, thoughtful, and humane ways of being, thinking, and acting are valued elements of institutional culture, then we will have, at the very least, created the conditions where students can both be introduced to the complexity of empathy and experience it as a daily practice.” P. 24.

Comment: In The Western Canon, Harold Bloom says that literature does not exist to alter individuals or society; that the Canon displays a complex view of humanity; that people read to enlarge their lonely existence by understanding the complexity of motivation and point of view in the world, but without didacticism and moralizing. RayS.

Title: “Empathy and the Critic.” Ann Jurecic. College English (September 2011), 10-27.

Reading Speeds

Question: What are the various speeds in reading and what are they for?

Answer/Quote: “Actually, when I say skimming, I mean skipping—just passing over whole paragraphs. Skimming is reading quickly, about 450 words a minute for a proficient reader; scanning—the way we read dictionaries or telephone directories—is done at about 600 words a minute. These are the first two reading levels of the five hypothesized by Ronald P. Carver, a professor of educational psychology. The middle level, which Mr. Carver called "rauding," is the level at which we read literary fiction, or letters or long magazine stories. To oversimplify his theory, when we raud we are not only reading every word but comprehending their meaning in the context of sentences and paragraphs. (Mr. Carver's other two levels are reading to learn—studying—at about 200 words a minute and reading to memorize, 138 words a minute.)”

Comment: My definition of skimming is spinning through dictionaries or telephone directories. My definition of scanning is reading the title, first sentences of paragraphs and last paragraph in order to raise questions to answer when reading a textbook chapter. Mr. Carver’s definition of “raiding” sounds like Sir Francis Bacon’s “…others to be swallowed…that is…to be read, but not curiously” [“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested”]. That means to me detective fiction, Westerns and “Chick Lit.” RayS.

Title: “Skimming Vs. Reading.” Cynthia Crossen. Wall Street Journal, October 17, 2011. Internet Version.