Vocabulary in the Elementary Grades

Question: What is the key to learning ten, sometimes 20 new words at a clip?

Answer: Study vocabulary through Latin and Greek roots and affixes. Quotes: “The next quantum leap in vocabulary growth…will come when the systematic study of Latin-Greek derivations is embedded into vocabulary programs for the elementary…grades.” P. 135. “A Growing body of academic research is beginning to demonstrate the power and potential of a Latin-Greek approach to vocabulary instruction.” P. 138.

Quote: “Think of the enormous advantage we can give students when they learn that one root can help them unlock the meaning to 5, 10, 20 or more English words! Moreover, it is likely that a fair number of those words are the academic words so essential to students’ learning in the various content areas. The systematic, ongoing and consistent integration of Latin and Greek roots into vocabulary instruction offers awesome potential for enhancing students’ academic growth.” P. 140.

Comment: The best vocabulary book on the market for adults is Norman Lewis’s Word Power Made Easy. Look it up on Amazon.com and you’ll see the glowing reviews of ordinary people who have used it. Lewis bases his program on the Latin and Greek roots and on the notion that words are ideas. Try it yourself and see how many new words you will learn based on Latin and Greek roots. For common Latin and Greek roots for elementary school, check the list in this article. RayS.

Title: “The Latin-Greek Connection.” TV Rasinski, et al. Reading Teacher (October 2011), 133-141.

Rating Fluency in Reading

Question: What are the categories for fluency in reading, low and high?

Answer/Quote: Expression and volume; phrasing; smoothness; pace.

Low:

Expression and Volume: Reads with little expression or enthusiasm in words as if simply to get them out. Little sense of trying to make text sound like natural language. Tends to read in a quiet voice.

Phrasing: Monotonic with little sense of phrase boundaries, frequent word-by[word reading.

Smoothness: Frequent extended pauses, hesitations, false starts; sound-ours, repetitions, and/or multiple attempts.

Pace: Slow and laborious.

High:

Expression and Volume: Reads with good expression and enthusiasm throughout the text. Sounds like natural language. The reader is able to vary expression and volume to match his/her interpretation of the passage.

Phrasing: Generally well phrased, mostly in clause and sentence units, with adequate attention to expression.

Smoothness: Generally smooth reading with some breaks, but word and structure difficulties are resolved quickly, usually through self-correction.

Pace: Consistently conversational.

Comment: We’ve come a long way from reading aloud with no sense of meaning to reading aloud with full comprehension as measured by expression and volume, phrasing, smoothness and pace. RayS.

Title: “Putting the Fun Back Into Fluency Instruction.” MA Cahill and AE Gregory Reading Teacher (October 2011), 127-131.

Getting Started on the School Year

Question: What is some good advice for the new teacher?

Answer/Quotes:

> “Wall displays are most effective when students and teachers coproduce these. Consequently, classroom wall spaces need not be filled on the first day of school.” P. 98. [Comment: The best displays are of student work. RayS.]

> “When children enter the classroom, they should have a series of tasks that are to be accomplished immediately.” P. 100.[Comment: When I was teaching in high school, I would have one of two activities right at the beginning, a spelling test or a 10-minute essay on a topic of their choice. RayS.]

> “Understanding where your students are now and where they need t be at the end of the year is very important.” P. 101.

> “When planning daily instruction, remember to plan emergency time fillers to help reinforce skills that are part of the scope and sequence of skills.” P. 106.

> “Join a professional literacy organization such as the International Reading Association [or the National Council of Teachers of English] and get involved.”

And, finally:

“Lastly, read. Read books outside of education, books that address issues in medicine, business,, and the world. Get to know what is going on nationally and glob ally. Read for fun. Have a book that you read to escape. And last, carry books with you wherever you go. Be a model of someone who loves to read and reads. And remember when talking with students to be sure to regularly talk up and talk about books….”

Comment: Take it from me, a wizened old fogey who survived 30 years as an English teacher and supervisor, this advice is good advice. RayS.

Title: “Organizing Literacy Classrooms for Effective Instruction.” DR Reutzel and S Clark. Reading Teacher (October 2011), 96-109.

Thinking Visually

Question: How can you help students think visually?

Answer: Have them summarize an entire novel by drawing a picture [or a diagram]. The author, Jim Burke, summarizes Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment, by drawing a circle with a large black dot outside the circle. That illustration becomes the focus of a discussion about the novel, its dot outside and how it summarizes the novel. Interesting image.

Comment: I think the dot outside the circle as a summary for Crime and Punishment is an interesting technique for helping students visualize and summarize a novel. Adds another technique to methods for critical thinking. RayS.

Title: “the Shape of Ideas.” Spark. Jim Burke. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy (October 2011), 155.

Reading Critically

Question: What are some questions that can help students read critically?

Answer:

> What is the topic?

> What is the writer’s purpose?

> What was not said about the topic? Why? What are the consequences?

> Whose interests are served by the text?

> What are other ways of writing about the topic?

Title: “Reading ‘Further and Beyond the Text’: Student Perspective of Critical Literacy in EFL [English as a Foreign Language] Reading and Writing.” J Huang. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy (October 2011), 145-154.

Writing Is Obsolete

Question: On the topic of “What’s Hot and Not Hot?” the following statement about writing is included as “Not Hot.” What do my readers think of the following statement?

Quote: “Surprisingly, writing is also on the coldest list. One literacy leader commented that perhaps the day is coming when writing will be obsolete. Voice recognition software will transform the composing process.” P. 20.

Comment: Back to the era of the Dictaphone. Dictated writing is like talking. It lacks the precision of word choice, the conciseness of Standard English at its best. It will be as imprecise as conversation, with needless repetition of words like “it,” “thing,” “get,” “there,” and the lack of clear reference for the demonstrative pronouns, “this,” “that,” “these” and “those,” and other characteristics like poor parallel structure, dangling modifiers, use of the passive as opposed to the active voice. The use of voice recognition software will lead to verbosity and lack of precision in writing. RayS.

Title: “Taking Our Pulse In a Time of Uncertainty: Results of the 2012 What’s Hot, What’s Not Literacy Survey.” Jack Cassidy and Doulas J Loveless. Reading Today (October/November 2011), 16-21.

Multi-modal Composition

Comment: Here is the text that set me off: “Of course, this will only feel legitimate if the conversations previously described begin to challenge the traditional hegemony of print-only texts in classrooms.” P. 143.

And the particular phrase that set me off was: “…challenge the traditional hegemony of print-only texts in the classroom.” The article tried to show the “transformative” power of adding sound and pictures to poetry, multi-modal composition.

The NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) is off and running on building another castle in the air. This time it’s “multi-modal composition.” They try “multi-modal” composition in their journals by adding pictures to the texts of articles. Those pictures add not one single idea to the text. They’re useless.

Communication is based on ideas. Ideas are best communicated by words. Words are best communicated in speech (impermanent) and writing (permanent). Pictures illustrate, support the ideas in the text. I’m all about ideas and the “hegemony of print-only texts in the classroom.” Words come first, even in the movies and on TV. Sometimes the pictures contribute productively, sometimes they don’t. The ideas are conveyed in the text. That’s the first and primary thesis of English teaching. RayS.

Title: “Class-room Re-mix: Patterns of Pedagogy in a Techno-Literacies Poetry Unit.” M Callahan and J M King. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy (October 2011), 134-144.