Entry#3 Reading Process System and ZPD

After reading chapter 2 of Catching Readers Before They Fall(Johnson and Keier, 2010), the most important thing I’ve learned is that reading is making meaning. When one reads, s/he needs to go through a process that helps them comprehend the meaning of text and find ways to make individualized connections to it. Only then we can say the reading is truly happening. This process is especially critical for the young readers (children), since many of them have not yet formed a proper system for making meaning of the words, phrases or sentences in print materials, which makes them struggle and frustrate when read.  (This figure below indicates how reading process system works)

            A major interest of mine regarding the reading process system is that how to incorporate the system to develop ways (methods, strategies) to expose English literacy to the children of other languages, and how to make them interested in English as well as become a successful English reader in the future.

Another thing I found interesting in the book is that, Chapter 3 gives the spotlight to Vygotsky’s famous theory of learning: the theory of Zone of Proximal Development and Scaffolding, to which I am very familiar with. ZPD has been popular for years in classroom teaching, and in almost all areas of content and subjects. It suggests that learning is more effective when it takes place within the child’s zone of proximal development, which means the gap between what the child can do independently and what s/he can do with the guidance of an adult. So, for the struggle readers, it is better for teacher to individualize their teaching to them in order to adapt to their current ZPD, and then scaffold the struggled readers patiently and interactively to read inside their zones. I have always fond of this theory, since it emphasizes the significance to make learning/teaching individual  and easy to meet each learner’s needs, though it might not be as easy for teachers implement. My concern is, when teaching in a large class of 20 students or more (pre-school), should teacher use the strategy in front of the whole class? Or individually after the group teaching?

Entry#2 Community Literacy Dig

This week our group, me and 5 other members took a trip around the city on a city bus, in order to dig into the potential of learning literacy in the most comment place--a bus. The six of us split up and took different observation tasks once we got on board. We spent half an hour observing and recording the physical environment of the bus, the people and their activities, the oral languages of people on board, and the vocabulary that was used on the bus. Then we came together again to share what we learned and what we thought.

I have to say that this experience is fairly new to me, since I have taken the bus for hundreds of times to school, yet I have never really paid such close attention to the surroundings, the passengers and the vocabulary in the bus. I have taken the task to observe and records what the people on bus were like and what they were doing, and I found that people on board were from different age groups (from infant to elderly), and gender groups. Some people were talking with each other, while some were sitting quietly, and there were also people calling through phone and playing with smart phones.

After talking and sharing with our group members, I found it is interesting that the bus could be a good situated learning environment for literacy development for children, because there were lots of written languages and oral (informal) languages formed and exhibited on the bus, and some only make senses in the particular context. For instance, on the bus, there were many small signs nearby the window says, “pull to signal”. Almost everyone, who takes the bus knows what the phrase means, that is, pull the string in order the make a signal to the driver that someone is getting off in the next stop. However, in a context of the bus, the three words easily cover the meaning of the whole sentence and it make senses to the passengers. Similarly, there were a few other signs like the “emergency exit” exhibited on the bus that can be interpreted as “bus literacy”. So, when children are on a bus, they are exposed to the particular bus literacy environment that can help them learn about a piece of real life, other than the “schooled literacy”, which sometimes doesn’t make sense to them.

Lots of schoolteachers think that reading is just about the students naming the words correctly, and maybe pass the tests and more. But it is more than that. The article The Donut House: Real World Literacy in an Urban Kindergarten Classroom (Powell & Davidson, 2005) has greatly inspired me that literacy makes less sense to students when they are just taught the reading and writing skills without applying them to the real-world events.

As Powell and Davidson has mentioned in the Donut House article, as literacy instruction become more test-driven, we, the educators must ask ourselves what are the ultimate goals for our students studying literature. The answer is certainly not merely to pass the test, it is far more that that: to help the students to learn about the world and their lives through literacy, and to gain confidence and willingness to make a positive change to the world.

After this field experience, and reading about the importance to make literacy learning situated in the Donut House article, I am very inspired to see a good way to help young children be engaged and interested in literacy. The community literacy dig is a good way to find out what is out there in our everyday life, in the most ordinary community that could be valuable for the young readers to learn.  

Entry#1

Hi everyone! 

Welcome to my blog! 

My name is Yiding, and this blog is about inquiring into the methods and strategy of teaching literacy to young children. 

A major interest of mine regarding this course is that how to incorporate the system to develop ways (methods, strategies) to expose English literacy to the children of other languages, and how to make them interested in English as well as become a successful English reader in the future.

This is a good start~ Thank you all for reading!