Entry#6 Teaching Vocabulary through Categories

PODCAST: VOL Teaching Vocabulary through Categories with Dr. Neuman

http://www.voiceofliteracy.org/posts/44046

After listening to the Podcast of interviewing Dr. Neuman, I am informed of the importance of vocabulary development for emergent literacy learners. Dr. Neuman first got to study teaching vocabulary in preschool and elementary schools when she became aware of the what the vocabulary gap between normal children and children at risk means to children at risk in the future schooling. When doing survey in 55 schools in the states, Dr. Neuman found that 0% of them have planned lessons in vocabulary development because the teachers believes that the vocabulary can be covered in regular reading or other lessons, however, the embedded learning does not work well for the preschoolers or first graders.

With the thought of changing the odds of success for preschool children at risk later on, she advocates teaching vocabulary early on in classroom through understandable categories. By vocabulary categories, she means the conceptual frameworks of words such at fruit, weather, animals, and so on. The WoW(world of word) strategy also includes embedded multimedia such as videos and audios to teach vocabulary categories. This way the learners can both hear and see the words they learned, which make it more understandable and memorable.

Dr. Neuman strongly suggests that preschool and elementary teachers should place more focus exclusively on vocabulary development early on, and more planned lessons in vocabulary development should be arranged as the vocabulary needs to be repeated and reminded to children.

Question: in the podcast Dr. Neuman spent some time discussing that oral vocabulary is the foundation of early literacy development instead of print vocabulary. I am confused why she emphasized this point,also, what is the difference between oral and print vocabulary teaching?

Original article: http://www.umich.edu/~rdytolrn/pdf/rtl1122109.pdf

Other resources regards vocabulary education: http://www.teachpreschool.org/2009/10/building-a-childs-vocabulary-in-preschool/

Entry #5 “Sound It Out” an overarching cultural model of reading

           The article “Sounding Out”:  A Pervasive Cultural Model of Reading by Compton-Lilly (2005) describe a picture of how the teachers, the parents, to the whole society expect the beginning readers to sound out the strange words and learn the letter-sound information while doing so. In the article, the writer found that although many of the children and parents use different strategies other than sounding out the sequential letters when reading, almost all the children in the survey think “sounding out” is the most useful and most often used strategy to read. In a matter of fact, they unconsciously used many other strategies such as using the pictures to guess the word, etc. The author believes that sounding out is just a handicap, not a help to reading, and that there are better alternatives to master reading. 

          After reading this article I remembered when I start to learn both Chinese and English when I was young. My first language is Chinese, though it is different from English in many ways, I can still think of similarity to English learning. When I was about 3, I can use a picture book to tell a story with the exact words printed on the book, even though I cannot read a single word whatsoever. The only reason I can “read a book” independently was because that I was read to very often, so I recited every word my mom read to me and match them to the corresponding picture. I couldn’t recall how I felt about reading at that time, but I think I must have make meaning out of the pictures and the words to remember them all. When I go to school as a first grader, I encountered a big problem: I cannot pronounce the Chinese Characters using the sounding system (called Pinyin), which is a lot like English phonetic alphabet. I worked hard but got frustrated all the time. My mom, however, has decided to help me with it, so we did a lot of work practicing the phonetic symbols at home, and whenever we were outside, she would point to a random word found on the street, and she would pronounce it first for me to spell it in Pinyin. I gained progress pretty fast. By the end of the semester, I was so good at spelling Pinyin and I still am now. I found the spelling experience is very beneficial for me to learn Chinese, even though it seems like the sounding-out thing sounds useless and a waste of time.Then I started to learn English when I was in 3^rd grade. I learned the alphabet; phonetic alphabet first and then the words. My mom helped me to sound out the words and she always said I need to read aloud so I can learn a language.            

         Despite what the author said about sounding out, I feel I benefited a lot when learning both the languages. However, I do agree that there are better alternatives regarding reading English. As for me, I am very interested in teaching young children reading with picture books. As I mentioned before, I could make meaning of the pictures when I was only three, since I was exposed to the literacy. I believe that pictures help children make meaning of the texts as well as decode them as they read, and learn naturally. 

           My major concern is that what kind of strategies I should use when teaching English reading to children whose first language is not English? How can they make sense of the texts, the words when they don't know anything about English? Should I start step by step, like first class the alphabet, and then words, decoding words? I wish I could teach the second language learners to learn English naturally and in a fun way and fall in love in reading, not as most people who learned to read in pain. 

Entry#4 Teaching Reading to Emergent Literacy Level students

Among this week’s readings, I especially like chapter 7 of the book Catching Readers before they fall.

The title attracted me from the very beginning: I thought I knew how to teach reading, but whoa! As one can expect, this chapter is about how to introduce reading to students at an emergent level. Since I am very interested in and planning to dedicate to teaching reading materials to preschoolers or kindergarteners who are English language learners, I am very happy to read about the strategies for teaching English literacy for the emergent level students and I’ve found a bunch of good suggestions in the reading.

First thing I find useful for teaching emergent readers is that the chapter has included some key strategies for struggled readers, which may be useful for my future teaching. The key strategies I like best include:

1)   Directionality and one-to-one voice/print match

For preschoolers or even kindergarteners, because of their limited literacy capacities (and/or may limited access to books or other reading materials), they are more likely have no idea from which direction to read a book, and how to hold a book, how to turn pages, recognize the covers. So, from the very beginning, the students need to know this knowledge in order to become a reader later on. The chapter has introduced a way to combine teaching directionality and one-to-one voice/print match, that is, when consistently read books or any other readings to children, point to the words one by one while reading it aloud, in the meantime, the pointer moves from left to right, then up to down. This will give children a sense the way to read a book, as well as the awareness that sound can be matched to each word.

2)   Thinking strategies

The thinking process is of the most important things in reading, as reading is about making meaning, the thinking process is about trying to make meaning of the texts. A successful reader not only can read the texts, but can understand and internalize it as well. When reading, the readers need to search and gather information from the texts to make predictions and suggestions. As for the emergent language learners, the materials they are reading are most likely to be picture books or readings with pictures. In this case, when reading a book, the children can be taught to think and guess what the text might say according to the picture. Involve the students into active and life-related conversations while reading would be good for developing their thinking skills.

            Second, I really like the part of how to introduce books at the earliest levels. Again, making meaning of the text is the most important piece in reading. Here the book has introduced how to make stories out of the books with simple texts, such as: This mom is a police officer/teachers/nurse by creating a story line for the students, in order to make it easier for the students to related the reading to their lives, thus they can make meaning of the text.