The book I chose for the llss 538 class book and blog
assignment is called, “But I’m Not A Reading Teacher: Strategies For Literacy
Instruction in the Content Areas” by Amy Benjamin. I chose this book because I’ve always had a
very hard time reading myself, much less trying to teach it. Writing has always been a bit of a challenge
for me also which made this book seem very fitting. I think I will learn a lot from this
book. I hope to gain more insight and
knowledge in order to help myself become a better reader and writer and with
that knowledge I hope to teach my students to be accomplished readers and
writers as well.
I wanted to begin by addressing some of the framing
questions for our course. Literacy is
defined as the ability to read and write.
It also indicates competence or fluency in a specific subject area. One becomes literate by learning as much as
they can about the specific subject. In
the book, Benjamin discusses learning as being cumulative. She states in chapter one that, “Reading
comprehension depends heavily on prior knowledge about the subject”. So the student develops a base knowledge for
a given subject and can then keep building off of the prior knowledge they have
toward becoming literate.
Being literate is a little different for each
discipline. But in certain contexts it
is also the same. You have to be
competent in the field you are teaching.
However knowing how to read and write in the field of science is very
different than in the field of English and literature. Math is also a completely different type of
literacy as are social studies and language arts. They are all different languages in a sense. My discipline is science and probably health
and physical education as well. Someone
literate in Science will know how to read and write research papers with a lot
of the scientific terminology. They will
be able to understand new terminology from strategically decoding the prefixes
and suffixes and taking the context into account in order to understand the
information that is presented. For
example, in the heart we have four valves: the bicuspid (Mitral), tricuspid,
aortic semilunar, and pulmonary semilunar valves. Now let’s break the words down: bi - two, tri
- three, cusp - flap, aortic - of the aorta, pulmonary - of the lungs,
semilunar = crescent moon shaped. Now if
we put everything together, it’s easy to see that the bicuspid valve is the
valve with two flaps. The tricuspid
valve is the one with three flaps, the aortic semilunar valve goes to the aorta
and has flaps that look like crescent moons, and the pulmonary semilunar valve
goes to the pulmonary arteries and has flaps shaped like crescent moons. Someone who is literate in the health
sciences should be able to figure out what these words mean simply by knowing
what the fragments of the words mean.
References
Benjamin, Amy. But
I’m Not A Reading Teacher: Strategies for Literacy Instruction in the Content
Areas. Larchmont, NY. Eye on Education, 2007
Leslie, interesting mini-lesson on heart structure and health science literacy.
ReplyDeleteI’ve learned something new today.
Looking forward to future posts.
I look forward to see your blogs on this book. I had purchased this book for a previous class that was canceled and I have not read it yet. Not much free time with coaching, teaching, and being a student. I am in the same boat as you I am a person who struggled with reading (dyslexia) and writing. I have come a long ways but I think when I have to write academic papers that it takes me more work than most others. I like your idea of looking at each different subject area as a different language or as Gee would say as different, "Discourses." Each course has its owns set of values, beliefs, and way of using the language. In the book I am reading it talks about reading being more than just saying all the words correctly but finding meaning in what we read. This would strongly be influenced by what we already have knowledge of. The author am reading uses the example of her reading a novel the made her experience many different emotions because she could create meaning from her code breaking of the text but in her reading of how to set up her modem was different. She could read all the words correctly but could not understand what it was trying to say to her; she could not put meaning to it and except frustration.
ReplyDeleteWow, that was extremely fun and informative! I am glad you chose this book because it was one that made my short list. I went another route, but look forward to learning more about this from you. I think for many of us that teach in fields other than English it is easy to feel the way your title implies. However, as you pointed out, if we want our students to become literate in our "Discourse" we must ensure that they can read and write our "language." I also like the point that while we can often recognize overlapping vocabulary, or parts of words, sometimes we don't take the time to simply decode how the author is using them. I am not sure I could have made such short work of the terms that you did, but with time and attention I might have come close. Nice to meet you and looking forward to more.
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