Module 2: Reading Reflection

“The major folklore of reading instruction relates to the “theory” that reading is considered an exact process. In other words, the reader is expected to read everything exactly as printed on the page in order to understand the message of the author. In general the consuming public, legislatures, courts, and too many educators hold to this theory. It is like the theory of the world being flat during the time of Columbus.”

-Robert Harper and Gary Kilarr

Without having read the chapters three and four, I probably would have said that I more or less disagree with this statement because of the situations and conversations I have been a part of with teachers I have worked with in the past. However, the reading for this week countered just about everything I have seen and experienced about teaching reading throughout my student teaching.  Therefore, I do agree with Robert Harper and Gary Kilarr’s quote that teachers most nearly misunderstand the fact that reading is not an “exact process”. According to Weaver, “experiments indicate that both grammar and meaning aid in the identification and recall of words” (p. 42). When weaver is talking about the meaning, she is taking context of the surrounding words and sentences into consideration when identifying unfamiliar words. When readers see an unfamiliar word “in context”, we are able to use the words that come before it and after it to connect the information to our own background knowledge and personal experiences in order to determine the unknown words possible meaning. For example, Weaver’s son was reading a passage, but kept mispronouncing or replace the word “gas” with another word, however once the gas was referred to as helium her son was then able to understand that the word was actually gas. “In this case, the meaning of the word was familiar to the reader, but he did not recognize the word in print until the context of following sentences triggered his own personal context, his prior knowledge of helium and its effects” (Weaver, 2002, p. 46). With that, it is important to keep in mind that “context includes the grammar of sentences and the meanings of words…Context is also taken to include the reader’s expectations and purpose of the reading…even the person’s culture and times- in short, the reader’s schemas, his or her entire background of knowledge and experience” (Weaver, 2002, p.54)

                When I was in my Kindergarten placement, I was there at the beginning of the year when the students first began to learn various letters and letter patterns, but there was only a small portion of the day where the students were read to in a whole group experience. Come to find out through the reading that that form of teaching is inadequate because “evidence suggests that many emergent and less proficient readers develop phonics knowledge most readily by learning whole words and deriving phonics knowledge from the, rather than by learning phonics first” (Weaver, 2002, p.57). Once readers begin to become more proficient, it is evident that they begin to think ahead and anticipate which words are going to be next in a sentence because they have become familiar with syntactic and semantic context and cues. Along with become more proficient and able to predict what is to come, readers may begin to make “more miscues involving pronouns and simple function words-- the so-called basic sight words. This occurs because they are reading to construct meaning, rather than to identify words” (Weaver, 2002, p.63). The important thing to understand is that when a reader is reading a text they are bringing in their own dialect and background knowledge, so instead of correcting the “absence of past tense markers, plural noun markers, third person singular verb markers, possessive noun or pronoun marker, substitution and omission of forms of to be and hypercorrections” it vital to simple check for understanding. Simply put, Weaver gave “three more arguments for the inappropriateness of exact word identification as a goal: (1) the fact that more than one word or group of words can signify a particular entity or concept; (2) the fact that we can often get the essence of a passage with its function words missing, or supply missing function words to fit the context; and (3) the fact that the precise words of text are quickly forgotten anyways” (Weaver, 2002, p. 71).

References

Weaver, C. (2002). Reading process and practice. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Educational Books.