Empowering Struggling Readers by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 615850
Publisher: Guilford Publications
Published: 2011-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

COMPONENT 1: IMMERSION IN RICH LANGUAGE SOURCES THROUGH WIDE-RANGING READING AND WRITING

Ms. Franklin knew that struggling middle school readers can substantially increase their vocabularies by immersing themselves in texts rich in new and varied language and by closely examining their word choices through intensive writing activities. On average, she directly taught 10–12 new word meanings each week, that is, 400–500 words over the course of the school year. However, she was committed to identifying other ways of developing new vocabulary that went beyond her own teaching.

Accordingly, Ms. Franklin exposed her students to a wide variety of texts and writing experiences. She had her student read from both fiction and nonfiction books, literary anthologies, magazines and newspapers as well as such sources as the Internet, various song lyrics, and poetry. To culturally ground her instruction, Ms. Franklin used texts that connected to students’ funds of knowledge, prose about topics to which they were emotionally tied. She also allowed students to make choices about which texts they read together and which ones they read independently. As the students read, Ms. Franklin tailored her vocabulary instruction to language encountered within the readings.

Students sampled a wide range of genres, including persuasive essays, poetry, narratives, business letters, and mysteries. As students read these different genres, Ms. Franklin had them carefully consider word choices as they created similar text themselves. Writing exercises thus provided students opportunities to demonstrate intertextual links in their word choices; that is, they were able to use new vocabulary they had just learned while reading immediately in their own writing.

An example of students reading widely and then composing similar prose occurred when Ms. Franklin focused on one of the state’s grade 8 ELA performance standards, in which students were required to produce a multiparagraph persuasive essay. The text that the school district supplied to Ms. Franklin as an example of persuasive writing was “To Thomas Lincoln and John P. Johnston” by Abraham Lincoln (1848). While Ms. Franklin considered this essay an important academic text, it did not suit her as the best way to begin her students’ introduction to persuasive reading. She found certain language—“idler,” “vastly,” “tooth and nail”—for example likely to be too arcance or stilted to grab her students’ attention for learning how persuasion works. Also, she was concerned that her marginalized readers might find this essay to be too difficult to tackle as the first example of persuasive prose.

Therefore, Ms. Franklin first turned to persuasive writings that related to topics she knew interested her students and about which they were already knowledgeable. Some of the choices included “Should Schools Provide Vending Machines?,” “Global Warming?,” and “Best TV Shows for Middle School Students.” Her students also read an example of persuasive writing from one of Ms. Franklin’s former students. With each of these reading experiences, Ms. Franklin consciously focused on word choices that worked to persuade the reader, having students pick out and share words they found to be colorful or ones that drew them into the piece.

After her students had read a wide selection of persuasive texts, Ms.

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