Book Club Reflection: Wilhelm’s “You Gotta Be the Book.”

 

 

Book Club Reflection: Wilhelm’s “You Gotta Be the Book.”

My Reading Process

            Like I mentioned in my earlier post our book club selection was a real page turner for me.  Right from the start I was glad I chose the book I did because I felt Wilhelm took a very practical approach to his study that I could relate to.  He offered teacher take-aways (e.g., modeling is a primary mode of teaching) that I felt were beneficial.  He also offered the social contract that he and Michael W. Smith created.  After reading this I wanted to make the contract a part of my teaching philosophy.  I also felt like this was a text I would want to draw from in my future teaching.  I can see myself consulting this book in the future. Wilhelm gives several good activity examples of how to engage readers that could be adapted into a post-secondary reading course.  In all the reading of journal articles and books I do I am always looking for practical examples of things I could do in the classroom. This book actually does that and more.  I think a book like this can make me a better teacher.  I look forward to experimenting with the ideas and activities presented by Wilhelm in my own classes.

The Book Club Process

            I wish we had more time for our book clubs.  We only met two times as a group.  The first meeting we had a good discussion about our selected book, but one of our members wasn’t able to make it. I have to admit this frustrated me a little bit.  I was really enjoying the book and wanted to share my ideas with all of my group members. Our second meeting we felt the need to start preparing for our presentation.  I feel like we didn’t have ample time to discuss the book fully.  Our book was so interesting and I really wanted to enter a deep conversation with my fellow members about it.  Unfortunately, that never had a chance to happen.  I would suggest scheduling more time for book clubs, so students have several classes to critically think about the reading and then a couple of classes to prepare for a presentation. 

Working as a Group

            We worked really well together as a group discussing our book and crafting our presentation ideas.  Julie was our note taker and took on the leadership of our group.  She kept us on track and reported our discussions back to the professor.  I feel I was supportive of my group members’ ideas and took the responsibility of leading the discussion portion of our presentation. Syeda did a wonderful Job of presenting slides and Ray was our tech guy who designed the power point.  I think Wilhelm’s book made our presentation more engaging because it suggested many interesting activities that we had our classmates explain their ideas of how they would implement them into a post-secondary reading context.  I feel our classmates enjoyed this discussion and I had wished we had more time to unpack the reading even more.  I don’t feel we had any weaknesses in our procedures because we came together as a group and put together in my opinion a very stimulating presentation on an important book for reading teachers.

Teaching a Book Club

            I am still very interested in teaching a book club unit in one of my classes. I think that I learned from this experience that book clubs need a good amount of time.  I think we could have dedicated at least another couple classes to the book club and we are graduate students, so I would imagine that developing readers would need even more time. I really liked the discussion and presentation aspects of the book club for this class and I would probably want do the same thing.  I would give my students time to discuss what they have read with their peers and have them share their insights with each other.  Problems I would anticipate would be students who didn’t do the reading or don’t show up for their book club meetings.  A way I think instructors can address these possible problems is to have students write a reflection about what they and their fellow members contributed to the book club.  I still have many more questions about book clubs, but am determined to experiment in teaching one because I think it is a great way to engage students, have them consider other points of view and express what they got out of a reading.

 

           

 

 

Krashen – “Anything but Reading”

    In Stephen Krashen’s article Anything but Reading he gets right to his main point in the first sentence by stating, “I will begin with my conclusion.  Only one method of improving reading ability really works: engaging in a great deal of interesting (better yet, compelling) comprehensible reading.”  Krashen’s interesting and often comical article goes on to show that more reading instruction led to lower test scores.  He then illustrates educators using everything from chess to roller skating to try and improve students reading, but they aren’t promoting reading itself.  At the end of his article Krashen endorses “narrow reading” and students self-selecting their texts as ways to help students improve their reading.

            I think Krashen makes some very valid points in his article.  It is pretty obvious that for students to improve their reading abilities they should actually read more.  I like the idea of using “narrow reading” because I think I myself as a reader like to read the same familiar authors that are most comprehensible to me, so I would imagine this would also help novice readers.  I also think if teachers can find topics that are most interesting to students and assign them to read works on those topics they will be more motivated to read.  I also agree with Krashen in letting students self-select their own texts, but I think that the instructor would need to read the books first and then offer the students a selection to be able to access properly.  I think Krashens article is limited for post-secondary instructors because he looked at fourth graders while we are teaching college level readers.  I think this article would be more beneficial if he gave us practical examples of how we could implement sustained silent reading in our post-secondary reading classrooms.  I agree it is a good idea to have our students do more reading in class, but the question is how do we do that with institutional student learning outcomes and standardized tests requirements?  I think what we can do as teachers to facilitate our students in improving their reading ability is to not only give them a choice of what they read in class, but also provide them with topics that we think they will be interested in.  I also feel it is important to make sure the texts we require in our classes are at our students reading level.  I believe having discussions on readings in class where students can enter a conversation and hear different points of view, might encourage them to read more about topics they are interested in.  I would also like to incorporate book clubs into my post-secondary courses because I think the best way to engage students in reading is to have them talk about what they have read and explain what meaning they gleaned from it.  This will enable students to see other points of view and possibly catch elements of a reading they may have missed that their classmates got. As an avid reader myself I feel there is nothing better than having people to talk to about things I have read.    

Hyland’s Stance and Engagement

Gist of the Article

            In Ken Hyland’s article Stance and engagement: a model of interaction in academic discourse he takes a close look at the interplay that happens when a writer takes a stance with their claims and strategically engages with their reader.  The author talks about how academic writing has shifted from interpersonal to more social.  He defines both stance and engagement and describes their features by giving examples (e.g., “Hedges are devices like possible, might and perhaps). He goes on to talk about how a writer must present himself as a disciplinary insider as well as persuade his audience on his claims.  The author looked at corpus data of texts and interviewed participants to investigate assumptions and practices of different disciplines.  Some of the interesting findings were that in scientific papers readers expected the writers to have considerable domain knowledge and the “soft” fields as he calls them seemed to use interactional markers 75 percent more than those of engineering and science.  Hyland found that in engineering and science papers directives were the most salient feature used.  The author closes by stating his hope that he has shown the importance of stance and engagement to bring writers and readers together in a written dialogue.

My Response

            I found this to be a very interesting article because I have always found what we have to do as academic writers confounding.  We take a strong stance and then chose words to manipulate the strength and commitment of our own arguments to persuade an audience.  It feels like there is a dance being performed between the writer and the reader.  The writer is trying to assert his claims, but not too strongly as to lose his audience while the reader is judging the author on his validity and insiderness. I think this article is beneficial to us as teachers because it clearly defines both the features of stance and engagement.  These are things we as instructors need to explain to our students because for them to begin to understand academic texts they read they will need to have a sense of why writers make these choices and the meanings behind them.  I as an ESL instructor will want to introduce my English for Academic Purposes students to the different strategies and word play they can use in their writing to persuade their readers of their claims and at the same time try to make sure they understand why writers are doing it in their readings.  I think it’s a tough task for us reading instructors because even more advanced readers don’t always understand how or why they use these strategies themselves.  I have enjoyed reading Hyland’s articles on hedging and I think this is another interesting piece.  I think more research could be done on how writers are actually using the features of stance and engagement in what Hyland calls the “soft” fields.

 

 

 

Hedging

In their article Metadiscourse Awareness and ESAP Comprehension Jalififar & Shooshtari argue for explicit instruction of hedging because it improved the language proficiency of the participants in their study, which in turn improved their reading comprehension. The researchers use Lakoff and Hyland to define hedging. In the case of Lakoff it is using words that can make assertions clear or not so clear and for Hyland it is utilizing words with less certainty. Jalififar & Shooshtari illustrate how there is a conversation that takes place between a reader and a writer during the reading process. Readers may not understand words that are used to hedge off of propositions if they are not explicitly taught to recognize these types of words while reading. The authors point out that hedging is often used in academic writing and that it can pose problems for non-native readers and writers of English. Jalififar & Shooshtari call for more research in this area, so ESAP and non-native students can become better readers and writers.

            This was such an interesting topic to me that I am in the process of writing a semantic theory research paper on it. Students use the modals “may” and “could” quite often in their academic writing to hedge off of statements where they have less certainty. I have found that “could” has slightly less certainty than “may” and it has given me understanding why I choose between the two words in my writing. Most native speakers of English just use their instincts when they use these two modals in their academic writing and non-native writers wouldn’t have that luxury. In my teaching and tutoring experience I have noticed that many non-native writers make much stronger assertions, so I would concur with Jalififar & Shooshtari that reading instructors should explicitly teach words used for hedging. There is a twofold benefit to clearly teaching hedging to students because they will not only better understand what they read, but will also become more sophisticated writers.

           

‘’You Gotta Be the Book by Jeffery D. Wilhelm

I’ve only read the introduction and the first two chapters of our book club book, but I already feel it will be instrumental in my teaching of post-secondary reading. Wilhelm shows his passion for teaching by expressing his sense of urgency to reach every student. He talks about having experiences with the books he has read and he wants to expose his students’ to the same kind of engaged and reflective reading that he enjoys. The author reveals a fantasy he has of letting everyone in on the secret of reading and it resulting in an America of readers.

This book has been a real page turner for me. Last week I was wishing I didn’t have homework for other classes because I felt as if I would have read the whole thing over the weekend. I guess what is most appealing for me about the book so far is its practicality. As I was reading and annotating this book I felt compelled to write a list of important teaching take-aways in some blank space I found within the book. This is what I wrote:

* To be a good teachers of reading, we must read.

* Modeling is a primary mode of teaching.

* We need to listen to each other. Teachers listening to teachers.

* Use the social contract and students will love you J

* Try new things in the classroom. Don’t be the teacher who teaches one year thirty times. Teach 30 years.

* Use texts that are approachable for students. Something that relates to their experiences.

  The Social Contract (Smith & Wilhelm 2002).

·         My teacher will try to get to know me as an individual.

·         My teacher will care about me.

·         My teacher will address my interests in some way (either outside or inside the classroom).

·         My teacher will assist me to learn and will work hard to make sure I have learned.

·         My teacher will be passionate about the subject and about teaching.

All of this came just from the introduction. I was thinking, I am so glad I picked this book and imagined myself keeping it on a shelf in my teacher’s office to consult throughout my career. Wilhelm discusses Rosenblatt’s argument that there are two types of reading the efferent and aesthetic. From what I understood the efferent stance of reading is when the reader reads for answers and the aesthetic stance of reading is when the readers lives through the reading and has an experience. This got our book club talking about the differences of reading for pleasure vs. reading for academia and we agreed that there was a disconnect between the two. We brainstormed in our session thinking about ways we as teachers can bring the aesthetic stance of reading into our classrooms for our students. A couple of the possibilities that came up were through a book club like the one we are in or through designing a unit around a novel.  Wilhelm goes on in chapter two to take more of a case study approach where he looks at successful student readers to try to discover what makes them passionate about reading. I look forward to reading the rest of this book and future discussions with my club.

Schooled Literacy

I found the article Learning "schooled literacy": The literate life histories of mainstream student readers and writers by Rick Evans very interesting and beneficial, but probably not for the purpose of the author. I was a little confused by the conclusion of the article. Was Evans in his conclusion saying that the system is working the way it is? If so, I do not agree. Sure these students are having success in academia, but at what cost? In the case of Kelly she lost her desire to read. Other examples showed that students detested academic reading and writing because they felt like it was forced.

This article confirmed my beliefs that as reading and writing instructors it is important to incorporate expressive writing and group discussions into our lesson plans. I also feel we should give students a choice of what they want to read because it could foster intrinsic motivation within our students. Feedback also seemed to play an important role in students attitudes towards reading and writing. When they received positive feedback from their friends and peers they were more willing to share their work. This shows the importance of community building and creating a safe environment for our students to share their ideas in class. I want to find ways to incorporate leisure "popcorn-trash" reading into my lesson plans so students are less anxious about the reading and writing they have to do in school. I have to admit that I also feel at times the reading and writing I do in school feels like a task, but the majority of the time I  like school work because I approach it with the attitude of enjoying the process and learning from it.

Most provocative passage for me: "Most students remembered being read to by their mothers, grandmothers, or sometimes even by their big sisters (rarely by their fathers); and, in turn, when they could, reading to them." What are the fathers doing? I can remember my Dad telling me when I was a kid that he would take me to the movie Star Wars after I read the book. I remember hating having to read the book before getting to see the movie at the time, but then being really happy I did. Now as an adult I enjoy reading the novel before seeing the film. This passage also shows me the importance of parents reading to and with their children when they are young because it instills in them a love for reading at an early age that with many of the students in this article has stuck with them into adulthood.

Chapter 2: The Reading Apprenticeship Framework

It was refreshing to read how an 8th grade science teacher instills the importance of reading to her class. I think if more teachers across the disciplines did this type of  thing they would greatly help their students not only transition into academia, but also foster them in reading fluently.

This chapter shows how students may not realize how complex the reading process is and that we as teachers can be mentors to our students. We can and should share with them the knowledge we have gained as well as the strategies we have used to be academically successful.

Take aways:

- Reading is problem solving and there are many ways the reader connects to the topic they are reading (e.g., their own ideas, memories, background knowledge, etc).
- It is important for me as a teacher to be aware of my reading process so I can give insight to my students.
- Fluency for developing readers comes from frequently reading accessible texts and rereading more difficult less accessible texts.
- It is important to expose our students to a wide variety of texts from different genres.
- Not all students that struggle with reading struggle with all types of texts. (e.g., I may be fluent in reading Japanese literature, but have difficulty reading science journals).
- Community building and creating a safe environment in the classroom is important in helping developmental readers.
- Extensive reading may enable students to expand their knowledge.
- Using books that appeal to students may foster them in becoming intrinsically motivated and could be contagious in the classroom.
- Students benefit from authentic discussions and group work on readings in class.


 

Scaffolding

Between the Smagorinski article and our discussion in class today I think I gained a better understanding of scaffolding. I like how Smagorinski gave us two examples of effective scaffolding in the classroom. I saw the Double Column Response Log as an answer to a cognitivist approach to teaching reading where the students have to find the correct answers that the teacher is looking for. As an undergraduate student there was nothing I hated more than the professor who would give you a quiz on a reading and you wouldn’t receive credit unless you answered the questions correctly. It wasn’t a matter of answering the questions correctly, but giving the professor the answers that he thought were correct. I can remember a professor talking about the ending of a novel and what he said it meant and I thought to myself, “I see that ending totally different from how he does. Why is his answer any more correct than my own?’ This activity on the other hand allowed the students to question the text and try to find their own answers. It enabled them to come up with their own meaning of the passages they read. I believe this type of instruction will scaffold students in analyzing texts and developing their own opinions. This will also foster students in having something to say about a given topic which they will have to do in their writing assignments throughout their academic careers. The Comparison-Contrast Essay went even a step further in scaffolding students in facilitating them in providing evidence, coming to a conclusion and developing a thesis without the teacher having to explicitly ask for it.   

A couple of our discussion questions really got me thinking about scaffolding:

What good is scaffolding if it doesn’t lead to deeper understanding? How does scaffolding lead to deeper understanding?

I think scaffolding does eventually lead to deeper understanding. Some students get to that understanding faster than others. I’m in the MA TESOL program and I see students learning composition very much like learning a new language. Some students acquire second languages easier than others and some develop in certain skill areas quicker. I think by scaffolding our students some may reach a deeper understand faster than others and certain things may click for some later down the road. I believe a way we as teachers can help scaffolding lead to deeper understanding is to explain to our students why we have them do the things we do in class.