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.