BUILDING MOTIVATED READERS
IN THE CONTENT AREAS
Presenter(s)
Jason
Burke
Don Johnston Incorporated
Day Phone: 847-740-0749
Email: jburke@donjohnston.com
As students
mature, their interests grow and change constantly. They thirst for new
information and the curriculum gets more and more challenging.
Pairing
struggling readers with considerate text and technology supports can be the key
to including students in the curriculum. Considerate text provides the older
struggling student with:
* the mature story themes and grade-level curriculum they want and need
* engagement to “hook” students and give them an edge
* new words and idioms to build their comprehension vocabulary
* background knowledge that draws on familiar examples and analogies
* sentence structures that make logical connections between ideas
* text structures that are presented in a predictable format
Avid,
fluent readers “acquire new language and vocabulary, new conceptual knowledge,
new comprehension challenges and new modes of thought to which they would not
otherwise be exposed.” (Adams and Bruck,
1995). Considerate text will get students reading to acquire the same
benefits gained by their peers who are avid, fluent readers. Explicit examples
of these attributes will be demonstrated and related to the needs of students
who struggle with reading to ways these students can access the curriculum to
begin learning through reading.
Well-written,
considerate text by itself can increase a struggling reader’s success. By
adding technology support, the considerate text can be even more effective. A
computer book version of the considerate text adds human—recorded speech to
model phrasing, rate, intonation and stress, irony, sarcasm, humor and the
pronunciations of new names and unfamiliar words. On-screen text is highlighted
as it is read to make a one-to—one connection between spoken and written words.
Supported Reading Guides instruct, direct and help students extract important
information and make text—to—self, text-to-text and text- to—world connections.
Participants
will be introduced to the newest product in the Start—to—Finish Publishing
family, Start-to-Finish® Core Content, and experience how they can use this
considerate informational text along with technology support to implement
comprehension instruction methods recommended by the National Reading Panel
(2000)2 that include: comprehension monitoring; graphic and semantic
organizing; a story structure from which a reader learns to ask and answer who,
what, where, when and why questions about the plot, characters and events in
stories; question answering; question generation and summarization.
Learning
to read and reading to learn have to happen simultaneously £p our older
struggling readers. They have a lot of lost time to make up and they can’t have
anything stand in the way of their progress. Providing students with the
considerate text in the Start—to—Finish Library and Start—to—Finish Core
Content gives readers the right variety of text and content to do both—learn to
read and read to learn.
Adams, N. & Bruck, N. (1995). Resolving
the “Great Debate.” American Educator, Summer,
7-20.
National
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