Dr. Joanne Robertson July 14, 2014 Polytechnic University, HK

1. Thematic Course on Supporting Students with SEN:Engaging All Students in Literacy Development Dr. Joanne Robertson July 14, 2014 Polytechnic University, HK

2. 16,262 students • Comprehensive education: pre- K to Grade 12 • Locally developed literacy resources

4. Course Outline

6. Engaging All Students in Literacy Development • Engaging the Literacy Learner • Key Components of Literacy Instruction • Essential Characteristics of Effective Literacy Teachers • Differentiated literacy instruction for students with learning and intellectual disabilities

7. K-W Chart

8. Engaging Literacy Learners

9. Engaging the Literacy Learner “Engagement is strongly related to reading achievement.” (Guthrie, 2001) • Contexts for Engagement and Motivation in Reading: http://www.readingonline.org/articles/art_index.asp?HREF=/articles/handbook/guthrie/index.html

11. What Engaged Rocket in Reading?

12. Engaging the Literacy Learner • The degree to which students engage in classroom literacy instruction is critical if they are to become successful readers and writers. • Engaged students are intrinsically motivated to learn. • When students are engaged they are focused on meaning-making when they read and write. • Research has identified a number of features of classrooms that successfully foster and support student engagement. Reflections on Literacy (Pearson, 2006)

13. Engaging the Literacy Learner Engaged readers…are those who apply reading strategies for comprehension and conceptual knowledge, are motivated to learn and achieve, and who are part of a supportive literate community (Guthrie & Wigfield, 2000).  Engaged readers not only are able to decode and comprehend texts, but they value reading, believe they are good readers, and choose to read.  Engaged reading is a calling for a integration between motivation, cognition, and social contributions in order to engage students in reading to become life-long, successful readers. • https://www.msu.edu/~dwong/StudentWorkArchive/CEP900F01-RIP/Gallagher-Reading.htm

14. Literacy Engagement • What does it mean to be engaged in reading? • How do create classroom contexts for engaging/motivating students to read? • Think-Pair-Share • What does it look like in the classroom? • http://vimeo.com/30549561

15. Instructional Contexts for Engagement • Learning and Knowledge Goals • Real World Interaction • Autonomy Support • Interesting Texts • Strategy Instruction • Collaboration • Praise • Evaluation (Guthrie, 2001)

16. Engagement • Educators and students share their increased engagement in the classroom as a result of flexible learning opportunities in the classroom. • http://www.udlresource.ca/?p=1648 • (SET BC- Engagement)

17. Key Components of Literacy Instruction National Reading Panel

18. Phonemic Awareness • The ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the individual sounds--phonemes--in spoken words. • A part of phonological awareness.

19. Important Points about Phonemic Awareness: • Phonemic awareness can be taught and learned. • Phonemic awareness can help students learn to read and spell. • Learning to read and spell words by working with letter-sound relationships also improves children’s phonemic awareness.

20. Phonics • The relationship between the letters (graphemes) of written language and the sounds (phonemes) of spoken language. • Phonics instruction is teaching children these letter-sound relationships.

21. Important Points about Phonics Instruction • Systematic and explicit phonics instruction is more effective than non-systematic or no phonics instruction. • Systematic and explicit phonics instruction significantly improves kindergarten and first-grade children’s word recognition and spelling. • Systematic and explicit phonics instruction significantly improves children’s reading comprehension.

22. Important Points about Phonics Instruction • Systematic and explicit phonics instruction is particularly beneficial for children who are having difficulty learning to read and who are at risk for developing future reading problems. • Systematic and explicit phonics instruction is most effective when introduced early (K or 1).

23. Some Cautions about Phonics Instruction • Phonics instruction is not an entire reading program for beginning readers. • “The best way to get children to refine and extend their knowledge of letter-sound correspondences is through repeated opportunities to read.”-Becoming a Nation of Readers. • Approximately two years of phonics instruction is sufficient for most students. If phonics instruction begins early in kindergarten, it should be completed by the end of first grade. If phonics instruction begins early in first grade, it should be completed by the end of second grade.

24. Fluency • Oral reading fluency is the ability to read with accuracy, and with an appropriate rate, expression, and phrasing.

25. Important Points about Fluency • Fluency is important because it provides a bridge between word recognition and comprehension. • Repeated and monitored oral reading improves reading fluency and overall reading achievement. • Attention to fluency is often neglected in reading instruction.

26. More fluent readers focus their attention on making connections among the ideas in a text and between these ideas and their background knowledge. Therefore, they are able to focus on comprehension. Less fluent readers must focus their attention primarily on decoding and accessing the meaning of individual words. Therefore, they have little attention left for comprehending the text. Why Fluency is Important

27. Vocabulary • Vocabulary refers to the words we must know to communicate effectively in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. • Vocabulary plays an important part in learning to read. Children use words in their oral vocabulary to make sense of the words they see in print. • Vocabulary is also important in reading comprehension. Readers cannot understand what they are reading unless they know what most of the words mean.

28. How Vocabulary is Learned • Indirectly. Children learn the meanings of most words indirectly, through everyday experiences with oral and written language--e.g., through conversations with adults, through being read to, and through reading extensively on their own. • Directly. Children learn vocabulary directly when they are explicitly taught both individual words and word-learning strategies.

29. Teaching Individual Words • Teaching specific words before reading helps both vocabulary learning and reading comprehension. • Extended instruction that promotes active engagement with vocabulary improves word learning. • Repeated exposures to vocabulary in many contexts aids word learning.

30. Out Of My Mind by Sharon M. Draper

31. Out of My Mind: Sort and Predict Word List

32. Reader Response Log….

33. Text Comprehension • Comprehension is the reason for reading. If readers can read the words but do not understand what they are reading, they are not really reading. • Instruction in comprehension can help students understand what they read, remember what they read, and communicate with others about what they read. • Research on text comprehension suggests what should be taught about text comprehension and how it should be taught.

34. What Should be Taught--Key Comprehension Strategies • Monitoring comprehension • Using graphic and semantic organizers • Answering questions • Generating questions • Recognizing story structure (and other text structures) • Summarizing

35. How to Teach Comprehension Strategies • Provide explicit (or direct) instruction: direct explanation, modeling, guided practice, application. • Make use of cooperative learning. • Help readers use comprehension strategies flexibly and in combination.

36. Key Components of Literacy Instruction

37. Lunch Break

38. Exploding Reading Myths • Please work in a small group for this activity • Read the statements in “Exploding Reading Myths” • Discuss the reasons why you think each of the statements is a ‘myth’ and not a true statement. • Try to provide examples from your own classroom practice

39. Exploding Reading Myths MYTH 1: Learning to read, like learning to talk, is a natural process. Response from Research: Findings from decades of research challenge the belief that children learn to read naturally (Lyon, 1998). While oral language develops naturally from birth, and exposure to native speakers’ language is sufficient to trigger language acquisition in infants, literacy is not acquired in the same fashion. Reading is a cultural adaptation that must be learned.

40. Exploding Reading Myths MYTH 2: With time, all children will eventually learn to read. Response from Research: Since reading is not biologically innate in the same way that oral language is, it is unlikely that all children will learn to read without the proper instruction. Over time, the achievement gap becomes wider between children who have well-developed literacy skills and those who do not (Wren,2002a). Rather than waiting for a child to catch on to reading, real progress can be made with intervention and tutoring that promote decoding skills (Pressley, 2006).

41. Exploding Reading Myths MYTH 3: Genetics rule: if the child has dyslexia, he or she cannot be helped. Response from Research: • Although dyslexia, a language-based learning disability that originates with poor phonological skills, is influenced by genetics, most children with dyslexia can learn to read. Genetic and environmental factors have about equal influence on reading achievement at all levels of reading ability (Fletcher,Lyon, Fuchs, & Barnes, 2007; Olson, 2006). Early intervention and code-based, systematic and comprehensive instruction enable most individuals with dyslexia to achieve satisfactory reading levels. However, spelling and fluency will likely continue to be difficult for children with dyslexia.

42. Exploding Reading Myths MYTH 4: If you start at a disadvantage, you will never catch up. Response from Research: Findings from decades of research challenge the belief that children learn to read naturally (Lyon, 1998). While oral language develops naturally from birth, and exposure to native speakers’ language is sufficient to trigger language acquisition in infants, literacy is not acquired in the same fashion. Reading is a cultural adaptation that must be learned.

43. Exploding Reading Myths MYTH 5: After Grade 3, children are done learning how to read. Response from Research: Not every aspect of reading can be taught or learned before a child completes Grade 3. Most children have not yet mastered decoding by the end of Grade 3; therefore they will need further instruction in vocabulary development, comprehension, and fluency (Pressley, 2006).

44. Exploding Reading Myths MYTH 6: Children can learn to read by relying heavily on context cues. Response from Research: Response from research: It has been shown that context can facilitate comprehension after words have been read (Phillips, Norris, & Vavra, 2007); however, it is not useful as an initial decoding strategy. When children encounter a word they have not seen before, they need to use decoding skills to sound it out.

45. Exploding Reading Myths MYTH 7: Students can master reading comprehension if they just read, read, and read. Response from Research: There is substantial evidence showing that if students are explicitly taught effective reading comprehension strategies they will become much better at comprehension than those who are not taught to use these strategies (Pressley, 2006).

46. Exploding Reading Myths MYTH 8: English has so many irregular spellings and inconsistencies that it is impossible to teach. Response from Research: For reading and writing purposes, English is 80 percent regular (Bowey, 2006). The continuum of learning the patterns in English begins with the basic Anglo-Saxon words (i.e., common words such as bump, get, right) and expands to prefixes, suffixes and Latin and Greek roots from Grade 3 or 4 onwards (Henry, 2003). This continuum presents the student with logical patterns. The teacher must be knowledgeable about language in order to present these patterns clearly.

47. What is a Learning Disability? • Some individuals, despite having an average or above average level of intelligence, have real difficulty acquiring basic academic skills. • These skills include those needed for successful reading, writing, listening, speaking and/or math. These difficulties might be the result of a learning disability. • A learning disability is defined as a condition when a child's achievement is substantially below what one might expect for that child

48. Learning Disabilities and Literacy Development • Many children with LD have struggle with reading. The difficulties often begin with individual sounds, or phonemes. • Students may have problems with rhyming, and pulling words apart into their individual sounds (segmenting) and putting individual sounds together to form words (blending). This makes it difficult to decode words accurately, which can lead to trouble with fluency and comprehension. • As students move through the grades, more and more of the information they need to learn is presented in written (through textbooks) or oral (through lecture) form. This creates difficulties for them in succeeding in school.

49. What are Some Types of Learning Disabilities? • Reading disabilities (often referred to as dyslexia) • Writing disabilities (often referred to as dysgraphia) • Math disabilities (often called dyscalculia) • Auditory and Visual Processing Disorders –difficulty understanding language despite normal hearing and vision. • Nonverbal Learning Disabilities – a neurological disorder causing problems with visual-spatial, intuitive, organizational, evaluative and holistic processing functions. • Other disabilities that affect memory, social skills, and executive functions such as deciding to begin a task.

50. Learning Disabilities: What are the Different Types • Learning disabilities expert Dr. Sheldon Horowitz explains the different types of learning disabilities and their impact on people with LD. • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG_xSBsFMPQ