[etni] re"teach them to read" [or putting the cart before the horse]
- From: "Dr. Rachel Segev-Miller" <aki_seg@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: ask@xxxxxxxx, Etni <etni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2008 11:39:29 +0300
My dear colleagues,
I'd like to make two comments re "teach them to read":
[1] Jeniffer wrote:
"Reading doesn't always come automatically to all people, and many elementary
school teachers
haven't been trained to do it.'
Reading never comes automatically to anyone. Automacity is the outcome of
practice [preferably closely accompanied by feedback] over an extended period
of time.
It is true, unfortunately, that the teaching of reading has for a long time now
been neglected by most institutions of teacher training [both the colleges of
education and schools of education at the universities].
[2] Most of the correspondence re "teach them to read" on this website
[Jeniffer's and others'] seems to relate more to what one of them called "the
basics", that is, decoding and fluency, rather than to reading comprehension.
Reading is both. My argument for a long time now has been [and see my 2003
article, again: link below], that reading comprehension at school [and not only
in L2 - English but also in L1 - Hebrew and Arabic] is not taught, but tested:
"Reading comprehension at school has traditionally focused on the product
rather than on the process: Students are given tests on their comprehension of
a text – usually in the form of questions – to assess their level of
comprehension. "But knowing what a student has comprehended does not, of
itself, account for how he has or has not comprehended, and cannot provide
information on how the student might be helped to comprehend at a higher level"
(Alderson & Urquhart, 1984:xiv)."[1]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] In addition to the product paradigm, another common paradigm at school is
the paradigm of "text as pretext" (Spivey, 1987), that is, using the texts in
textbooks not to teach reading but rather teach language.
http://eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/1b/76/77.pdf
Also, my analysis [often with both my undergraduate and graduate students] of
the cognitive level of the so-called reading comprehension questions on the
Bagrut exams over the years [including last winter's], has unfortunately
indicated that even in the case of the 5-point version, the level was rather
low [and see the above article for a simple instrument to assess the level of a
question].
This is also why I think the HOTS reform should've started with the explicit
teaching of reading comprehension rather than literature [which, of course,
also requires reading comprehension] at ALL school levels [elementary, junior,
and high] rather than only high [Bagrut].
Shabat shalom,
Aki
Dr. Rachel [Aki] Segev-Miller
The English Department, The Center of Academic Literacy,
& The M.Ed. Program in Interdisciplinary Education
Kibbutzim College of Education, Technology, and the Arts;
& The M.Ed. Programs in Language Education & Learning and Instruction
Levinsky College of Education
Tel-Aviv, Israel
tel. (w) +972-3-6902362; (h) +972-9-9571560; (mobile) 050-7225822
email: aki_seg@xxxxxxxxxx; aki.segev@xxxxxxxxx
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