Maureen Mulligan
PSY 111
Reaction paper #2
The topic of reading and writing, and more specifically my professional
responsibility as it pertains to reading and writing is something that is very
important to me, and a topic in which I hold on high regard. I am a first grade
teacher, and I was fortunate enough to attend a university for undergrad where
much of my time spent there was learning about how to best foster students’
literacy skills.
The power points describe literacy a few different times, and I wanted to
note that they point out that all 4 aspects of literacy are important in the
development of students reading and writing abilities. “In emergent literacy,
reading is not the only important language skill learned in school, but rather is one
among a complementary array of critical language-based skills: reading, writing,
speaking, and listening” (Wheeler, 2014). I can speak from experience that in order
to develop good readers and writers, you also need to model for your students what
good speaking and listening looks like. Along the same lines as that, the way that
students are spoken to and listened to at home, I have found has a lot to do with
how well they will succeed or how well they will pick up reading and writing. This is
one way in which I believe reading and writing are connected to my area of
professional responsibility, I have to make sure that I am covering all aspects of
literacy in my classroom instruction. Because it is 1st grade, and the brunt of my
instruction is literacy based, I spend a lot of my time on professional development
learning about new ways to better improve the way I teach my reading and writing.
Some of my students come to my classroom reading on grade level or above grade
level, while others come not even being able to tell me the letter sounds. Although I
know that this is an important part of figuring out how to read the research suggests
that phonemic awareness is not the end all be all of learning how to read. Wheeler
states in his power point entitled “Learning to Read” that “Decoding is important to
learning to read but is not the only factor and not necessarily even the first thing
that should be taught” (Wheeler 2014), and then he goes onto explain that “Rapid
and eventually automatic decoding underlies the ability to read effectively; context
is useful but cannot substitute for the ability to identify words rapidly and
accurately” (Wheeler 2014). I found this to be very interesting because the ability to
decode words is always a skill that I teach my kids to use when they come to a word
that they are unable to read. With that being said, I do see where Wheeler is coming
from arguing that the end goal of reading is to read to comprehend what you are
reading, and being able to decode a word simply means you know what it says. The
next step students need to be able to take is to construct meaning for the words that
they are reading.
This brings me to my next way as to how I connect reading and writing into
my area of professional responsibility. Not only is a big part of my instruction
teaching some of my students to decode and read new words they come across
when they read, but I also teach my kids an assortment of different comprehension
skills to use when they read. This happens by doing a lot of modeling, and a lot of
think a-louds so that they kids know what I am thinking in my brain as I am reading
and trying to understand what I am reading. One way that I teach them how to
understand what they are reading is by paying special attention to the meaning of
words when we read. Wheeler discusses in his “Reading to Learn” power point how
important teaching vocabulary is in order for students to be able to read to
comprehend, “Direct instruction of vocabulary has typically been the most common
approach but many studies show that reading is the more likely route to vocabulary
growth” (Wheeler, 2014). Although you should not be doing direct instruction
throughout your whole day, when it comes to modeling and teaching your children
how to train their minds to comprehend or understand what they read, it is very
important that we teach them how to learn new vocabulary words.
References
Bruning, R. H., Schraw, G. J., & Norby, M. M. (2011). Cognitive psychology and
instruction (5th ed.). Boston: Pearson.
Wheeler, K. (2014a). Learning to read [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from
Concordia University, Nebraska archived PSY 511 in Blackboard.
Wheeler, K. (2014b). Reading to learn [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from
Concordia University, Nebraska archived PSY 511 in Blackboard.
Wheeler, K. (2014c). A cognitive model of writing [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved
from Concordia University, Nebraska archived PSY 511 in Blackboard.