Week 8, Stories That Pirates Love to Read and Teach

At first glance, ILA was a bit underwhelming. I poked and prodded around and got to a page about their magazine and journals. The magazine is not billed as a theory heavy research journal. It is a magazine. Light reading. The website says, “We are always looking for articles that reflect current trends in literacy instruction and provide easy-to-implement tips for today’s educators…please keep in mind that 900 words is our maximum word count and that we do not use reference lists in the magazine.” As a magazine reader myself, I thought that it sounded great. An idea generator. Easy to pick up and easy to put down.

However, there were also many journals that are research, theory, and methodology based, and their submission standards reflect those of all of the major journals that we have come across in our graduate programs. They clearly want you to become a member of their organization, but to entice you they give a bit of free access to an issue. I chose to take a look at Reading Research Quarterly and read some of two of the articles that looked interesting. One of the articles, “Enhancing Decoding Efficiency in Poor Readers via a Word Identification Game,” caught my eye. It is specifically geared toward elementary school children, but I thought that the points that they made could be applied to any grade level. We want students to be engaged and enjoy their time in the classroom. Dare we say that they might even have a little fun? This brings me to the other article that I read. “The Effects of Extensive Reading on Reading Comprehension, Reading Rate, and Vocabulary Acquisition.” The idea that drove this article was that high-school and college age L2 students had more success with learning the foreign language when they were given class time to read extensive reading material as well as intensive reading material. This means that they built their vocabulary and language comprehension when they were given reading materials that weren’t as challenging and were enjoyable or interesting to the students. They were able to build a sight-word vocabulary that then lead to better retention of the more difficult vocabulary and comprehension of the intensive reading. Again, we have a researched and peer-reviewed article that suggests students retain more information when they enjoy what they are doing in the classroom. Not only have I found this to be true in my personal experience, but in our WAC class, there is a student who claims that she learned all there is to know about writing in her high school English class where they spent some of their class time playing “Apples to Apples.”

This brings me to my own idea about assigning reading in a basic writing classroom. I suppose it is necessary to have a text book, but why can’t there also be a theme to the class. Like Basic Writing Mystery. Or Basic Writing Super Heroes. Then you can assign some reading that might be considered by some to be fluffy, but if you have engaged your student with reading something that they enjoy and you can tie it in to a class theme, why not? And that is a serious question…I mean it. Is there a reason why this wouldn’t work? Have any of you tried assigning popular culture reading? There are some good graphic novels out there. Has anyone considered assigning reading in a graphic novel? I think even Stephanie Meyer put out a graphic novel from her Twilight series.

The one negative thing about ILA is that they are really geared toward K-12. After attending the panel discussion with the community college instructors, I think that isn’t so much of an issue if you use this as a resource when you teach students that might be less prepared for college than those who are accepted at AUM and have to take Basic Writing. But for 4-year university programs, there may be a gap unless you use their resources with some creativity. I found something intersting when I checked out their ILA Bridges link. I got to a 3rd grade lesson plan for reading, writing, and speaking that fits the common core requirements for that age group, and about halfway through they recommended creating a RAFT. “Performance Task—Introduce RAFT Role of Writer: Students will write in first person as a historical character Audience: Classmates, teacher, Plymoth Plantation staff Format: letter/journal Topic: A day in the life of a Pilgrim or Wampanoag boy or girl in the 1620s.” This is clearly something we do here in college.

I have added a snip from their “What’s Hot In Literacy At a Glance” flyer. Hot=Currently Trending. You can view the entire report at literacyworldwide.org/whatshot. What stands out here to me is that the things that were surveyed and voted on as the most hot topics are things that we talk about now. Assessment/Standards…comes up in many of our readings and blogs. Digital Literacy…I’m taking a class on that right now. Early Literacy…this has made an appearance in many of our blogs and FB posts. Teacher Professional Learning & Development…AUM offers this through colloquium workshops. Do you guys think this is an accurate portrayal of what you might think of as “hot” topics?