Modelos teóricos de SSC

A particular challenge for teachers is working with struggling readers. These readers may have damaged learner identities, be unmotivated, and possess a diminished sense of self-efficacy as readers. Using essential questions and frontloading are particularly important for these students. So is connecting what you are reading to their personal concerns and background, and getting them to make personal connections. “Thinking-aloud” models for them “how to do it” and responding to their “think-alouds” gives you the chance to name and celebrate what they already do as readers—as well as naming what they could do next. This builds motivation and self-efficacy. There is nothing more motivating than feeling a developing sense of competence, and the growing capacity to meet a challenge (Smith & Wilhelm, 2002; 2006).

There are some other caveats in working with students who seem to be “struggling”

or “poor” readers. Teachers sometime assume that if they are having difficulty with decoding vocabulary, then they will not be able to understand the assigned texts (VanDeWeghe, 2004). If someone is stumbling in reading aloud a story, you may assume that they will not be able to make any thematic interpretations of that story. In a study of English teachers’ perceptions of students’ reading, Fred Hamel (2003) found that teachers may underestimate students’ capacity to interpret texts based on narrow measures of “reading ability,” and thereby have low expectations for their potential success. At the same time, he also found that literature teachers need to recognize that students require help with reading comprehension as something that’s part and parcel of literary 124 HOW DO WE ENGAGE STUDENTS WITH LITERATURE?

interpretation. Helping students with reading comprehension means more than just assisting them with decoding; it means having students engage in think-aloud activities as they are reading a text to determine the ways in which they can make interpretations as well as resolving the difficulties they are encountering. Jeff Wilhelm (2007a; 2007b) has likewise found that “think-alouds” are a powerful way of inducting struggling readers into more engaged reading and strategic competence as readers of literature.

While students acquire these conventional ways of reading largely through reading, you can certainly model or scaffold their experience in encountering new text genres by making explicit the strategies you employ with these texts. For example, when the class is reading a Jonathan Swift parody, you can describe how you identify his use of language and a mock-serious tone as signals that he’s engaging in parody. This is something Jamie had to take up with his students when he noticed that some of them struggled with the conventions of dramatic scripts.

Readers’ understanding of language or vocabulary is certainly a factor shaping their understanding. A key element in understanding word meaning is understanding how that word is being used in a certain context. When a female character, Jill, utters to her date after their first time out, “That was a nice dinner,” these words could mean any number of different things depending on the larger context. Jill could be meaning that while the dinner was “nice,” the date itself was less so. Or, she could be meaning that she actually enjoyed the date. Sorting out these competing meanings requires an understanding of characters’ beliefs about each other, motives, agendas, and goals.

All of this means that trying to teach reading in a vacuum—teaching reading skills or strategies in isolation for their own sake—won’t be as successful as teaching reading within the context of a unit, project, or activity in which reading is used as a tool to accomplish some larger purpose driving student engagement. For example, a group of middle school students had to write a letter to their school board arguing their case to not shut down their school (Sheehy, 2003). They conducted surveys of their peers’

attitudes about the school and then interpreted the survey data to create multiple drafts to build their case for why they wanted to stay in their school. In this activity, they were engaged with achieving a larger purpose—convincing the school board of the value of their school—that shaped their understanding of survey data and their drafts. When they lacked knowledge on how to craft a convincing argument, their teacher provided them with assistance about genre conventions of argument.

This is why Jamie had such good success. He taught students about literary conventions and how they worked in the context of making videos for use by their peers. He explored what promoted and disrupted various relationships in the play in service of a final project where they would tell their own stories exhibiting a theme about relationships.

If students do not possess facility with the general processes of reading, then this is what we must teach our students. In any unit of instruction, we must make sure that pre-requisites such as having a clear purpose, activating background, sharing knowledge of how to navigate the text, e.g. through think-alouds, and sharing our evolving thinking and response about the inquiry are all very important. (See Population-specific reading strategies on the website.)

However, the teaching of reading can also break down when students lack knowledge of genre conventions. Many researchers (see, for example, Wilhelm, Baker, & Dube, 2001) argue that this is the reason for the well-known 4th-grade slump. Students have been reading narrative and learning general reading strategies for several years. Suddenly they are faced with new task- and text-specific demands that they are never assisted to

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learn, and which teachers seem to assume they will learn on their own. In 5th grade, students are starting to focus much more on specific subject matter texts in science, social studies, or math, texts that require specific disciplinary ways of thinking, for example, how to conduct an experiment. If students are not provided with these discipline-specific ways of thinking and prior knowledge as part of larger units or projects, they struggle.

In their study on boys and literacy, Smith and Wilhelm (2002) found that many boys said they used to be good readers, and then they, as one boy put it, “got dumber.” This assuredly did not happen. They weren’t necessarily “poor readers.” They were “poor readers” of a certain kind of text requiring certain kinds of genre or disciplinary knowledge they never acquired from their teachers. Some of the boys recognized this and complained that “teachers give you really hard stuff to read, and not help you know how to read it.” (See Content-area-specific reading strategies on the website.)

Moving Beyond the General Processes

Jamie knew he had to help his students understand the conventions of scripts, so that they could be helped to both read Romeo and Juliet (and all other dramatic scripts) and to write the scripts for their videos. Dramatists rely entirely on dialogue and extra-textual directions because they cannot take advantage of the same textual features that novelists or other writers can. This is because scripts are written to be performed. Therefore students are confronted with textual conventions they may not have seen before. If students don’t pay attention to these conventions, they will be missing a major part of dramatic work, and will miss much of the meaning.

Jamie found out that the drama theorist Esslin (1987) identifies 22 basic elements used in dramatic scripts that no other kind of text uses. Esslin divides these 22 elements into 5 basic categories: framing systems, systems at the actor’s disposal, visual systems, the text, and aural systems. David Anderson (1987) has adapted these systems for viewing drama to make them useful to reading drama. These conventions require what could be called “text specific” reading strategies, since the demands of scripts require readers to make very particular meaning-making moves that are specific to this text type or genre.

Anderson’s categories are pre-reading, descriptions of settings, technical stage directions, the character’s words, stage directions and character descriptions. Pre-reading strategies help students to build background that will guide them in reconstructing and visualizing the action in their mind. They need to know what kind of script it is and how it is intended to be performed (radio, television, proscenium stage, etc.). They will need to look at the title, the genre (tragedy, comedy), lists of characters, names and titles, and character descriptions.

As they read, students will need to know how to ascertain important informa-tion and make inferences from descripinforma-tions of settings, which imply tone and mood, reveal character as well as social and historical perspective. They also need to know how to read dialogue, understand speaker designation, and understand that in scripts, dialogue will be expected to convey mood, tone, symbolism, setting, and clues for story and character development. And, students need to learn to visualize stage directions describing sounds, lighting and properties, and the movement of characters and properties.

Finally, students need to learn how characters are represented through the dialogue—

their own and others —and how characters are represented through stage directions and descriptions.

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So What’s a Teacher to Do?: Making Explicit Your Ways of Reading What this means is that in addition to embedding reading instruction within an engaging, purposeful unit or project, you need to make explicit your ways of reading or interpreting specific kinds of texts by describing the genre conventions and prior knowledge you apply to those texts. This means that advanced reading of texts for your units or projects, you need to identity differences between your own reading processes as an experienced reader and the processes your students will bring to the texts. In planning his activities, Jamie knew that he had to understand the demands placed on readers by dramatic scripts.

Then he had to find a way to assist his students to learn how to recognize and deal with these demands so that they could meaningfully comprehend and interpret the text they were being asked to read. Jamie identified the most important of those demands as setting directions, stage directions, character directions.

You then need to determine how to provide your students with the genre conventions for understanding specific kinds of texts. To help his kids understand how these directions needed to be used to create a visual image in the mind, Jamie brought in several cartoon strips that dealt with the topic of romantic love in a way that helped address the question “what is a good relationship.” He told his students that they needed to translate the cartoon into a script.

The students brainstormed what kinds of information were encoded in a cartoon that could not be encoded in a straight textual presentation. The students identified how characters looked, what they wore, facial expressions, where they stood, how they interacted, how they moved, how they said things, how things changed from panel to panel, etc.

Jamie informed his students that scripts used particular kinds of “codes” to communicate this kind of information so that a reader or play director would know how to visualize and stage the scene in her mind. Students spent a couple of days practicing translating cartoons into scripts and identifying the kinds of script conventions they had to use. They were now much better prepared to write their own scripts and to read Romeo and Juliet.

Student teacher Andrew Porter was faced with the same problem when introducing the play The Diary of Anne Frank (Frank, 1989) to his 8th graders. He chose another method for introducing his students to the conventions and importance of dramatic script.

Andrew went on to the Internet and downloaded the scripts for famous scenes from popular shows like The Simpsons (Groening, 1989–2010) and Seinfeld (David & Seinfeld, 1990–1998), for example, the scene where Homer teaches Bart how to fight, and the scene where Kramer drops a mint candy into a patient during surgery.

He split the class into groups and allowed them to choose the scene they wanted to reenact. He gave them time to review the scripts and to rehearse. The kids then enacted their scenes and talked about what made an enactment powerful. They then talked about where they received the clues for how to enact a scene. Though a few students had seen and remembered these scenes from their television viewing, most of them relied somewhat on the stage, setting, and character directions. Andrew identified these conventions of scripts and the class had a discussion about how to read these directions and how to use them to visualize a scene and “re-enact it in your mind.”

Short “procedural frontloading” (i.e. ones that develop new strategic facility) activities like these helped both Jamie’s and Andrew’s students induce and master the use of these conventions and greatly assisted their reading of the plays they were subsequently asked to read. Moreover, because the students had some larger purpose for reading the texts—to prepare for a drama production in which they could display

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competence in front of their peers—they were engaged with wanting to understand their texts. Jamie and Andrew were not teaching “reading” in a vacuum. They were helping their students acquire certain ways of reading of certain kinds of texts within larger, engaging contexts. They paid attention to the general processes of reading that are necessary to all successful reading, but they also paid attention to the text and task-specific strategies that the particular texts they were reading at that time required of their students. This is tremendously important for the teacher of literature and doing just this is the focus of our next chapter. (See Genre reading strategies on the website.)

PORTFOLIO REFLECTION

Reflect on instances in which you and/or your students experienced difficulties in reading texts by identifying the specific type of difficulty encountered and reasons for those difficulties related to prior knowledge of a topic or genre, purpose for reading, interest in a text, or engagement with an assignment. Then, reflect on strategies you employed or taught your students to employ to cope with these difficulties and reasons those strategies did or did not help you or your students cope with these difficulties.

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