Running head: MY BELIEFS AND PRACTICES IN READING INSTRUCTION

My Beliefs and Practices in Reading Instruction Fang Ge Michigan State University

MY BELIEFS AND PRACTICES IN READING INSTRUCTION My Incoming Beliefs and Practices

This is my second year of teaching a Chinese immersion program at the kindergarten level. None of my students have any experience of speaking or reading in Chinese prior to the class. It is hard to find reading materials that are both age-appropriate and engaging in Chinese, so I have been creating this part (as well as other parts) of the curriculum by myself. Reading is an intellectual process to comprehend, analyze and synthesize the information presented in written languages. To accomplish this process, several components are essential. These components are phonics, vocabulary, sentence structure, comprehension and fluency. For advanced readers, analytical and synthesizing abilities are also important. Reading is a skill built upon listening and speaking skills. Taking into account my students zero background knowledge in Chinese, the necessity of building listening and speaking skills cannot be understated. When students are able to speak Chinese, they can start to learn to relate the sounds of spoken language to the characters in written form. With a sufficient number of characters stored in their mind and some practice in reading, they develop the knowledge of words and their meanings in context. The ability to understand meaning in text is the goal of reading. With more practice, readers can read text smoothly, accurately, and with expression. Kindergartners have strong ability to recognize individual character, especially when these characters derive from pictographs and closely relate to their daily life. However, as emergent readers, they are only at an initial stage of independently developing comprehension of new context by applying knowledge of learnt characters.

MY BELIEFS AND PRACTICES IN READING INSTRUCTION

Therefore, by the end of the year, I expect my students to have learned recognizing approximate one hundred characters and reading twelve class books we make, some of the books contain the characters we learn and others occasionally go beyond them. Throughout the year, I will focus on the students ability to recognize individual characters in learnt text because they are the building blocks to become independent readers. In order to achieve this expectation, I started with the teaching of oral vocabulary. The strategies I used included flash cards, various games, contextualization of vocabulary in songs and nursery rhymes. When students are able to speak the vocabulary, I taught them to recognize some selected ones in written form with animations, hands-on activities and games. Finally, we made books that contain these characters and we read them in a step by step manner. Usually, I read aloud the books first and check students' comprehension. Then I guided the students to read with me until they can do it without my help. So far, I havent communicated with my students explicitly or implicitly about reading in Chinese. In my testing of reading, I valued the students ability to recognize individual character and the level of fluency they display when reading the books we made. My Outgoing Beliefs and Practices Affirmations Select texts purposefully to support comprehension development. At this stage, kindergartners word-level skill is still too limited to finish any reading, except for short sentences or a mixture of words and pictures, independently. Therefore, texts were used largely to encourage the development of their listening comprehension ability when I read to students. These texts are well above their reading level but is at their listening comprehension level as suggested by one of the articles (Shanahan et al., 2010). In addition, the texts I chose

MY BELIEFS AND PRACTICES IN READING INSTRUCTION were of high quality with richness and depth of ideas and information. For example, the stories of the elephant and piggie had well developed plots and an appropriate richness of

word choice and sentence structure. They also provided a good resource to engage children in higher order thinking and making predictions. I tried to avoid using books only containing repetitive sentence patterns in an attempt to build students depth of understanding. How literacy tasks influence reading motivation? In open-ended tasks, students were in control of both the products they created and the processes they employed. There was no one correct answer, nor was there a specified procedure to use. (Turner & Paris, 1995) The tasks that my kids performed were not strictly open-ended tasks, but these tasks still increased their reading motivation by providing them with choices, challenge, control and collaboration with parents. For example, after learning the sentence patten of I can do ___ at ___ years old, the children were allowed to create their own timeline with the help of their parents. Children were excited to read each others final products because they were all different in content and format. In another case, children cut out pictures from magazines to create their own books on what animals can do. They also made a Chinese zodiac book that included people at their own choice. These choices made the tasks more meaningful for children and thus increased their engagement level. Additionally, reading their peers products offered an enjoyment for children. Effective strategies to teach vocabulary. Some strategies that I used in my vocabulary instruction proved to be effective. For young children, Total Physical Response works very well. When learning the words of animals, I displayed the word cards on the projector and asked the children to act them out. This strategy can also be applied to most concrete words such as family members, action verbs, etc. Another way to engage children is to associate the characters with images, especially when the characters derive from

MY BELIEFS AND PRACTICES IN READING INSTRUCTION pictographs. After learning a number of words, making word meanings and relationships

visible can also involve students actively in constructing word meaning. For instance, after learning animal names and action verbs such as walk, jump, fly and crawl, students put related words into a web according to what animals can do. Finally, we made word families with the characters we learnt and thus helped students to learn new words as well as remember old words. For example, the character , when combined with other characters, can make words with different meanings such as (mouse, tiger, teacher, old lay, old man, old friend). The above strategies worked because they helped kids to make sense of the characters by making connections with other characters or themselves. Questions When to explicitly teach reading comprehension? I used to believe that explicit instruction in reading comprehension should be taught after word-level skills are firmly established. Conversely, the panel believes that reading comprehension strategies, texts organizational structure and motivation to understand can be taught and fostered along with word-level skills, vocabulary knowledge and broad conceptual knowledge, right from the start. (Shanahan et al., 2010) My misconception was caused by the vague and limited understanding I had about the instruction of comprehension. I assumed, from my own reading experience, that comprehension largely involved higher order thinking skills and it was impossible to teach them to beginning readers. After reading the materials of module three, I realized that comprehension consisted of comprehension strategies and the texts organizational structures, and the selection of text, a focused and high-quality discussion on the meaning of text and establishing an engaging and motivating context can all facilitate the development of childrens reading comprehension. The summary of effective reading

MY BELIEFS AND PRACTICES IN READING INSTRUCTION comprehension strategies and the elements of structure in a narrative text and an

informational text clearly defined what to teach and the recommendations can all be adapted to beginning readers. What is fluency? The definition of fluency given by Rasinski and Samuels and Worthy and Broadduss articles reshaped my thinking of fluency. It indicates that fluency consists not only of rate, accuracy and automaticity, but also of phrasing, smoothness, and expressiveness. Prior to reading these articles, I considered speed and accuracy the two major elements of fluency. When students can read fast and accurately, I deemed that as fluent readers. However, my practice neglected the fact that a reader must comprehend and interpret text and read with appropriate timing, expressiveness, stress, and intonation to be truly fluent (as cited in Worthy & Broaddus, 2001). I didnt even realize the possibility that students may read a text without comprehending it. Since the sentences we read are short and easy to understand, I took it for granted that as long as students can read them, they can understand them. A scenario in my classroom helped me to understand the real meaning of fluency. One day, I put together a new sentence Your fathers father is your grandpa. for students to practice recognizing the characters. Most kindergarteners were able to read the sentence, but most of them were confused and couldnt figure out the meaning of the sentence. In addition, I didnt explicitly teach phrasing, smoothness and expressiveness, though I included these elements in my own reading. Presently, young children imitated the teacher so well that they naturally displayed these qualities in their reading. In the long term, however, they need to be aware of these elements to become real fluent readers. How to build a word-rich environment? Prior to learning the module of vocabulary instruction, my understanding of a word-rich environment was limited to the Chinese words and characters posted on classroom walls to facilitate students learning of vocabulary.

MY BELIEFS AND PRACTICES IN READING INSTRUCTION However, the definition given by Graves and Watts-Taffe was much more comprehensive. When thinking of a word-rich classroom, they think of the words that students see in the classroom environment, read in a variety of texts, hear spoken by the teacher and other

students, and ultimately use in their own speaking and writing. (Graves & Watts-Taffe, 2008) By comparison, I realized that when staying in a classroom environment, students use all of their senses to approach the learning of vocabulary. They learn words not only during the teachers explicit instruction, but also when they read books in the library, play games with their peers, write journals, listen to audio books, etc. Therefore, word learning is a multidimensional process. To facilitate this process, the teacher needs to make the best use of resources in the classroom to enrich such a learning process. In general, I have a much more profound and accurate understanding of the instruction of reading at the end of the course. I am fully aware of the key components of reading and how they interact with each other in the development of reading proficiency. With a lot of useful and practical strategies to teach each component and a clearer idea of what words I am going to teach next year, I believe tangible improvements will be made in my teaching of each component. The following plan of action will address in more details what movements I will make and the rationale behind the movements. My Plan of Action Affirmations Select texts purposefully to support comprehension development. Teaching reading comprehension with multiple genres of text is another element of text selection to promote comprehension development. So far, I only used fictions and nursery rhymes in my classrooms. I am planning to use literary texts such as fables and poetry and informational texts such as timelines and procedural texts. For example, after learning words for body parts,

MY BELIEFS AND PRACTICES IN READING INSTRUCTION

we can read a procedural text about how to make a snowman. Reading multiple genres of text will expose students to different structures of text, an important element of reading comprehension. At the same time, students will encounter texts of multiple genres in real life. Such a selection may increase their motivation level in reading. It can be implemented from the second trimester when the students stored Chinese words of a variety of subjects. How literacy tasks influence reading motivation? Open-ended tasks provide challenge, choice, student control over learning, opportunities to collaborate with others and to construct meaning through reading and writing. This is the reason that I want to try them out in my classroom. After reading the book Little Panda Birthday Party next year, I am going to design some activities for children to choose. These activities may include writing invitation to the pandas party, writing birthday cards for the panda, acting out the panda birthday party, design a menu for guests at the birthday party, preparing birthday presents for each guest, etc. This can be carried out towards the end of the second trimester when the students are comfortable with some basic writing and reading skills in Chinese. In the talkin shop of this module, some of my classmates mentioned the effectiveness of collaboration in increasing the childrens motivational level. I am going to divide students into mixed-ability groups so that the able reader can help couching a less able reader.
Effective strategies to teach vocabulary. Inspired by the reading materials, I am

going to try some new strategies of vocabulary instruction strategies. One strategy is to use pithy formulas (often in rhyme) that help learners to remember Chinese characters. For example, (small) (big) (sharp, made of small on the top and big on the bottom) (sun) (moon) (bright, made by sun on the left and moon on the right) (fish) (sheep) (delicious, made by fish on the left and sheep on the right), etc. Another strategy is to use morphology. Breaking familiar characters into radicals not only helps students to learn

MY BELIEFS AND PRACTICES IN READING INSTRUCTION and remember those specific words, but also supplies them with the building blocks to understand new words they encounter. For example, the characters of (eat, drink, sing) all contain the radical , which means they all have something to do with the mouth. This will be done at the beginning of the second trimester when the students learn some basic characters. Questions When to explicitly teach comprehension? Comprehension lies at the heart of reading. Considering its importance and the feasibility to teach reading comprehension to beginning readers, I plan to add this component to my reading instruction. Furthermore, students draw on some combination of word-level skills, vocabulary and conceptual

knowledge, comprehension strategies and text structures as they read. The explicit instruction of reading comprehension from their early school years will help them to learn how to comprehend text effectively. To carry out my plan, I will teach the strategy of activating prior knowledge/predicting when reading aloud to students. I will stop periodically to ask students what will happen at the end of the story. To help students identify and remember the elements of structure in narrative texts, I will put words such as where, why, who, etc. on the fingers of a pair of gloves and seek their answers. A sequencing activity in which they rearrange a scrambled list of pictures of major events will also be adopted. (Shanahan et al., 2010) To help students develop a deeper understanding of what they read, I will ask students to discuss a selection with a partner and then report back to the class. Gradually, I will guide them to participate in short and structured small-group discussions. All the above activities will be performed by the end of the first trimester when students are able to comprehend texts relatively rich in depth of ideas and information.

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What is fluency? Currently, my fluency instruction was biased to achieve only speed and accuracy. Such a practice left the students a wrong impression that the faster or more accurately they can read, the more fluent they are as readers. As a result, both the students and the teacher may overemphasize the importance of speed and accuracy at the price of comprehension, the ultimate purpose of reading. Another consequence of my current practice is that without explicit instruction of timing, smoothness and expressiveness, students will achieve real fluency in a longer span of time, or some of them may never achieve it. Therefore, I am going to implement a series of steps to improve my fluency instruction. First, I will model fluent reading with explicit instruction. At the same time, I will provide negative examples for students to compare and generalize the elements of fluent reading. Inspired by the female teacher in the video, I will make running records and give feedback to my students at the end of their reading rather than interrupting right after the mistakes they make. Phrasing words in meaningful groups with the two forms mentioned by Rasinski and Samuels is another change I am going to make. All the above measures will be carried out when we start to read sentences and throughout the year. How to build a word-rich environment? I am going to enrich the learning opportunities for words in my classroom in my future practice. Such an environment can immerse students in words for both incidental and intentional learning and the development of word awareness (Blachowicz & Fisher, 2011). Although I read aloud to students in Chinese almost on a daily basis, I didnt realize it is a good opportunity for young children to learn word meanings incidentally. In order to maximize students vocabulary learning, I will add some direct teaching and explanation of vocabulary during storybook reading. More examples will be provided to show how these words are used in other contexts and how they can relate to students life experiences (Graves & Watts-Taffe, 2008). A book will also be

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read multiple times with different focuses each time. To help students understand the texts, I often dramatized my voices for different characters or acted out what I read and my approach will be replaced by a more natural and scaffolded reading. Wordplay is another important part of a word-rich classroom I am planning to create. For example, kids can create their own sentences with learnt words and share their creations with the whole class. These sentences dont have to make sense, but must be grammatically correct. For example, my mother can fly, I eat a tiger, etc. Finally, I am going to create a word wall in my classroom. The word wall will be arranged according to the subjects we learn and used as prompts to make sentences. This can be done starting from the second trimester.

MY BELIEFS AND PRACTICES IN READING INSTRUCTION References

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Blachowicz, C. L., & Fisher, P. J. (2011). Best practices in vocabulary instruction revisited. In L. M. Morrow & L. B. Gambrell (Eds.), Best practices in literacy instruction (4th ed., pp. 224-249). New York, NY: Guilford Press. Graves, M. F. & Watts-Taffe, S. (2008). For the love of words: Fostering word consciousness in young readers. The Reading Teacher, 62, 185-193. Shanahan, T., Callison, K., Carriere, C., Duke, N. K., Pearson, P. D., Schatschneider, C., & Torgesen, J. (2010). Improving reading comprehension in kindergarten through 3rd grade: a practice guide. Turner, J., & Paris, S. G. (1995). How literacy tasks inuence children's motivation for
literacy. The Reading Teacher, 48, 662-673.

Worthy, J., & Broaddus, K. (2001). Fluency beyond the primary grades: From group
performance to silent, independent reading. The Reading Teacher, 55, 334-343.