Academic Reading

For our CoL inquiry we have been asked to look at academic research and readings to help us understand our inquiry focus in more detail as well as see what other studies and research that have been done that could strengthen our inquiries. I have completed some readings over the last couple of weeks and here are some of my thoughts and takeaways from each of the readings and research. I have also had some amazing conversations with my colleagues around what I should look into and how to strengthen my inquiry and my learners progress. 

1. Words as Tools: Learning Academic Vocabulary as Language Acquisition
Nagy, W., & Townsend, D. (2012)

Words are a mean of communicating and thinking about the content of a specific discipline. "Lack of academic vocabulary knowledge has consistency been identified as an obstacle to student success." This research article provides a set of recommendations to improve the practice in the area of academic language. It is interesting to note that there is a significant difference between the academic language and typical conversations and it is important that students have access and the opportunity to be exposed to academic language. Academic language tends to have longer words due to the prefixes and suffixes of the words. This article outlines the six characteristics of academic language and they are:

•  Latin and Greek vocabulary
• Morphologically complex words
• Nouns, adjectives and prepositions
• Grammatical metaphor, including nominalizations 
• Informational density 
• Abstractness

These six characteristics are not seperate facts rather that are all functionally related. I found a two really interesting quotes from this research. "Just because people who read more can read better doesn't mean that if you read more this will make you read better."
AND
"The correlation between the amount of reading and reading ability does not imply a causal relationship."Both of these lines really resinated with me in the fact that so often in relation to the problem we just say children need to read more and they will get better. This is something that is important with reading of course, however this has also shown me how important exposure to topic specific vocabulary is as well as deliberate acts of teaching that can help the students unpack what they are reading. Just because they can read it does not mean that they can unpack what they are reading and think about all of this abstract ideas with text.

This reading has really shown me that we do need to use words as tools and be able to expose our learners to this specific language and explain what it means in order to help them succeed. This research paper gave some great insight into guiding questions for teachers and the role of the teacher to insure that students have access to academic vocabulary. There are some key parts of this that I will use in my guided reading sessions that I will document as evidence to see that there is a change in my students achievement.  

2. Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade
Shanahan, T., Callison, K., Carriere, C., Duke, N. K., Pearson, P. D., Schatschneider, C., & Torgesen, J.

This article provided a large number of recommendations to help with reading comprehension. The five recommendations were outlined in detail with how each of these areas could be improved.  The five recommendations were as follows:

• Teach students how to use reading comprehension strategies.
• Teach students to identify and use the text's organisational structure to comprehend, learn and remember content.
• Guide students through focused, high-quality discussion on the meaning of text. 
• Select texts purposefully to support comprehension development. 
• Establish an engaging and motivating connect in which to teach reading comprehension.

This article outlined a range of different strategies that could be used in the classroom to extend learners and focus on improving reading comprehension in all areas. There was lots to unpack in this article and I will refer to this throughout my inquiry to see if there are some areas that I could strengthen and improve and add some information from the article into my classroom. 

3. Key into inference
Parkin, C., Pool, B., & Parkin, C. (2010).

This was resource that was highly recommended for my learners and is something that I really want to implement into my reading program. Although this is a program I have been able to read the key parts of what key into inference in and how to use this in the classroom. This has also prompted me to look into further readings that have provided research for this which I will try and get access to and then share what I found from the readings in another post later on. 

4. The Reading Book
Cameron, S., & Dempsey, L. (2019).

This was one of the first books that was recommended to me to check out in relation to reading and what I can do to change the way I look at inferring or how I could focus more on my students who need help with inferring. This book gave a great breakdown of guided reading and how to facilitate independent reading with activities as well as how to have share reading with the class that can lead into some of the key overall topics that we look into each week. From this I was then able to find another book of Sheena Cameron's which was the one I have outlined below. 

5. Teaching Reading Comprehension Strategies: A Practical Classroom Guide
Cameron, S. (2009) 

I have read through Sheena Cameron's teaching reading comprehension strategies and have found some really insightful information. This guide has been really great to see the reading comprehension strategies being broken down into key areas. There is a part to this that focuses just on inferring which is an area of interest for me this year with my CoL inquiry. This section of the book explains what inferencing is as well as gives some great inferencing follow up tasks that I will be able to use in the classroom to support this part of reading. 

As I continue on with my inquiry I know that there will be more academic readings that I will want to look into and come across and will update these readings on my blog as they come. This is just a starting point for what I will use for my intervention and build on some incredible work that has already been done. 

References:

Cameron, S. (2009). Teaching reading comprehension strategies. North Shore: Pearson.

Cameron, S., & Dempsey, L. (2019). The Reading Book.

Nagy, W., & Townsend, D. (2012). Words as tools: Learning academic vocabulary as language acquisition. Reading research quarterly, 47(1), 91-108.

Parkin, C., Pool, B., & Parkin, C. (2010). Key Into Inference: Guide & answers. Triune Initiatives Limited.

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: IES Practice Guide. NCEE 2010-4038. What Works Clearinghouse.