Print Referenced Reading

I just read a collaborative report on print focused read alouds in preschool classrooms. It was really interesting. The study showed that four and five year old children who were read alound to with “print focus” (i.e. engaging the child by referencing specific print intermittently) had increased pre-literacy skills compared to their peers. The implications of this report is that parents and tea…chers alike can utilize this best practice method and have a positive impact on their child’s literacy development. Let’s not forget however, that literacy development, like speech, is more complex than a single prong teaching method. Children benefit from adults modeling good literacy techniques. This is just one more idea for our tool box of strategies to promote the good habits of literacy development.

Book Review: What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, James Paul Gee (2007)

James Paul Gee, a Professor of Reading at the University of Wisconsin-Madison offers an intriguing perspective on how children learn in his book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Gee argues two main points throughout the book: (1) Playing video games supports the acquisition of a variety of literacy and science skills and general cognitive development; (2) The methodology of instruction that videogames provide may be emulated by educators. While I take Gee’s first point with a rather large grain of salt (I have a hard time supporting any time spent playing “Call of Duty” or this year’s equivalent), I find Gee’s second thesis about the successful methodology of videogames well-researched and, in the very least, thought-provoking. Gee points out that both parents and educators concede that kids are willing to work long and hard to gain the skills necessary to play a video game successfully. His book offers a serious analysis of this dynamic methodology that video games offer children for acquiring these skills. Gee is not arguing that video games should replace other forms of standard instruction. His argument pertains to “the potential of video games” (9), and believes that the method of instruction embodied in video games has potential for academic disciplines. Gee’s analysis offers 16 key principles to video games. Below, I summarized the five principles that I found most compelling to the discussion of literacy instruction:

Principle 4. Risk Taking:. Good video games lower the consequences of failure; players can start from the last saved game when they fail. Players are thereby encouraged to take risks, explore, and try new things.

Principle 6 Agency: Thanks to all the preceding principles, players feel a real sense of agency and control. They have a real sense of ownership over what they are doing.

Principle 9 “Just in Time” and “On Demand”: People are quite poor at dealing with lots and lots of words out of context; that’s why textbooks are so inefficient. Games almost always give verbal information either “just in time”—that is, right when players need and can use it—or “on demand”, that is, when the player feels a need for it, wants it, is ready for it, and can make good use of it.

Principle 10 Situated meanings: People are poor at learning what words mean when all they get is a definition that spells out what a word means in terms of yet other words. Research suggests that people only really know what words mean and learn new ones when they can hook them to the sorts of experiences they refer to—that is, to the sorts of actions, images, or dialogues the words relate to (Barsalou 1999; Glenberg 1997). Games always situate the meanings of words in terms of the actions, images, and dialogues they relate to, and show how they vary across different actions, images and dialogues.

Principle 16 Performance before Competence: Good video games operate by a principle just the reverse of most schools: performance before competence (Cazden 1981). Players can perform before they are competent, supported by the design of the game, the “smart tools” the game offers, and often, too, the support of other, more advanced players.  

While I cannot imagine advocating more time spent video gamming (particularly over time spent reading!), I do agree with Gee that as educators we can take a look at the dynamic, if not addicting, ways in which videogames promote the learning of new principles. Imagine the literalness of the marketed term “Hooked on Phonics” if we could utilize these gamming principles in our reading instruction.

Kathleen Holman, M.A., CCC-SLP
Chicago Reading Services

http://www.holmantherapy.com/chicago_reading_services.html

NPR story re: first grade classroom with no books

There was a piece on NPR this morning about how Waldorf schools do not introduce liiteracy instruction yet in first grade. Children are first taught knitting to improve fine motor skills and learn the task of moving left to right. Song, movement, and visualizing stories are also involved, but there are no real books in the classroom. The piece sounded very interesting; clearly contraversial. I did not catch the whole thing because I was between clients, but I am anxious to hear the podcast. Anyone hear this?

Wilson Course

It looks like there is an introductory Wilson Reading System Workshop for grades 2-12 in Chicago this summer (Aug 15-17). The portions of Wilson that we used at RRC were great, and I need more training in this approach. Is anyone interested in going with me?