Chapter 2 of Subjects Matter addresses this problem head on; my phonics were good, but I was unable to "actively build and construct meaning from [the] text" (29). It was my comprehension that was keeping me stuck. My mom, being a teacher herself, recognized that I was struggling, and provided the academic support that my teacher should have provided me. After each chapter, my mom would make a list of questions that we would talk about. It was from these "book discussions" that she and I could see where my comprehension was good, and where I misunderstood or was confused.
I had no previous knowledge or understanding of 1930's Alabama; colloquialisms and slang kept me confused in my reading. Had my teacher provided a packet titled "important things to know before diving head first into To Kill a Mockingbird", perhaps my summer going into 8th grade wouldn't be as scarring as I now remember it to be. My teacher needed to "develop, build upon and add to [my] prior knowledge" in order to help me get through a pretty hard novel (or at least to an 8th grader).
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| Struggling Through To Kill a Mockingbird (circa 2008) (word count: 300) |
Hey Sarah! Thank you for your post! I know how you feel about the difficulty reading complicated texts because I got trapped every time I was assigned to read something difficult especially some topic I have no prior knowledge of. I think sometimes teachers should take respond for this situation that we students are in. And what I like the most about this chapter is that it provided us with some ways to help students read more effectively. We can’t just make them read but also give them useful prior knowledge to help better understand the content. (97 words)
ReplyDeleteYour summer going into 8th grade sounds like my summer going into 11th grade! I was taking an AP Lang course that year and we had to read three different books. Two of them I could pretty much capture the idea of the content, but the other one I had no idea. Little did I know, that one book was going to be similar to my experiences reading other assignments in that class. When it came time to take the test, I still had no clue or understanding what was being said in the passages. I felt like I was reading a foreign language. These types of reading assignments can be so frustrating for our students and it us up to us to make it not so much!
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You've brought an important issue here, Sarah, although it may be mostly relevant to ELA and social studies teachers. The authors of Subjects Matter discuss the importance of schemata, but that's not quite the same thing as being unfamiliar with the kinds of regional dialects one encounters in some novels and primary historical documents. When I've had students read texts like this, I've often given them a "glossary" of colloquialisms they may find confusing. For famous novels there are already lots of glossaries out there. But for the kinds of texts one might read in a social studies class, the teacher might need to create a glossary for students. And just let me again say that picture is amazing!
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