Getting Children In2Books: Engagement in Authentic Reading, Writing, and Thinking

Abstract

Getting children excited about--in2--reading and writing is the first step in developing high-level literacy. An innovative program based on this premise is producing excellent results with urban elementary students who had struggled with language arts. The authors suggest this program shows that there are better approaches than focusing merely on phonemic awareness, phonics, and word recognition. ********** LITERACY reigns in U.S. elementary schools. Because of recent federal and state policies, more instructional emphasis than ever before has been placed on reading and writing. Such a development should bode well for raising the reading comprehension, vocabulary knowledge, and critical-thinking skills of children in the U.S., which, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), have been basically static for the past 30 years. Moreover, according to such international assessments as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), these are areas in which U.S. children lag behind children in a number of other developed nations. (1) However, there are signs that the current emphasis may be doing the very thing recent federal legislation was designed to avoid: leaving U.S. students, especially children from our poorest neighborhoods, even further behind in what really counts when it comes to literacy--comprehension and critical thinking. How could this possibly happen? Because K-3 reading instruction in many schools has focused so heavily on phonemic awareness, phonics, and word recognition that comprehension, vocabulary, and writing have been given short shrift. Because so much emphasis has been placed on K-3 reading that literacy instruction at higher grade levels has not been given the attention that it requires. Because the results on standardized reading tests have served as the sole criterion of literacy progress and consequently elementary school literacy programs have become mechanized and test-driven rather than content- and meaning-driven. Because instruction focused on reading skills has ended up reducing the teaching of science and social studies in the elementary schools to a minimum and in some cases has even crowded these subjects out of the school day altogether. (2) Ironically, developments such as these have occurred largely in response to state and federal mandates intended to raise the quality and level of literacy instruction. We applaud the idea of giving literacy the primary emphasis in the instructional day in U.S. elementary schools. But we also have observed that, unless fundamental principles of good literacy curriculum and instruction are kept firmly at the forefront of daily teaching in all subjects, the new emphasis may have little effect at best and at worst may negatively affect student literacy. If children are to excel in reading, writing, and critical thinking, they need to learn how to read different types of texts deeply and critically and how to write different types of texts in ways that clearly and powerfully communicate ideas. If the children who are not faring well in literacy learning in our schools are to succeed, they need teaching that both accelerates their learning and goes beyond what are commonly regarded as the basics of literacy. Instruction must promote children's engagement with text while also developing their skill at understanding and creating texts for a variety of purposes and across a range of subjects. For the past few years we have worked in urban public elementary schools to implement literacy instruction that emphasizes higher-level reading, writing, and thinking while also maintaining instructional focus on the skills of decoding, word recognition, and fluency. Our aim has been to help students learn what they really need to learn in order to become engaged and accomplished readers and writers--literate beings capable of interpreting text; developing connections between themselves and texts; critically analyzing, evaluating, and synthesizing; critiquing the usefulness of information in a text; writing on a variety of topics and for many different audiences; revising and editing ideas and forms of expression; and carrying out other higher-level processing that is involved in reading and writing. …