A exercise in reading...and perseverance

This happens to me every time...every freakin' time. I start a book, I get excited about it, enjoy reading it...then, somewhere in the middle, I get bogged down. It doesn't even matter how good the book is. For some reason, towards the middle of every book that I can remember ever reading, I hit this point where finishing it becomes somewhat of a chore; an exercise in pushing on and forcing myself to finish the book I am reading.

Ok, here's an illustration of what I mean (beyond the obvious one of my being on page 133 of a 229 page book called "Proust and the Squid" by Maryanne Etc...): I've been reading Giant by Pulitzer Prize winning author Edna Ferber (according to the Wiki about her she wrote the original novel for the musical Showboat--music by Jerome Kern, lyrics and book by Oscar Hammerstein II). INCREDIBLE book! So well written, fascinating characters, huge sweeping story; but I got stuck mid way through about a year ago and have yet to finish it. It has gotten so bad in fact that I've started to ask my wife where that book I've been reading is "you know, that one by that female author that you should read next...Big!", I ponder. "You mean Giant?" she asks with just the right amount of sarcasm. "Yeah, Giant; do you know where it is?" "So you lost it?" "No, I just don't know where it is.." This usually continues for a bit before I either find it or...ahh who am I kidding, I lost it; maybe it will turn up sometime within this next year. Besides, you get my point. Sometimes it takes an amazing amount of perseverance for me to finish a book. Fortunately, I have an outside influence (this class) to provide added perseverance in helping me finish "Proust..." so...I press forward.

Chapter five (of nine) introduces some interesting terms and information as well as continues to pound home ideas about the brain.
First the terms, there are five of them of interest and they can be found on page 113 (in case anyone wants to happily follow along). These terms are used to describe the various steps a child needs to take towards becoming a "fluent comprehending reader" (more on that later on) and are all important developmental stages, or developments.
-Phonological development: "how a child gradually learns to hear, segment and understand the small units of sounds that make up words". According to Ms. Wolf, this is critical.
-Orthographic development: "how a child learns that his or her writing system represents oral language". Talk about an aha moment!
-Semantic and Pragmatic development: "how children learn more and more about the meanings of words from the language and culture around them". Sounds like Gee theory to me...
-Syntactic development: "how children learn the grammatical forms and structures of sentences" essentially learning sentence structure like I went to the store as opposed to I to the store went.
and...
-Morphological development: "prepares the child to learn the conventions of surrounding how words are formed from smaller, meaningful roots and units of meaning" Ms. Wolf's example is the word unpacked; it is one word with three parts: un-pack-ed. Once kids learn how to recognize these smaller 'morphemes', their reading comprehension accelerates.


So, why are those terms important? Apparently, those are all different steps that we all who are "expert readers" progressed through to mastered the art of reading. They are also places a person who is teaching another to read can focus on teaching that skill. Ms. Wolf is particularly interested in teachers helping students develop Morphological awareness. She contends that it is an important tool that helps kids learn to read very efficiently and shares a story about a child who was tutored in and intensive reading program her and her colleagues ran and how that child went from reading several levels below his grade level to reading above his grade level in a few short months. It is a touching story, but I don't really have time to go into it just now...

Anyways...Ms. Wolf continues to categorize children (and I would assume anyone who is learning to read for the first time)in the following ways:

1. Emerging reader
2. Novice reader
3. Decoding
4. Fluent comprehending
5. Expert

An Emerging reader is what was described in chapter 4 (and in my previous blog) that is when kids are exposed to reading by a loved one and it a warm and precious experience.

A Novice reader is where some really cool things happen and decoding of simple sentences begins. Kids discover that words like cat (her example) consists of three sounds: /k/ + /a/ + /t/. They learn things like 'ch' makes a totally different sound than a /c/ and /h/ do individually and all the other crazy idiosyncrasies of the English language that make it both beautiful and a pain in the ass to learn (I do believe that pain in the ass was one of her technical terms). Kids learn that often times words can have one, two, three or even more separate meanings depending on context. Her example was the word 'Bug'; it is an insect, can spy on someone, is an automobile, is a computer glitch...are there any others? Oh yes, can be a pain in the a-- (ok...hopefully that is the time I use that joke...). Kids begin to learn new words based on the content of a story. Etc...Essentially, all the stuff that we think about when we imagine a kid learning to read. Slow sentences, sounding out words, gradual comprehension. Ms. Wolf says that the key to getting to the next phase is TONS of practice and that some kids get quite stuck in this phase...necessitating intensive reading intervention.

A Decoding reader is beginning to become much more fluent. In this stage people (notice I didn't say kids?...AhHa...) start to read in chunks. Like: Be-head-ed. And recognize the differences in words like bear and dear. They also start to master suffixes like Sing, sing-er, sing-ing etc...

Fluent readers have mastered all of the above and one essential new tool: "comprehension monitoring", which is...just what it sounds, a reader monitors her/his own comprehension to make sure that she/he really understands or is just glossing her/his eyes over the words for the last ten pages or so...that's happened to me...I don't mind it when I'm reading, but don't really like it when I'm driving...but that's probably a topic for another blog at an entirely different time.

Ms. Wolf really didn't get into Expert reading. I assume that will be next chapter. She did include a few interesting/fun things though that I will include below:

1. A neat way to help kids learn Phonologically (which she contends is an uber-important step in learning to read well) is by doing those clapping hands for each syllable of a word games. Like SAM (one clap for one syllable) or volks-wag-en (three claps for three syllables). I remember doing those when I was a kid and always had fun with them; my wife and I are doing the same thing for our five year old and he gets a kick out of it too. C'mon good reader!!

2. A poem about the pain in the ass-ness (oooh, there's that joke again) of the english language:

I take it you already know
Of touch and bough and cough an dough?
Others may stumble, but not you
On hiccough, thorough, slough, and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?

Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead; it's said like bed, not bead;
For goodness sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat,
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother.
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.

And here is not a match for there,
And dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there's dose and rose and lose-
Just look them up - and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword.
And do and go, then thwart and cart.
Come, come, I've hardly made a start.

A dreadful language? Why, man alive,
I'd learned to talk it when I was five.
And yet to read it, the more I tried,
I hadn't learned it at fifty-five.


Good night.