Promoting Literacy
for
Roma Children
and
Young People
Critical Thinking International, Inc.,
For
RWCT—Bulgaria
Next Page Foundation
Zagreb, Croatia. July 30-31, 2005
This material may be duplicated for training purposes in Central Europe, but it may not be reproduced for commercial publication.
© Copyright Critical Thinking International, Inc., 2005.
Cover photo: School in Bucharest, Romania. December, 1998.
Promoting Literacy
for
Roma Children
and
Young People
Table of Contents
Introduction
What Difference Does Literacy Make?
Literacy makes a difference in the way people think
Literacy affects people’s opportunities in life, too
Literacy builds vocabulary, and vocabulary controls what you can think about
What is reading ability, and how does it develop?
Emergent Literacy
Assessing Concepts about Print
Beginning Reading
Building Fluency
Reading to Learn and For Pleasure
Mature Reading
Why do educators put emphasis on younger readers?
What factors limit readers’ success in literacy?
Home Language
Lack of Exposure to Books and the Practice of Literacy
Lack of Family Support for Education.
Literacy builds vocabulary, and vocabulary controls what you can think about
Teaching Young People to Read
Providing an Orientation to Literacy
The Read-Aloud Experience
The Language Experience Approach
Creating Language Awareness
Teaching Students to Read for Meaning
Activities for the Anticipation Phase
Focusing questions
Think/Pair/Share
Anticipation Guide
Paired Brainstorming
Terms in Advance
Reading Aloud
Showing Items of Interest
Activities for the Phase of Building Knowledge
Talking Through a Text
Questioning the Author
The Directed Reading-Thinking Activity
Dual Entry Diary
Bringing Stories to Life Through Drama
Activities for the Consolidation Phase
Save the Last Word for Me
Literature Circles
Sketch to Stretch
Shared Inquiry Discussion
The Discussion Web
Debates
Value Line
Techniques that Highlight Aspects of the Comprehension of Fiction
Story Maps
Character Clusters
Character Maps
Following Dramatic Roles
Reading for Structured Opposites
The Story Chart
Readers Theater
Creative Dialogue
Helping Struggling Readers
Promoting Literacy through Public Performance
Choral Reading and Reciting
Poetry Slams
Inviting Students to Write Poetry
Teaching the Process of Composing
The Writing Process
Writing Culturally Relevant Books for Young People
Guidelines
Pattern Books
Metaphors
“Slices of Life”
Situations
Building Partnerships With Publishers
Types of Reading Materials for Young People
Types of Publishing Arrangements
Standard commercial marketing
Subsidized publishing
Funded Publishing
“Community Capital” Projects
Pedagogy of Racial Minorities
The Development of Racial Identity
White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
References
Introduction
The task of promoting literacy is a noble one. Literacy opens to those who have it the accumulated wisdom of people from all times and places. Literacy brings its users to new levels of consciousness, and presents them new possibilities for being actors in the world. Literacy invites its users into the global conversation.
Promoting literacy among young people is a task that can be pursued on many fronts. In this book we argue that in order to promote literacy, one needs certain background information. One should understand and know the advantages of being literate, and also the nature of reading, and how a student learns to read.
Promoting literacy among people who have been oppressed because of their cultural identity requires understanding something else: the nature of identity development among oppressed young people; and the nature of racism.
One also needs certain strategies and techniques. These include lively techniques for teaching reading, and most especially of teaching students to read with understanding and with a critical eye; ways of writing books for young people, especially books that highlight cultural content; strategies for building partnerships between writer, publishers, teachers, and community activists; and methods for making literacy visible and attractive in the community.
What Difference Does Literacy Make?
Advertising campaigns show us images of the embarrassed grown-up, standing on a city street with a decoy newspaper under his arm that he can’t read, staring at a street sign he can’t decipher, afraid someone will recognize him for an illiterate. Such people exist, but the problem of limited literacy is far more widespread and more subtle than the stereotype suggests. Rather than the totally illiterate people of the stereotype, in many countries far more people read and write, but read and write so poorly that they seriously limit their opportunities. Literacy affects people’s lives several ways.
- Literacy makes a difference in the way people think. Studies by A. R. Luria, in the 1930’s (Luria, 1976) showed that being literate makes profound differences in people’s reasoning, their awareness of language, their awareness of themselves, and even their ability to formulate questions and learn about things they don’t know. The Brazilian educator Paolo Freire (1968) found much the same thing: people who were not literate practiced “magical consciousness” and rather fatalistic thing—they didn’t see themselves as agents as their own lives, capable of acting for their own destinies. Studies with readers show that those who read and talk about books with others show greater self-awareness and critical thinking (Almasi, 1995); tend to engage ideas more deeply (Eeds and Wells, 1989; Goatley, et. al., 1995); and are more likely to perceive themes in what they read: that is, they are more likely to “get the message” (Lehr, 1995).
- Literacy affects people’s opportunities in life, too. Large scale studies in the United States have shown that, on average, the better adults read, the more likely they are to be employed, to hold a professional job, have good health, stay off public assistance and out of jail. They better they read, the more money they make. All of this goes the other way, too. Those who are in menial jobs, unemployed, on public assistance, or in the penal system are disproportionately drawn from people with low reading skills[1]. The figures on the next page were taken from the National Adult Literacy Survey in the United States, (Washington: National Center for Education Statistics, 1992), in which more than 20,000 adults over the age of 16 were given extensive literacy tests and assigned to five levels of reading ability, “1” being the lowest, on three kinds of tasks: reading prose, interpreting documents, and making sense of materials that required some quantitative reasoning. The respondents’ reading ability was compared with demographic factors about them, such as their income level, type of employment, and whether or not they received public assistance or were incarcerated.
- Literacy builds vocabulary, and vocabulary controls what you can think about. One way low literacy limits people’s opportunities is by limiting their language. Limited language limits what a person can notice and think about. Studies have shown that in the English language, the language that is used in print is far richer than the language used in everyday speech or on television. Even the vocabulary in books written for readers is more sophisticated than the table talk of college-educated adults. Moreover, print has many words that never occurred in speech, in several large scale studies (Stanovich, 1992). Words like “isolated,” “probability,” “prohibit,” and “null and void” are found in print, but almost never used in oral language. Each of these words casts light on a slice of experience that we could not easily grasp without having the word. Not knowing what an “isolated case” is can lead a person into superstition. Not understanding “probability” keeps people spending their grocery money on the lottery. Not having the word “prohibit” can land people in jail; and not knowing what “null and void” means can leave a family without a lease on an apartment, without a place to live[2].
What is reading ability, and how does it develop?
What goes into teaching a person to read? At its simplest, reading is the act of getting meaning from a written text. In order to read successfully, readers must be able to collect or construct meaning from written symbols.
Readers recognize squiggles of ink on a page as letters and words. This activity is called word recognition.
To become skilled at word recognition, readers need to be aware of the smallest sounds in language, called phonemes. In turn, phonemic awareness, as this aptitude is called,prepares readers to look for matches between sounds and letters. Learning letter-to-sound correspondences is the study of phonics.
Readers work with the words they recognize, and somewhere in the interplay between what they see on the page and what they expect from what is in their heads they construct an understanding of what they read—comprehension.
Comprehension in turn is made up of several processes and kinds of knowledge, including knowledge of vocabulary, world knowledge, the ability to make inferences and construct meaning, and the ability to follow text structure.
Readers eventually come to recognize words quickly and accurately, while constructing an understanding of what they are reading. Rapid and efficient reading is known as reading fluency.
Also, it is hoped that as they have learned to read they have made books a part of their lives and found authors they especially enjoy. This is the habit of reading.
Eventually, they may learn to hone their minds by weighing an author’s words, reflecting on arguments, and coming up with their own interpretations of what they have read. This is called interpretation, or critical reading.
Here is an illustration of these components in action. Suppose a third grader is asked to read this passage:
“Come quick,” whispered Mother, from across the street. “The guard is looking the other way.”
Rebecca clutched her doll close to her chest, crouched low, and scrambled across the empty street toward the lamppost that hid her mother. Just then a search light from atop a darkened building swept the street she had just crossed.
“Gestapo,” said her mother, hugging the panting child. “They’re everywhere.” Rebecca squeezed the Star of David around her neck and trembled.
A number of things have to happen for this passage to be read successfully.
Word Recognition. Of course a reader will have to recognize most of the words for the meaning of the passage to be easily available to her. If she is reading the passage on her own, she should find no more than four words in this passage she did not recognize (That is, she should easily recognize 95% of the words). If she is reading the passage with the support of a teacher, she would be expected to find no more than eight unknown words (a 90% recognition rate), according to many reading specialists (e.g., Gillet & Temple, 2003). As will be seen, understanding a passage is much more than the sum of understanding the words. Nonetheless, if the child has to pause and puzzle over the meanings of more than a few words in a passage, her comprehension will be impaired.
How is this word recognition done? By the time she has reached third grade, a child will have stored thousands of words in memory so that she can recognize them instantly. Reading specialists call this store of instantly recognized words her sight vocabulary. This reader has been accumulating these words since she was in kindergarten, and as she progresses through the grades, she will be learning more new words--thousands more new words--every year.
How is she going about learning new words? In several ways. For example, this child failed to recognize clutched on a first exposure, so her teacher reminded her to break it into parts: cl + utch + ed. As a third grader, this reader is highly skilled at phonemic segmentation. She has no difficulty breaking the words in her speech into separate sounds, and she is ready to find matches between letters on the page and speech sounds. But also because she is a third grader, her knowledge of phonics is not just a matter of matches between individual letters and sounds, but of matches at the level of patterns of letters combining vowels and consonants. Therefore, she was able to find the pattern –utch, which she could pronounce by relating it to a word she knows--Dutch. She knew the cl- consonant blend from many words she can read: clap, click, clock, cloud, etc. She also knew the past tense ending -ed from her past reading and study of words. Once she had worked out the pronunciation of this unfamiliar word, clutched, she will recognize it as a word that she has heard and used in speech but not read before. At third grade, she is using phonics; but her word knowledge includes not just letter-to-sound relationships but knowledge of larger spelling patterns, and even of grammar as a factor in word structure.
The word Gestapo, on the other hand, presents a different problem. Here she not only has to work out the pronunciation of this unfamiliar word, but once she is able to pronounce the word, or an approximation of it, she still will not be able to associate the written word with a word she uses in speech. Thus she will have to use other strategies--in this case, context clues--to decide what the word means. The sentence in which the word appears is
“Gestapo... They’re everywhere.”
She knows that Gestapo is referred to by “they,” meaning that the Gestapo are most likely people. From the context of the passage, she knows to equate the Gestapo with the guards who were scanning the street with their searchlights. Because this reader had surmised that the girl in the passage with the Star of David was Jewish, she reasoned that Gestapo were guards or police who hunted Jews at some time in history. Perhaps they were German soldiers or police, and the setting was the time around World War II. In this second example this reader has learned not only to pronounce a previously unfamiliar word, she has derived an approximation of its meaning. Form the context of the passage, she has learned a new item of vocabulary.
It has been shown in this example that recognizing words is a complex business involving several strategies. And the example features a third grader who is a reasonably successful reader. When younger readers are just beginning to recognize words, still more strategies enter the picture.
Comprehension. Understanding a text is more than the sum of understanding the words. Now consider the processes by which a reader does come to understand the text. Please look again at the passage we shared at the outset. How would a reader go about understanding it?
First, she would be helped by her knowledge of vocabulary (Pressley, 2000). She uses her knowledge of words like guard, searchlight, and Star of David to help her construct the meaning of the text. And, as was just seen, she reasoned that the word Gestapo provides a new name for a concept she already had: the Nazi police. Knowing vocabulary provides the reader with building blocks to help her construct her understanding of the passage. But items of vocabulary are not enough by themselves. Although vocabulary is necessary to understanding the text, the reader must also create a context in which choices among competing meanings of words can be made. Without a context to give these words meaning it is not known if a chest refers to a box or a rib cage, if scrambling is a way of preparing eggs or of moving our bodies, if post refers to mail or a pole, or if sweeping is an act of cleaning or a kind of motion across a surface. Here, then, is something of a paradox: although our knowing the vocabulary helps us construct a meaning for the text, the meaning that is constructed for the text also helps us understand the words.
Second, the reader has background knowledge or cognitive schemes that help her understand the passage. Words like “whispered,” “guard,” and “search light” are more than vocabulary items. Together they help our young reader evoke mental frameworks for understanding that the situation described in the passages is one of danger, of stealth to avoid detection. It is important that she was able to supply this framework herself, because the situation of stealth to avoid detection was not stated explicitly by the text. From the mention of Star of David, our reader also supposed, without being told explicitly, that the passage has to do with the flight of Jews from persecution by the Nazis during World War II--something she knew about because she had read about it in other books.
Third, she makes inferences about what is going on in the text. Although the text never said Ana was a young girl, our reader noticed the detail of the Ana’s clutching her doll and her depending on her mother for guidance, and inferred that she was young. And although the text left a gap between Ana’s scrambling across the dangerous street and being hugged by her mother, our reader was able to infer that she made it safely across the street into her waiting mother’s arms.