Literacy Article

[Nicole Cacciatore]

My first thought after reading the article, "Teaching Disciplinary Literacy to Adolescents: Rethinking Content-Area Literacy," is that the United States has itself a huge problem. I think it is scary that we have 9 year old students that are showing much higher reading skills than 15 years ago and that those same students as adolescents in high school are actually reading worse or not better than a generation ago. Its frustrating that we cannot get ahead altogether. You would think that working hard to advance reading skills at a younger age would of course benefit them in the future, but to find out that it does not have an affect is very discouraging. Considering the students in various other countries read better than American students, I would be curious to know what their standards, approaches, and strategies are. Why are the American students unable to perform at the same standard? What is it that we are doing differently? Do they put more money into education? These are just some of the questions that I was thinking about. What definitely rings true to me is that basic reading skills would not automatically develop complex skills and that reading more sophisticated materials in science, history and math may need to develop specific skills to better understand and comprehend the material. I also realized the importance of this problem being tackled because of the more competitive American job market. The few strategies that were implemented? I'm not sure if they would have much of an effect on the level of reading of adolescents, but a more long term study would be necessary to test that. I definitely agree that there is a need for explicit literacy certification standards for teachers who teach in the disciplines. As a final thought, as a counselor, I feel that it is much deeper issue in education than literacy. I believe in practice, practice, practice and repitition, repitition, repitition. I would consider that the reduction in literacy skills could possibly have a lot to do with the fact that at that age, adolescents become over-consumed with the advancement of technology in their lives and where that part can become so advanced, it could actually hurt those same students in literacy. I think many of these students are lacking in study skills and time actually reading texts. These students are on computers and very well may be distracted or pre-occupied.

[Joycelyn LaRocque]

I agree. English is the hardest language to learn. The US does have a huge problem, and I think that if reading is included in other content areas that might help the students read better, and improve their vocabulary. By the same token the high school kids who can't read never learned to do so in elementary school, and there are nine year olds in elementary school today who can't read. Besides kids today spend so much time text messaging or playing with their gadgets, and so little time with books, it's no wonder that so many of them can't read. The little time spent on reading at school is not enough to teach them how to read.

[Joycelyn LaRocque]

I agree. English is the hardest language to learn. The US does have a huge problem, and I think that if reading is included in other content areas that might help them read better, and improve their vocabulary.

[Carrie Schlechter]

Nicole,
You could be right we could have a huge problem. You raise a lot of important ideas in your post. I'm thinking about your comment of “what are other countries doing” and I wonder how many immigrants enter into those countries each year. Are the statistics the same? On page 43 in the second paragraph it states 65 thousand immigrant workers (not counting the workers children) enter into the US each year (I'm assuming these are legal). This is may not be counting how many illegal immigrants are entering into the US, which we also continue to educate in our school systems. The number of students that have so many literacy skills varies and sometimes I feel the students that have spoken English all their lives have to sometimes suffer the consequences and are behind in the disciplinary literacy because we often still have issues with the basic literacy of students in the same class. I am led to believe because of this language barrier we face daily it will be a battle for our country to get ahead. Now, if the other countries immigration statistics are the same it would be very interesting to see what they are doing to enhance literacy. One more thought, isn’t English the hardest language to learn? We should at least get some extra credit on our achievement scores for that!

[Lisa Ciro]

I agree with you, Nicole. I would love to hear what other countries are doing to improve literacy in their classrooms. I also agree with you that the more practice the students have, the better they will become in any content area. We talk a lot about these problems in my grad classes. In the articles that we read, many people think that students need the practice not only in school, but at home as well. They say that when reading materials are available at home, and when parents read to their children, the children are more likely to read more on their own. I think that this might work in some situations but not all. I'm also wondering, if the level of literacy has decreased from a generation ago, what was working in the past?