Daniela

=Daniela's Page=

Okay, so using wiki...

I'd like to start out by going over some notes I took over coffee with Cyndi in March this year.

We called this idea an "Inquiry Project" into Reading Practices. I made a note that we were going to integrate strategies, but I don't really remember what we meant by that. We did say that the data would be more important than any grades or grading and that it was more important to use the same strategies and methodology than to use the same assignments (although we did not rule out using the same or overlapping assignments).

Specifically, we want to find out how students read. We toyed with the idea of reading protocols (in the spirit of Flower & Hayes' read-aloud protocols).

Why do they hate reading? This is a pretty central question. Or is it just that they don't like to read for school? What about the Bible, Harry Potter, Fifty Shades of Grey, Ducks Unlimited?

We start with the premise that readers (ourselves included) have different reading "modes," for example a reading for pleasure vs. reading with a purpose, e.g. reading to obtain information, reading to pass a test, etc.

Can we start out with a survey about reading habits, practices, attitudes? --> This is a challenge and we have to phrase questions carefully, because if we ask them a too open-ended question like "how do you read," they might not know what we mean. Coming up with well-worded questions is an important issue.

Could we give them (or have them bring in) pieces on the same topic, but in different genres and media--e.g. a novel, a newspaper article, a magazine, a scholarly article....and then discuss how the topic is presented differently and how so and why/when one might prefer one over the other?

Here's an idea: I've been having students write a Writer's Profile, something that I found online. Could we instead have students write a Reader's Profile of themselves and actually write it in stages--start out with a paragraph and then turn it into a 2-3-page piece that will be a high-stakes essay?

Hi Daniela, This is Angie. It seems to me that this is a pretty good adaption of the Writer's Profile. It seems like we'd need some questions that would guide the writing. I have a set of questions that I use with my students, but they interview one another and then write up the literacy biography of the person whom they interviewed. Maybe we could use something like that set of questions in this activity. I am attaching a document with this list of questions for everyone to use if they would like.

10/16/12 Hi Angie--thanks for your input! Yes, definitely need guidance there, and the original prompt had those but lent itself to a 5-P essay, which we wanted to avoid. We ended up doing something different--the assignment was "What is the connection between you, the reader, and you, the writer?" Students had to, in this essay, get at that connection while/after exploring reading and writing habits and where these habits placed them on the college-playing field as outlined by Irvin [in an essay titled "What Is 'Academic' Writing?"]. This was the "shitty first draft" of that assignment, so the biggest problem was to have students "get" at that connection--for the most part, it remained elusive. We (that is the instructor I collaborated with on this and I) finally realized that we did not have a clear enough idea of this ourselves, so we will revisit for next semester. What I like about the literacy bio is that it makes them listen to others and get that person's story right. Do you make them pick and choose questions, or do they start out with everything and fashion the bio from there?

They do all the questions. However, they do the verbally. Then, they think about what they feel is really important that they learned about the person whom they interviewed and do a write up about this. It does cut down on the amount of writing when they approach it this way. My writers are older though, so their ability to reflect is a little different. (Some of mine are a good bit older... I have grandparents in my classes, for example.) I think it does help when they discuss what was most important with the class before they do the writing. It seems to help when they talk about what they're going to write before they write it.

10/23/12 I agree that advanced aged helps (I guess until the point where it starts to hinder...) when it comes to reflecting. However, I was pleasantly surprised this semester by a few students who are straight out of high school. But overall, this assignment has already achieved something--to get them to gain insights into that reading-writing connection and discover something that they had not known was there.

Later on 10/23/12 Ok, so Cyndi asked about ideas for "focusing and shaping our research over the coming weeks." Since I don't really have an idea about this, I thought I'd start by sorting through (mentally) where I am and what I do have.

**Reading Questionnaires**--I administered these earlier in the semester and have them on file, but I have not done any work with them yet. At the end of the semester, I plan to set aside those from students who have since withdrawn from the class and then "summarize" the ones of students who are still in the class. Since I administered the questionnaires relatively early, they did not include questions 10 & 11 from Cyndi's revised draft of the list. I will administer those separately in one of the upcoming weeks.

**"Reading into Writing" Assignments/Post Tests**--This is such a lovely assignment, and I asked students in both of my sections to each select a passage from //Fast Food Nation//. With one group, I did the assignment in class and made sure they understood what "frame it with an attributive phrase" meant (I use the terms "signal phrase"), and I wrote along with them for about 25-30 minutes. The other group did not have this kind of time, and I sent them home with the assignment sheets. One thing I changed about the assignment was that we would not write a "mini essay," but just one decent-size paragraph instead.

What was most striking about the initial turnout was that so many of them did not follow instructions. I failed to tally those (I guess I should have copied their drafts before I returned them!), but after the first attempt, not one student had followed the directions. This is ironic since we are trying to get them to become stronger readers...the biggest issues were --did not follow instructions for Step 1 (quite a few selected fewer than 3 or more than 5 sentences) --did not follow instructions for Step 2 (did not frame quotation) --did not follow instructions for Step 3 (instead, they summarized the passage or somehow responded to it, but without the kind of details that the directions specified).

The group I wrote with (D4) had the benefit of seeing my write-up when the time was up, and I had the benefit of asking them immediately what they had done instead. That's when it turned out they had mostly summarized. I tried to understand why they had done that since the instructions did not include the word "summarize," and they told me that they thought "explain the meaning of the passage" meant that they would have to summarize it--they basically did not at that point have another solution for this problem. I sent D4 home with the task to revise based on what they had seen me do, and 5 or so returned their revisions. Out of these 5, 2 had begun to do what the assignment asks. I shared those 2 write-ups with the whole class and pointed out what these writers had done that I wanted all of them to do--asking very basic questions of the text (for example, one student noticed that the author of the passage was listing a lot of stuff, and she then started writing about the role of lists and how they helped her when she read a text).

The other group (D5) was largely left alone with the task since I sent them home with the assignment sheets and told them it was the first time that I had ever used the assignment and that the only directions were...to follow the directions. They, too, did an overall pretty horrible job with this :-) The one student in this group who started to follow Step 3 had not followed Step 2 and had not copied down the passage--instead, she had given the page and paragraph numbers. I shared my own write-up with this group, too, after returning the first set of

Judging by the very low turnout, students in both groups are very resistant to this assignment--this is nothing they've ever done before, and many seem willing to risk an eventual zero on the assignment rather than dealing with it. I've kept it very low-stakes (perhaps too much so) since we have to do it on top of working on an essay, and returned the first set to each group with feedback. They are to work with the feedback and then return the passage to me again--I told them we'd have a conversation in writing like this for a while, so that they would have several chances to add depth to their thought before I'd finally grade it. I already told them we would do another one of these in a few weeks.

**Read-Aloud Protocols**. I'm going to be honest here and just tell you that the idea of these freaks me out--mostly because of the logistics and the lack of time--the semester seems to be running away right now! We do not have individual microphones available to student, although we do have a new computer lab whose computers should be equipped with built-in mics. IT told me that students should be able to record to Windows Media Player--the only question is then how they are going to save the files. I need to do a test of this myself to ensure students can do this, and I should be able to test this no later than next week.

Soooo.....going back to Cyndi's original question about focusing and shaping research, I still don't have a good contribution here. Very generally speaking, it seems that we want to collect data--the kind of data that will allow us later to make the observations we want to discuss and present. In terms of reading up on already published research, I am very woefully behind, though I plan to read "How to Read a Scientific Article" and figure out how I can use it in class.

__**Sun, 13 Jan. 2013**__

I pasted below a sort of informal eval of my last semester's students' responses to the first question on our initial Reading Questionnaire Fall 2012: Reader Self-Assessment. 31 Questionnaires returned from 2 sections of ENG 111 (Comp I)


 * 1. What role does reading play in your life?**

--16 students stated explicitly that reading played an important role in their lives. They used phrases like “big role,” “important part,” “huge role,” “major role,” “very important role,” and “dominant role.”

--11 students noted the relevance of reading to their success in college (homework, class work, assignments)

--4 students noted the relevance of reading to the jobs they currently work

--specific non-academic contexts: 1 student said she had “to know how to read to be able to take care of business” and 1 related it to her faith: “I read my Bible & have devotion”

--6 students stated that they read to get information and to keep up with “current events.” They also used phrases like “find out what’s going on in the world,” “what’s happening in the world,” “keeps me in the know.” Several of them used the word “information” or “inform” in the context of news.

--6 students stated that they read for enjoyment: “for pleasure,” “Reading relaxes me,” “read for fun.” One of these responses goes deeper than the others: “reading has always been my own personal escape.”

--2 students expressed a view of reading as a tool for growth that went beyond simple success in college: “reading gives me the opportunity to learn and move forward,” “I …realized it was the root to all success”

--Only 3 students expressed an outright or somewhat negative attitude towards reading: “I only read when I have to,” “I have to read in school, and read signs, also everytime I go to work I have to read the movie titles,” “It only matters when I need to read my assignment instructions or when I have to read books for an assignment.” The repetition of the phrase “have to” is noticeable here, as well as the use of the word “only.” While not all students who expressed a positive attitude towards reading or acknowledged the role of reading in their lives passed the class, it is interesting to note that all three students who viewed reading as a “have to” failed the class.

-- Overall, I was surprised how few students expressed an outright dislike of reading. Clearly, the majority of students who completed the questionnaire see reading as an integral part of their lives, as a tool that enables them to function at work, in school, and in non-academic, non-employment parts of their lives. At the same time, only a relatively small fraction declared reading a pleasurable activity, something that they do for fun or relaxation. On the whole, the students see reading as a utilitarian and practical.