Ideas for IRW Unit Plan

Ponder all the ideas, activites, readings, blogs and discussions that we've had so far this semester. What ideas and elements might you want to incorporate into your IRW unit plan? What types of readings assignments (e.g. MLK's I have a dream, fiction, non-fiction, pop culture)  and/or themes (e.g. education, social justice, environment) might you want to incorporate into your unit plan?  


Possible Themes: Since McCormick discusses the important of matching, to a certain degree, the reader's repetoire with the text's repetoire, I would base the unit around a theme that has relevance to the students' lives and which is current. I have two possible ideas. One is about the state budget cuts and the importance of student political participation. We can read about Proposition 30, the decision by the CSU trustees to raise CSU tuition if Prop 30 doesn't pass, and student activism in general. Students would read actual initiative text, but also articles about the crisis and the impact on students. As an activity, students can write letters to the editor and/or letters to CSU trustees and state elected officials about how they feel about the budget cuts and the impact on them.

A second idea is to focus on family immigration, particularly immigration from Asia. Where I teach (De Anza and Ohlone) there are a high number of Asian American students, as well as international students from Asia. Immigration to the U.S. is a topic that is relevant to those students, even ones who are not Asian. The issues we can explore are struggle, sacrifice, loss, adjusting to a new country, culture shock and making a new life in America. In terms of readings, there are books and short stories about 1st and 2nd generation Asian Americans and their lives in Asia and the subsequent move to the U.S.. The writings can be reflective about their own journeys and their parents/grandparents journeys (through oral history interviews), connecting the readings with their own experiences. My hope is that students will come away with an appreciation of the commonality that is shared by many who come to the U.S. for a better life.
I found the readings and discussions we had in class quite instructive and influential in my process of developing an Integrated Reading and Writing unit. Here are some elements I would like to incorporate:

1) A diagnostic/self-reflection at the beginning of the unit
2) Use of K-W-L+ as a tool to get students thinking about and writing about their readings as a way to activate their schemas and to interact with the texts.
3) Allow for drafts and re-drafts of papers and for peer and self editing to allow students to learn to edit and proofread their own work and the work of others.
4) Writing tasks like sentence combining as well as reflective writing such as journaling.
5) Have community-building activities to have students learn to work collaboratively but also to develop their investment in the course. One community-building activity that I found to work is an ice breaker called "creation chant" where the students stand in a circle and say a word or phrase that has cultural meaning to them and their family. They go on to explain its importance. This is video taped and shared with the class on a class website or facebook page. Another idea is to have students create a project that is a spoken word poem, graphic novel (short) or short film. The piece relates to cultural experiences and the readings and is shared with the rest of the class (or performed) as a community-building activity.
6) I would make the final project of the course a writing portfolio, so the writing assignment due at the end of the unit created would be a part of the portfolio.
7) Scaffolding would be an essential way to build skills of integrated reading and writing through the unit and the course overall.
8) Readings: Choose readings that are relevant to students and activate their schema (general and literary repetoire). Would utilize many types of media, not just print (magazine/newspaper/non-fiction/memoirs) so the students can relate to the media. Different media can include videos (youtube), blogs (or have their own blogs), facebook/twitter.

McCormick's Three Reading Approaches

McCormick states there are three reading approaches/theories today:

1) Cognitive, or objective: this is an information-processing model which posits that readers actively draw on their prior knowledge in processing texts. Therefore, it is important to teach quantifiable skills to students that they can draw upon when they read, such as phonics.
Schema theory developed from the cognitive theory, and reflects the prior knowledge that reader's bring to the reading process. The background knowledge influences how readings are thus interpreted. Instructors can introduce schema to their students prior to giving them a reading, so that the students will have the prior knowledge necessary to understand the text. Schema can and is a product of one's socio-cultural background, but that schema is there to provide an objective, "correct" reading and understand of a particular text.

2) Expressivist model: this model focuses on the reader's life experiences in influencing the reading and comprehension process. This is a subjective view of reading, that readers create their own personal or subjective meanings from the texts they read. Cultural context, such as in cognitive theory, is important, but expressivism encourages students to develop their own individual and authentic responses to texts. In this way, there is no "one" correct, objective interpretation, as in the cognitive theory. We should not force students to have to learn phonics and other rules, but should realize that reading is a continual, active process that bears "an organic connection" to the rest of the reader's life. McCormick finds this approach too "wishy-washy" in that there is no concrete way of evaluating whether the reader understands, since the interpretation of the reading is left up to the reader.

3) Socio-cultural: this model focuses on the cultural context in which reading occurs. The reader becomes an active, critical reader of a text, and has to be able to place the reading within social contact and writing practices of a culture, "to be able to analyse those conditions and practices, and to possess the critical and political awareness to take action within and against them". The focus then becomes being able to "read the world" and reading about their own culture, so that they can understand the social, cultural, political, and historical contexts and to be able to critically question their reading. This view sees reading as a revolutionary process whereby students can transform their lives and society's based on their interactions with the reading, especially in terms of railing against injustices in the world.

Questions: Which of the models is considered best practice today? I've seen people at my campus utilize the three models in an integrated way, or depending on the instructor, give one model emphasis over the others. I wonder if there is a way to incorporate all three into a curriculum or even an assignment, it seems like that is a possibility. I'm looking forward to playing with practical applications of these theories.

About blogging....

As a writer, a good blog post for me is one that is clear, has supporting evidence, and thoroughly answers the questions asked. It is useful for me to have clear guidelines and questions that help frame potential responses. It's is also helpful to have a resource to respond to that is thought-provoking and interesting.

As a reader, I like to read blog posts that are straightforward, clear in their writing, and fun/interesting to read. I don't particularly like to read blog posts (or anything for that matter) in overly academic language (yes, I know we are in the education field) because I feel the ideas and what is being expressed is more important than the form. I think relatability is also important so that one finds the blog posting relevant and interesting to them.

In terms of comments, I find constructive feedback on my blogs helpful. Where another student can shed new light on an idea I've written, or agrees/disagrees with what I've said, I've found those types of posts to be most useful. I like to provide posts agreeing/disagreeing with others' posts and giving some explanation for my point of view. I do have to say that I tend to post on posts that I agree with more than those I disagree with.

I think it would be overly-onerous to be required to read every students' blog in the class on a weekly basis. I think it would be easier, and we would perhaps get better, more thoughtful responses, if we were to follow a few students throughout the term or had to comment on a few a week of our choosing.

I think in terms of evaluating and grading blogs that we should consider the blogs holistically. Some key questions to consider: Did the blogger/student complete the assignment? Did the student answer thoughtfully? Did the student express his/her ideas?

I don't think it's fair to grade students based on, say length and whether the student wrote in academic language. These are blog posts and the language and style that are commonly used are less formal than that found in academic texts. I think students should be graded on the quality of the ideas expressed, not necessarily on the formality of their writing style or prose.

Ideas on Developing an Integrated Reading and Writing Course

Some overarching ideas for an Integrated Reading and Writing course:

1) Choose articles and books that will activate students' schemas and utilize active reading: have students make inferences both before, during and after reading, and allow opportunities for reflection of reading and the process. The readings will probably have some theme the students can relate to, whether as college students, or perhaps have a cultural focus depending on student demographics of the campus (e.g. Asian Pacific Islander).

2) Course would probably be a Learning in Communities course, perhaps co-taught with another instructor. The additional time would allow us to develop, over the course of one or two terms, the skills and competency we'd like the students to gain and master.

3) A truly integrated course where students will think as readers while they write and read from the perspective of good what good writing entails.

4) Course would likely utilize the K-W-L+ for both reading and writing as a way to reflect and engage with the texts and composition of essays.

5) Writing activities can include freewriting, developing rough drafts, making revisions, practicing sentence combining and producing essays. Reading activities will promote improving reading rate and comprehension, developing recall and interpretation skills, employing efficient study techniques and experiencing the reading-writing relationship across all disciplines (Goen-Salter).

6) A diagnostic or self-assessment at the beginning of the term can be given to allow students to share their own experiences with language and as a way to see their writing and communicative skills.

7) The course would build on skills progressing through the term, so that by the end of the term, students would produce a persuasive paper that had elements of research in it. Student would submit a portfolio of their essays and write a reflective essay detailing their improvement over the term and areas they still need to work on.

8) Other ideas: course can utilize videos (spoken word) that students can analyze. Course can also utilize peer feedback of essay drafts and collaborative work to develop a sense of community and engagement.

Sugie Goen's articles on Integrated Reading and Writing and Eliminating Remediation

"Integrating Reading and Writing: A Response to the Basic Writing 'Crisis'"

• Nearly half of the 440,000 entering freshmen, nearly half are at the basic skills level in reading and writing. 
• The CSU Board of Trustees mandated in 1997 that remedial instruction would be limited to one year with the penalty of disenrollment from the university for students to complete this requirement during the first year.
• The integrated reading and writing program combines reading and writing in a remedial set of courses in the first semester (3 units writing, 1 unit reading) and then the second semester is an integrated course of English 114, the freshman level composition course.
• There were six principles which guided the creation of the courses and their curriculum:
• Integration: the idea that good writers are good readers and the need for faculty who can teach literature, composition, and/or reading.
• Time: learning and improvement in reading and writing develop gradually, so adequate class time is necessary for this to occur.
• Development: a year is necessary for students to learning basic reading and writing strategies
• There are five objectives that this curriculum hopes to achieve: 1) understand the ways that readers and writers write in and beyond the university; 2) to develop a metacognitive understanding of the processes of reading and writing, 3) to understand the rhetorical properties of reading and writing, including purpose, audience and stance, 4) to understand and engage in reading and writing as a way to make sense of the world, to experience literacy as problem solving, reasoning and reflecting, and 5) to develop enjoyment, satisfaction and confidence in reading and writing.
• The initial cohort of students in this curriculum was assessed in Fall 2001 and the authors measured end of year grade comparisons, reading outcomes, writing portfolios, student self-assessments and second-year passage rates in composition courses. 
• The outcomes were overall positive in all categories, demonstrating that integrating reading and writing is effective.
• The students became competent readers and writers and wrote with their audience in mind. 
• Other colleges and universities should consider using this approach for their remedial students. 

Questions: I'd like to learn more about K-W-L+. Also, I'd like to get more nuts and bolts on the actual curriculum used in these remedial classes to consider in forming my own curriculum.

"Critiquing the Need to Eliminate Remediation"

• The author's research led her to find a close link between the development of reading and writing skills, and thus the need to teach the subjects in an integrated way.
• The course designed was intended to "invit(e) students to look at a text they read for clues to its production, and a text they produce for clues to how it might be received".
• The curriculum does this by building in self-reflective activities such as the "difficulty paper". 
• The assessment of the pilot was overall positive: higher retention rates, higher remediation pass rates, portfolios of work throughout semester and in second-year composition which showed improvement and importance of integrating reading and writing.
• Integrated reading and writing offers a solution to the dilemma of CSU to provide accessible and high-quality education but acknowledging the lack of skills many students bring with them from high school to college and developing them into competent readers and writers of English within the first year of university studies.
• Programmatically and historically, the first year of college is the place for remediation to take place, instead of blaming high schools and arguing for the need of elimination of remedial courses. 
• Because of this need, community colleges are the proper choice for teaching basic skills, but only 3 CSU campuses have master's degree programs that teach students how to teach basic skill learners. 
•  Question: Again, I'd like to know more about KWL+ and how to design an assignment around that structure. I'm wondering how many community colleges and UC/CSU campuses today offer IRW courses for their basic skills students? 

Remediation and Basic Writing

What skills does a student need to be "ready for college-level work"?  How should colleges deal with students who are not ready for college level work?  Should such students be excluded from college?  Should they be sent to community college first?  Should they be given a time limit for "getting up to speed"?  Should they be allowed to take other courses while they're making up "deficiencies" in reading/writing? 

Skills a student needs to be ready for college-level work includes the ability to read academic text with basic fluency, to be able to communicate effectively both orally and in writing, and basic "studenthood" skills, including how to navigate the college system, how to get help if needed, knowledge of resources both inside and outside the classroom.

It's not necessarily the fault of students or even their high schools that they are under-prepared for college-level work. Faced with this reality, colleges and universities need to and have responded by offering basic skills courses. There's been a trend at community colleges to accelerate basic skills students through these remedial courses so that they can get to college-level courses as quickly as possible. This may mean some students have to stay at the community colleges for 3-4 years before transferring. 

I believe that the goal and mission of community colleges is to serve their community of adult learners, regardless of their skills when they arrive at the college level. The issue really stems from a lack of funding at the K-12 levels; we've become so focused on making sure students pass standardized tests without truly ensuring they graduate into college with the skills necessary to be critical thinkers and writers. As long as the budget situation remains unstable and funding decreases to public education, colleges and universities will continue to be faced with a need to continue offering basic skills courses. 

At the colleges I teach, students can take courses across the disciplines and there are few prerequisites required, such as completing English 1A before a student can take Political Science 1, a course I teach. As a result, I end up teaching some skills in the course. I don't mind doing that at all, but I know other faculty are frustrated and annoyed by students they feel "don't know how to write". I don't think we should hold students back from taking general education courses while they are trying to get up to speed with their skills because they would miss out on opportunities to explore major and career fields while developing the studenthood skills I mentioned above.

I do recognize that this situation of remediation is an issue, but faced with this reality, we need to continue to support students and serve our communities in any way possible, including remedial course offerings.

Summary of "Mechanical Correctness as a Focus in Composition Instruction"

• Article examines and the cultural and pedagogical forces through history that explain the obsession among composition instructors with mechanical correctness
• In the early 1800's, there was an American Renaissance during which there rose a "secular literary-intellectual culture in America", and this period also saw an increase in focus on grammatical correctness in schools.
• Linguistic anxiety and social pressures to be grammatically correct then began to appear as common usage errors and peculiarities of speech were pointed out and corrected.
• Colleges and freshman composition courses began to focus on error-free writing as good writing and teaching to the avoidance of error as opposed to "teaching genuine communicative competence".
• This continued into the mid-1880s, as college instructors were overworked, that they focused only on avoidance of errors in the papers they graded and issues such as style, organization, communication (rhetoric) were ignored.
• The early 1900's ushered in the "handbook era" led by Edwin C. Woolley's Handbook of Composition: A Compendium of Rules which became the basis of college level writing courses, emphasizing mechanical correctness: punctuation, spelling and grammar.
• The handbooks were relied on by graduate student instructors and the like but the problem with that is that the only knowledge that they were transmitting to the students were in those handbooks. There was little or no teaching of issues of rhetoric and style.
• In the 1930's, research began to bore out that grammar drills were not useful in improving student writing. Rhetoric, then, became the primary focus in the 1940's and 50's.
• The goal and challenge today is for composition instructors to find a balance between rhetoric and mechanics. The fact that we are at this stage in composition studies demonstrates that we are coming to constitute a genuine discipline.

Summary of "Historical Perspectives on Reading Research and Practice"

The article chronicles the changes that have undergone within the field of reading research and practice dating back to the 1950's, so it covers about 50 years of development. It is clear that reading research and practice, according to the article, does not come about on its own; it is a product of the environment and a sign of the times in which it is occurring.

For instance in the 1950's, there was a high birth rate during peacetime after World War II and an increasingly large number of young people were entering the public education system. B.F. Skinner and his theories on behaviorism (a learned stimulus and response) was the prevailing and popular psychological basis upon which reading researchers viewed how people read. Behaviorism posited that in order to improve reading skills, individuals had to receive paced training programs emphasizing phonics.

In the 1960s and mid-70's, the "natural learning" era put forth the view that language is developed through meaningful use and reading as an inherent ability, not something that you make a behavioral response. In the mid-70's to mid-80's, Immanuel Kant's theories based in cognitive psychology came to the forefront and focused on reading as how new knowledge (from a reading) was processed based on an individual's pre-existing knowledge.

From 1986-1995, Sociocultural theory, whereby the focus went away from the individual as in previous periods and moved to focusing on the person's environment and sociocultural influences. The influences of a person's environment, community and external influences was the key to understanding how they would in turn take in information from a reading.

Finally, the authors presented "Engaged Learning" as the era we are presently in, dating back to 1996. This theory firmly places the emphasis on the individual reader as an active participant in their own learning process and as an instructor, you need to engage the reader. Instructors have to consider the impact of non-traditional media and its impact on reading. Overall, the emphasis now is on engagement and reflection and their importance to reading.

Active Reading Article

Q: Briefly discuss how you might teach or convey the ideas in "Active Reading" to a developmental reading writing class.  How would you help students to understand these processes and strategies? And how might we use writing to practice some of these readings processes and strategies?

The author of "Active Reading" states that readers engage in activities before, during and after reading. Before reading, there is the act of selecting the text itself. Readers choose texts based to gain information, for finding personal identity, for integration and social interaction and for entertainment. With that in mind, I would teach this portion by giving students some choice in what they can read for the class. In order to allow students to find personal identity and provide them with some social interaction, the students can post a personal narrative to a blog, for example, such as Tumblr. Perhaps I would require students to find a text they personally enjoy and write a paper on it. Another idea for interaction would be the use of discussion forums and having students read and comment on each other's blogs, much like we do in this class.

During reading, the author of "Active Reading" proposes three different activities: the construction of a contextual frame/anticipation, ongoing inferences while reading, and focusing and reflecting. As a class, students can pull out words from the text that provide imagery or thoughts for them and share what those words are and images those words invoke.

After reading, the author posits that readers reflect, activate new reading, and discuss with others.  I would encourage students to find additional readings that interest them based on an earlier work because, as the author suggests, "reading breeds reading". Van Woerkum provides several suggestions to activate the reader more, including using language that evokes pictures via trigger words, adding questions into the text, comparing and contrasting viewpoints from the readings, use language that students use within their communities and stimulating the reader by suggesting useful sources for additional information on a given topic/theme.

In terms of getting students to understand these processes, I would try to understand the students' current basis of reading and writing abilities and their knowledge base. I would then try out of some of the strategies above and ask students to reflect on them. Did they help? What was the process like? Did students find they were more engaged and in control of their own learning?

In terms of writing, the author suggests understanding how active readers read and then writing in a way that connects with the reader's likely constructs and experiences. This information may be helpful in imparting to the students in the class. One way to do this is perhaps for the instructor to share his/her own experiences and schema so that students, when they are constructing and sharing their blog posts, to engage their instructor and understand what their instructor is looking for in quality, well-formed responses.

Literacy Narrative

I'm a second-generation Vietnamese American, so I grew up speaking and writing Vietnamese and English in my younger years. My parents were refugees from the War, so they came with very little knowledge of English. I spoke Vietnamese first, but looking back now, it was apparent my parents wanted me and my siblings to learn English quickly while maintaining our connections to Vietnamese. Therefore, I learned to live a dual life: I would read, write and speak Vietnamese at home, but would communicate in English while at school.

I grew up in San Mateo, and there were very few Vietnamese people around to communicate in Vietnamese with. As a result, I began to lose my ability to speak Vietnamese and became primarily an English speaker by the time I finished elementary school.

It helped that Vietnamese is romanized, so the transition to English reading and writing was straightforward for me. I remember language being one of my stronger subjects in school and how I enjoyed reading children's books growing up. I had an active imagination and I was a voracious reader; I'd spend a lot of my free time at the public library reading fiction, including fantasy novels.

As a young reader, I found it helpful to read aloud and to annotate, especially for books and articles I did not find very interesting. I also found abstract texts difficult. For example, I had a hard time understanding Shakespeare in freshman English class. The language used felt so foreign to me and I had to use a book that had a "translation" of the text on one side of the page opposite the original text. I really had to rely on coming to class and hoping the instructor would help interpret the meaning, both literal and figurative, of Shakespeare's writings.

As for insights about my own reading process that could make me a better teacher, I would say that it is important to annotate and to read actively. It helps to read with a purpose, i.e. why one is reading the text and what do they hope to get out of it. I think it also helps to read interesting, engaging texts that the reader can connect to. When you have a vested interest in a particular reading, the chances are higher that you will read more attentively and with greater focus.