My Thoughts on chapters 5, 6, and 7

I liked aspects of most of the theories discussed in chapter 5. While I disagree with the Maturation Theory and I see why it has been pushed to the side, I can completely understand how it originated. My ideas align with the ideas in the Theory of Literacy Development and Family Literacy Theory because I feel that a strong connection between home life and school life should be made and children should be exposed heavily at home to reading and other forms of literacy and this should be related to how they are taught in school as well. I think Big Books are a great idea because children can then see everything in terms of pictures, sentences, spelling, etc. as they are being read to. It seems silly to read to a classroom full of children and have at least half of the children struggle to see the pages. However, I do no think that just because the book might be enlarged that the children will feel as if they are sitting on the teachers lap. I understand the reference but I think that it is a little far fetched. Also, I strongly agree with the Emergent Literacy Theory's stress on the early experiences of children being talked to and read to and how these both relate to literacy development. I definitely think that the more children are exposed to language and reading, the more fluent they will become. I feel that heavy exposure to anything will enhance a child's skills in any area. It also makes sense that children who tend to be good listeners and speakers will be advanced when it comes to reading. If they already have a strong foundation on a language, then being able to decode the written word will be easier because they can search their memory banks for words that they are already familiar with. Finally, in chapter 5, I thought Piaget's theory and how it applies to classroom learning to be very interesting. I majored in psychology in undergrad and so many of these theories are not new to me, but relating the information to the classroom in particular is interesting and I believe useful. For instance, I would never have though that children in the concrete operational period would benefit from organizational charts more than children in other stages but it makes complete sense to me now that I've been provided with the information.

Also, I found the theories in chapter 6 to be very true. I believe that social interaction does play a large role in learning language and learning to read and becoming literate. I found a connection between The Emergent Literacy Theory and Social linguistic Theory in that they both seem to support oral language as the foundation for becoming an efficient reader, and again, I am in agreement. The results of Health's study did not surprise me. Also, Au's outlook regarding The Socio-Cultural Theory was enlightening. It makes perfect sense that reading, even by oneself, is a social activity because of the origin of the writing and the interaction between the author and reader, but I never had thought of it this way before. Also, the fact that we construct reading within a certain context does mean that we cannot separate reading from that context and I liked Au's perspective on this as well. Moreover, scaffolding, zone of proximal development, vicarious learning, and modeling, among the other concepts discusses within the Social Constructivism and Social Learning Theory, all seem to make sense to me but I think that these practices take place even if someone is not familiar with the terminology. I think people model behavior and assist others depending on their abilities even if they are unaware that they are doing so. I think, however, that with the knowledge of such concepts, teachers will be more able to incorporate activities such as buddy reading or be able to understand why they should modify lessons for differentiated instruction to allow for scaffolding to occur or to account for a student's zone of proximal development.

As for chapter 7, I was again familiar with much of the information on memory, however, the information relating to how it all relates to reading made me think about memory from a different perspective. First, I believe the Interactive Model is the most accurate in terms of it not just being a one way process. I definitely agree that reading cannot be understood only as a one way process of decoding and world identification leading to comprehension. I remember a study that I learned about that indicated that if you scramble letters of individual words in a paragraph but leave the first and last letter of the word where it should be, a person can easily read the paragraph as if nothing was scrambled at all. I find this so so interesting and I think that it relates to this idea of reading being an interactive process. Obviously, when reading a scrambled word without hesitation in a paragraph, a person is not decoding the word as they would normally. They are probably able to read the words because on some level they are comprehending the story before they decode the individual word, if that makes sense. I am not sure exactly what I am trying to say here but I think this study does relate to the interactiveness of the process. Also, The Automatic Information Processing Model provides insight to why some children hate to read. If a child is struggling to decode words and doesn't have the ability to comprehend what he or she is reading at the same time because they are expending all of their energy decoding, then why would it be enjoyable? There is no benefit to them if they do not understand what they are decoding. It all must seem so pointless. Knowing this information and keeping it in mind when helping children learn to read is valuable because if, as it states in the text, the teacher knows to give the child an easier text to read in order for them to comprehend what they are reading, then the student might have an easier time and enjoy reading and actually improve instead of just becoming more and more frustrated. Finally, I think it is important to note that different kinds of memory help us to understand the underlying processes involved when learning and can definitely be applied to learning to read.