An Examination of the LVA Approach to Teaching Reading

The Language Vocabulary Acquisition (LVA) Approach is a revolutionary method of reading instruction for emergent and developing readers. It is an intense reading program with high levels of student participation, engagement, and interaction with print text, that yields high outcomes in phonological awareness, reading and writing fluency, and comprehension. The LVA Approach quickly immerses young African-American children into print text, bombarding them with a preponderance of new words, ideas, and general understandings about their surroundings and the world in general. This approach enables them to develop expansive word knowledge, resulting in reading, writing, and thinking competencies at or above their grade level and national norms. This approach focuses on the printed text—words, words, and more words—rather than visual images, picture clues, and illustrations.

Research studies on literacy development supported the use of printed text in children's initial efforts in reading (Gough and Hillinger 1980). Words, word constructions, and vocabulary development are the beginning steps to the LVA Approach. Children are able to take the skills learned in the LVA Approach and apply them to children's literature and standard basal reading texts. The LVA Approach was developed by Angela L. Davis who successfully introduced it to her first-grade class during the 2000–2001 school year. This article describes a three-year pilot effort to improve the reading competencies of primary-age children at Bouchet Academy, a Chicago Public School (CPS) located on the southeast side of the city.     

Responding to individuals with severe learning difficulties and stereotyped behaviour: challenges for an inclusive era

Traditionally, professionals working with individuals with severe learning difficulties who demonstrate stereotyped behaviours, such as rocking and hand-flapping, have viewed such behaviours as undesirable, inappropriate and in need of reduction or elimination. This perspective is influenced by notions of readying those individuals for mixed settings, educating, training or modifying them to help gain their acceptance. Intensive Interaction is an alternative approach for working with individuals with complex difficulties that responds positively to them and their stereotyped behaviours, sometimes using these as a point of connection. Intensive Interaction sets out to enhance social and communication abilities and not to reduce stereotyped behaviours. However, findings from two studies of Intensive Interaction that show some reduction in stereotyped behaviours are reported and discussed. The authors consider the way in which more inclusive thinking connects with changes in thinking about stereotyped behaviour and the individuals who engage in them.     

激发兴趣,引导学习——高职高专院校现当代文学教学思考

随着教育形势和社会环境的变化,高职高专现当代文学教学面临诸多困境。要挖掘现当代文学的当代价值,摆脱文学无用的边缘化困境,就必须要培养学生的学习动机,激起阅读兴趣,激发学生的阅读思考。     

Reading,Writing, and English Course Pathways when Developmental Education is Optional: Course Enrollment and Success for Underprepared First-time-in-College Students

Academic underpreparedness is an issue for many first-time-in-college students, particularly those entering community colleges. Whereas many underprepared students enroll in developmental education, research has indicated that traditional remediation may not increase students’ chances for success. Therefore, states and colleges have begun to implement new course placement strategies to increase the accuracy of initial course placement and new instructional approaches to better serve their developmental students. Specifically, in 2013, the state of Florida passed Senate Bill 1720 which redesigned developmental coursework and placement policies across the Florida College System. The reform lifted developmental education placement exam testing and course enrollment requirements for certain exempt students, irrespective of prior academic preparation or achievement. The current study focuses on these exempt students—those who had the option to bypass developmental education—who were also underprepared, and their initial course selection and subsequent success in their gateway (introductory college-level) English course. Using statewide student-level data and logistic regression techniques, the results indicated that level of preparation was related to students’ course enrollment and gateway English course success. Students slightly underprepared in reading or writing were more likely than severely underprepared students to enroll in the gateway English class, relative to a developmental reading or writing course. In reading and writing, slightly underprepared students were more likely to pass English, relative to severely underprepared students. The authors consider the findings in light of recent national changes to developmental education and offer recommendations for policy and practice.     

The Ecological Message of the Outdoor Magazines

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine (a) college students' attitudes and complexity of thinking about the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and (b) the effects of environment-based coursework on students' attitudes and thinking. Using self-report questionnaires in a pretest-posttest design, the authors examined attitudes in terms of their direction, extremity, ambivalence, and importance. Complexity of thinking was measured as integrative complexity. Results suggested that college students (N = 205) who had moderate and ambivalent attitudes toward the ESA wrote significantly more integratively complex essays about the issue than did students who had unambivalent attitudes. Students' integratively complex thinking was not related to the direction of their attitudes toward the ESA or its personal importance to them. Students who were enrolled in an environment-based, university-wide writing course showed a significantly greater increase in integratively complex thinking about the ESA than did students enrolled in a nonenvironment-based, university-wide writing course.     

‘That’s just the way I am’: metacognition,personal intelligence and reading

Metacognition is thinking about thinking and there is fairly robust evidence that an awareness of one’s own understanding, especially in reading, is strongly linked with success. Readers who are alert to the problems in their understanding of what they read and can adopt a range of strategies to ‘fix’ these problems tend to be better readers. Kathy Hall and Julia Myers here explore how such awareness works in one child’s view of herself as a reader and suggest that such insights need to form part of a useful assessment of the child’s reading.     

Preservice teachers and parents: using a reading course to change perceptions and practice

The authors sought to understand preservice teachers’ views about parents of students who struggle with reading and about their own preparedness to deal with such parents. Research, including surveys, student evaluation and tutoring intervention, indicates that before their work with parents and students, preservice teachers held strong beliefs about parents’ role and responsibilities with respect to their children who find reading daunting. After a semester‐long reading course which provided opportunities to work with struggling readers and their parents, the preservice teachers in this study expressed beliefs that were contrary to the ones they offered at the beginning of the course.     

Diagnosis of Reading Problems: is there a case?

The argument presented in this paper is that effective instruction of children with reading difficulties relies little on accurate diagnosis either of the apparent cause of the reading problem or the nature of the reading problem. The former argument—that the diagnosis of the underlying cause of the problem is futile—is not new but bears restatement as there is no sign that the practice is abating among certain health professionals. The latter argument—that the diagnosis of the child's relative strengths and weaknesses in reading is also irrelevant to instruction—is more controversial as it contradicts standard educational practice. It is considered that standardised reading tests, if properly administered and interpreted, have a part to play in the identification of children with reading problems, but not in the diagnosis or treatment of such problems. Children with reading difficulties would be better served if more attention were paid to instruction and less to diagnosis.     

PUBLIC EDUCATION ABOUT NORMAL FORGETFULNESS AND DEMENTIA: EFFECTIVENESS OF A SYSTEMATICALLY DEVELOPED INFORMATION BROCHURE

Earlier research revealed that many elderly people in The Netherlands are worried about their forgetfulness and are afraid of incipient dementia. Until now, no systematic research has been conducted on the effects of public education about normal forgetfulness and dementia, and therefore an information brochure was developed and evaluated. The main function of this brochure was to reassure people who were unnecessarily worrying about possible dementia. A second function was to motivate people to seek professional help when this seemed advisable. Sixty‐two percent of all respondents (307 of 400) who had been worried about dementia before reading the brochure said that their anxiety decreased or disappeared after reading it; approximately 3% became more worried after reading the brochure. A cognitive test battery was administered to 104 people to determine whether their increased or decreased anxiety was justified. Thirty subjects had low test scores, yet 16 of these subjects had been reassured by the brochure that their forgetfulness was nothing to worry about. This group was characterized as experiencing fewer problems in daily life as a result of their forgetfulness and as having a higher internal locus of control. Seventy‐four subjects performed well on the cognitive tests, yet 18 of them had remained worried about their forgetfulness after reading the brochure. Anxiety for heredity of dementia could be a possible explanation for their persistent concern. Although many people were reassured by the brochure, the results also show that it is important to evaluate information brochures used as intervention instruments—in one third of the present sample, the effects of the brochure were not in accordance with its goal.     

Intervention Provided to Linguistically Diverse Middle School Students with Severe Reading Difficulties

This study investigated the effectiveness of a multicomponent reading intervention implemented with middle school students with severe reading difficulties, all of whom had received remedial and/or special education for several years with minimal response to intervention. Participants were 38 students in grades 6-8 who had severe deficits in word reading, reading fluency, and reading comprehension. Most were Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs) with identified disabilities. Nearly all demonstrated severely limited oral vocabularies in English and, for ELLs, in both English and Spanish. Students were randomly assigned to receive the research intervention (n = 20) or typical instruction provided in their school's remedial reading or special education classes (n = 18). Students in the treatment group received daily explicit and systematic small-group intervention for 40 minutes over 13 weeks, consisting of a modified version of a phonics-based remedial program augmented with English as a Second Language practices and instruction in vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension strategies. Results indicated that treatment students did not demonstrate significantly higher outcomes in word recognition, comprehension, or fluency than students who received the school's typical instruction and that neither group demonstrated significant growth over the course of the study. Significant correlations were found between scores on teachers' ratings of students' social skills and problem behaviors and posttest decoding and spelling scores, and between English oral vocabulary scores and scores in word identification and comprehension. The researchers hypothesize that middle school students with the most severe reading difficulties, particularly those who are ELLs and those with limited oral vocabularies, may require intervention of considerably greater intensity than that provided in this study. Further research directly addressing features of effective remediation for these students is needed.     

Using Discourse Processing Methods To Study Moral Thinking

A 16-year-old gunslinger named “Doug,” who performed nine drive-by shootings in his hometown of Omaha in 1 year, considers the films South Central and Boyz'n the Hood to be affirmations of his aspirations and lifestyle (Hull, 1993). In contrast, most viewers of these films absorbed explicit lessons about which behaviors and life choices to avoid. What are the factors that lead to these radically different understandings of the same video text? Why are the “take-home” moral lessons so distinct? Combining methods and theory from two research areas—discourse comprehension and moral judgment—a research program is summarized that examines moral thinking using methods such as narrative recall, multiple-choice moral theme extraction, thinking aloud while reading, and probing for inferences while reading on computer. These studies offer a new approach to uncovering how people process moral events in discourse such as written and visual texts, persuasive messages, and real-life events.     

“Seeing the Light”: A Cognitive Approach to the Metaphorical in Picture Books

Picture books, as both sophisticated aesthetic objects and literary texts, provide the ideal site for critically examining how values and ideology are transmitted to children. How the child reader might be affected by the process of reading a picture book—that is, how he or she might be moved emotionally and potentially gain new insights about the world—is of interest to scholars and educators alike. This article draws upon cognitive literary theory as a conceptual frame through which to explore the cognitive and emotional affect that reading may have upon children. “Reader response” and “cultural criticism” are approaches to literature that seek to understand how readers interact with texts. Cognitive theory, when applied to literature, builds on these discourses by focusing on why reading fiction might cause the brain to produce emotional and cognitive responses in readers. As metaphors are a feature of language and of thought, a study of the metaphorical in picture books aptly lends itself to the theoretical framework offered by cognitive literary theory. Drawing on examples from four picture books produced for children, broadly correlating to different developmental stages, this article examines the role of metaphor in encouraging skills in decoding and creative thinking. Talking to children about visual metaphor or metaphorical expression introduces them to a feature of language and thought that provides a conceptual frame for richer understanding and expression of ideas. Examining how the metaphorical operates in picture books thus takes us a step closer to understanding how the process of reading affects children and enriches their lives.     

A Social-Studies Unit that Developed Pupils’ Powers of Problem Solving

This article reports the author's experiences using graphic novels with pre-service teachers in a young adult literature course. Drawing on critical response papers two students composed after reading Pride of Baghdad, a graphic novel by Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon, the author argues that when readers possess the background knowledge needed to approximate the role of the implied reader—that is, the imaginary audience for whom authors envision themselves writing—they are capable of engaging with graphic novels in ways that readers who lack experience with the form, or who question its literary merit, are not.     

The use of tinted lenses to alleviate reading difficulties

An increasing number of optometrists are offering assessments using the Intuitive Colorimeter (Wilkins, Nimmo‐Smith and Jansons, 1992) to determine whether children who have reading difficulties might benefit from the use of tinted lenses. Suggestions have been made in the media that tinted lenses may provide a ‘cure’ for developmental dyslexia, and there have been many anecdotal accounts of improvements in reading following their use (e.g. Brace, 1993). However, such extreme claims are not typical of the scientific literature supporting the use of tinted lenses. This article provides an overview of the research into the use of tinted lenses for the amelioration of reading difficulties. The electronic databases searched for this review were BIDS, MEDLINE, PsychInfo, PsychLit and Science Direct. Key search terms used were coloured (colored) lenses, Irlen lenses, scotopic sensitivity and visual deficits in combination with the term ‘reading difficulties’.     

Exploring the role of intertextuality in concept construction: Urban second graders make sense of evaporation,boiling, and condensation

The study explores urban second graders' thinking and talking about the concepts of evaporation, boiling, and condensation that emerged in the context of intertextuality within an integrated science‐literacy unit on the topic of States of Matter, which emphasized the water cycle. In that unit, children and teacher engaged in a variety of activities (reading information books, doing hands‐on explorations, writing, drawing, discussing) in a dialogically oriented way where teacher and children shared the power and the burden of making meaning. The three qualitative interrelated analyses showed children who initiated or continued productive links to texts, broadly defined, that gave them spaces to grapple with complex ideas and ways of expressing them. Although some children showed preference for a certain way of thinking about evaporation, boiling, and condensation, the data do not point toward a definite conclusion relative to whether children subscribe or not to a particular conceptual position. Children had multiple, complex, and often speculative, tentative, and emergent ways of accessing and interpreting these phenomena, and their conceptions were contextually based—different contexts offered opportunities for students to theorize about different aspects of the phenomena (along with some similar aspects). Children also theorized about aspects of the same phenomena in different ways. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 43: 637–666, 2006     

Constructing meaning about literacy difficulties: Preservice teachers beginning to think about pedagogy

The purpose of this study was to explore the meanings preservice teachers constructed about students with reading difficulties. Qualitative techniques were employed to develop six case studies to understand better how preservice teachers framed their meanings. Cross-case analysis revealed that each preservice teacher's stance on meaning, while idiosyncratically based on experience, was tied to pedagogy in two distinct ways: (a) most of the participants placed an increasingly important role on the supervising teacher when considering reading difficulties and (b) they situated themselves as a teacher within that context. The findings suggest the importance of designing preservice education course work that is inquiry-oriented and offers opportunities for students to explore systematically their developing stances and self-constructed meanings about reading.     

Beginning reading intervention as inoculation or insulin: first-grade reading performance of strong responders to kindergarten intervention

This study examined the first-grade reading progress of children who participated in an intensive beginning reading intervention in kindergarten. Specifically, the study investigated whether kindergarten intervention could prevent first-grade reading difficulties, or produce an "inoculation" effect, for some children under certain instructional conditions. Participants included children at risk for developing reading difficulties who received a 7-month beginning reading intervention in kindergarten. In October of first grade, 59 children who had achieved criterion levels on measures of phonological awareness and alphabetic knowledge were randomly assigned to one of two types of first-grade reading instruction: (a) code-based classroom instruction and a supplemental maintenance intervention, or (b) only code-based classroom instruction. February posttest measures assessed oral reading fluency, word reading, nonword reading, and comprehension. Between-group analyses indicated that instructional groups did not differ on any posttest measure. The students' absolute levels of achievement were compared to national and local normative samples. These results indicated that between 75% and 100% of students in both conditions attained posttest levels and demonstrated growth comparable to their average-achieving peers. These results support the hypothesis that strong responders to kindergarten intervention can experience an inoculation effect through the middle of first grade with research-validated classroom reading instruction.     

What academic language and learning advisers bring to the scholarship of teaching and learning: problems and possibilities for dialogue with the disciplines

Higher education policy is seeking, in the interest of ‘quality assurance’, to reward teaching and the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). Academic language and learning (ALL) advisers, who work closely with students to improve their performance in their courses of study, have much to contribute to SoTL. ALL advisers who adopt an ‘academic literacies’ approach share with lecturers in the disciplines an engagement with issues of ‘‐ography’ (i.e. writing in and for a discourse community)—including the relationships between epistemology, form, and language—yet, misconceptions about ALL advisers’ work can prevent discipline lecturers from consulting them when thinking about questions of teaching and learning in their own field. This paper discusses ALL advisers’ access to insights into students’ experiences of learning and of being taught, with relevance both for particular disciplines and for academic culture across the disciplines; their contributions to SoTL; the difficulties they encounter in trying to communicate across the borders of the disciplines; and ways of improving this situation in the context of the new emphasis on encouraging improvement in the quality of teaching.     

Academic Outcomes Among a Sample of Learning Support Community College Students

This research examined the relationship between placement in a learning support college program and subsequent academic outcomes. The sample consisted of 275 entering freshmen students who were enrolled in the Learning Support reading courses in the fall of 2005. Data were collected from the Gordon College Office of Institutional Research. The data showed that of the 275 students who enrolled in a Learning Support reading course in the fall 2005 semester, 189 returned for the spring 2006 semester. Data also showed that 58% of the 275 students enrolled in Learning Support reading during fall 2005 successfully completed a basic reading intensive course upon completion of their remedial reading class. One hundred eighty seven students who had previously completed Learning Support reading enrolled (spring 2006 or later) in Introductory English 101 and 121 passed. Fifty-five students who had completed Learning Support reading enrolled (spring 2006 or later) in History 1121, Western Civilization, and 20 students passed. Six of the 205 students who completed Learning Support reading graduated Gordon College within a three-year period. The results of the present study indicate that the Learning Support Reading Program in place at Gordon College has proven to be a beneficial tool for at-risk college students. It is assumed that programs such as the Learning Support Program described here may help students build a foundation that will aid them throughout their college career.