Sharon,
I love your story; thank you so much for telling it. The question,
"What is reading?" is really the crossroad question of literacy. If one
believes that reading is making meaning of text, then it doesn't matter
how that text enters the thought process. If one believes that reading
is decoding, then we are led into benchmark assessments, leveled books,
Accelerated Reader, twenty minutes per day of round robin reading, and
other such classroom methods and strategies that *say* they are about
comprehension while ignoring the necessity for think time, mulling over
sentences, discussing personal impressions of stories, and other such
less-quantifiable activities.
Good luck on your dissertation!
Renee
On Jan 15, 2012, at 5:47 PM, Sharon Ballantyne wrote:
Hello all,
I have been very pleased to have the listening component so positively
reinforced, largely thanks to the influence of daily five practices.
as pointed out by another teacher, the children do respond positively.
I provide lots of opportunities for listening as part of daily five,
read-a-louds and the growing expanses of audio formats as well as
formats that support highlighting of words as they are read as found
in meegenius app for iDevices.
I use audio personally all the time with most of my curriculum being
in audio which I listen to while reading it to students. I am unable
to read print due to being totally blind. While I use Braille daily as
an organizational tool to help sort my files, student books, classroom
library and such, it is far too cumbersome and time consuming for me
personally to read lengthy texts. . If one has grown up using Braille
it may be a different response entirely. Accessibility in Braille is
also very costly and in this age of technology very limiting for the
things I personally need.
My grade three class would never consider that I am not reading as I
share what I read through listening. When students can pair print text
to follow along it also really enriches their learning for fluency as
mentioned, but also to hear all the nuances of speech and tone through
different speakers. Some of the narrators on the audible library are
quite talented. I listen to audio formats of children's picture books,
novels, textbooks while simulreading these to my students. I listen to
text and teach with it in much the same way you do with a piece of
print in front of you.
I do my duty supervision in a kindergarten class four times a week
while the teacher takes her break and as my guide dog and I enter it
is not unusual for a child to announce "Mrs. B is here to read to us."
.
I believe the audio format can supplement, extend and where needed
replace print decoding as the only form of reading. Listening as
reading promotes a love of reading, enjoyment and widens horizons to
appreciate literature.
Historically there has been an argument that people reading by audio
are not reading. Our students with LD who might use scanning
technology such as kerzweil have been challenged as this not being
literacy in my own school board.
It is not as easy to research using audio but it can be done. My
kindle allows me instant access to a world of books I would not
otherwise had access too. Scanning of print texts to be in a digitally
accessible format I can now do as quickly as quickly as I can
physically turn a print page. Using digital camera technology which
has replaced the flatbed scanner technology, I have my camera
configured to detect hand motion of turning the page and an audible
camera click alerts me the page has been scanned. With my software
program set to read while scanning I can "read" (by listening to the
speech synthesizer of my computer), while I scan print pages. The
quality is still questionable at times but if anyone had told me even
a few years ago that I as a totally blind person would successfully be
working with a digital camera to scan documents and make them
accessible I would have thought it quite beyond my imagination.
E-readers are a wonderful technology. Some people do not even realize
e-readers often have full speech possibilities to read the text if the
book has text to speech enabled. Many users I know have opted to
combine reading the text visually and switching to audio to support
reading when tired or commuting.
It kind of begs the question... what is reading?
Does reading beyond the "cult of normalcy" expectations mean it is not
reading just because it is different from the way people usually
interact with text?
As I defend my phD dissertation(unrelated to this topic) in a few
months, the reality is that five years of research have been
accomplished using listening to reading. It is a process of drawing
the circle wider and accepting that print impairments in the
twenty-first century do not mean an inaccessibility to the world of
reading and literacy.
If I can provide any support to any teachers who might be struggling
to get their head around the making space of accepting this as
reading, please do feel free to contact me off-list.
Sharon
sbal...@nexicom.net
"Painting is just another way of keeping a diary."
~ Pablo Picasso
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