May 16 Class: The Reading Process

Tonight we learned about the reading process and all the things that happen in order for someone to understand text. There were so many steps that I had never considered before. When you think about it, it is amazing that any of us can make sense of the lines and designs on the paper or the images in a video. As a literacy teacher, I had been taught that reading involved the graphophonic, semantic, syntactical and pragmatic systems. I analysed reading from the a cueing system point of view using the 4 systems to a comprehension lens looking at connecting, questioning, visualizing, determining importance, inferencing, synthesizing. Reading involved both decoding and understanding, which is complicated in itself, but I had never considered the process of actually getting the information/stimuli to the actual parts of the brain that is able to make sense of the stimuli which have been converted to electrical impulses and chemicals. When I actually stop and think about what our brains can do, it’s amazing. After watching and listening to a presentation from Barbara on reading, we were sorted into groups. My group collaborated to create a visual representation of the reading process which is shown below.

Tonight’s class connected to the Edyburn article on Technology-enhanced reading performance: Defining a research agenda. In this article he questions school procedures for supporting students who struggle with reading. One of the main decisions around these students is the method of meeting their reading learning needs: Do schools offer remediation or compensation? I know that I have been encouraged to continue to work with students and to develop skills into junior high. At the high school level students who struggle with reading are offered audio versions of class texts via Kurzweil or audio books. Many of my high school students can understand the info they hear when it is presented orally, they just cannot decode the words to make sense of the text. If the difficulty with decoding is connected to a processing, brain based issue why, I wonder am I encouraged to wait so long in providing my striving reading students with support? If the issue cannot be fixed, the schools should be using assistive technology to compensative for the problem area. Edyburn has the reader questioning the background knowledge that they students who struggle with reading are not developing. By failing to compensate and continue at the ineffective acts of remediation, we are increasing the gap between the students who are successful and who are not. We need to provide students with the supports they needs, be it additional help or assistive technology, as soon as we identify their needs.