Week 3: What is a Text? Workshopping Multiple Modes of Communication

What do subway maps, music by Bach, a graph indicating bio-crises in African nations, a picture book about the frog life cycle, a cubist painting by Picasso, a podcast on positive psychology, the novel and film of Dracula, poems by Robert Frost, an article in Rolling Stone, or a collection of autobiographical accounts by Vietnam veterans have in common? According to current literacy theorists, a text is defined as any closed system of meaning that has symbolic value within a particular discipline. Our task this week is to determine what makes each of these texts different, what they afford us as readers, and what kinds of distinctive qualities we're looking for as we explore them. For instance, can we say that we should observe and interpret, in other words "read" a still life painting of a lemon in the same way we would make scientific observations about a live lemon? Does Picasso's visual commentary on the Spanish Civil War, Guernica (shown below), provide an equally important perspective on history? This will be food for thought in class.

As Short, Kaufman and Kahn (2000) and Alvermann et al (2004) argue, the more exposure we can give young readers to varied texts as tools for thinking and communicating, the more prepared they will be to read, understand, and compose different genres of text, even as their experiences with content instruction increase in difficulty.


https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzShSePIEEYIcXdoWEpsaFVJcVU/edit


Glossary:

Reader Response, Efferent and Aesthetic Reading:

Louise Rosenblatt's theory of Reader Response (1978), which is largely derived from the pragmatic learning philosophies of John Dewey, focuses on the idea that readers have active, purposeful transactions with text and their authors. Many of these transactions are driven by sensory, "lived through" experiences within fictional narratives that generate aesthetic (of the senses) responses.  At other times, readers seek a more public interaction as they gather and share information (efferent reading).  Her theories have empowered the reader to take different stances, interpreting and breathing potential meanings into texts, even those considered classics in our literary canon. Educators have sought to encourage a range of reader responses by exposing students to a variety of text genres, and modeling what a text can offer them as a reader. Both aesthetic and efferent responses help to support Text- to-Self, Text-to-Text and Text-to-World connections between a reader's prior knowledge and new experiences/ information.

Transmediation (Siegel, 1995): the process of taking understandings from one system (print text) and moving them into another system (visual text, such as a drawing). When we consider the definition of visual and other media literacy in Alvermann's Chapter 6, modeling ways to critically and creatively view, listen, read and reconstruct a variety of symbolic messages and diverse meanings for specific content purposes will be crucial to a child's growing literacy set as both reader and a writer. 

Intertextuality (Text-to-Text): the process by which we make meaningful connections between different texts, such as a film and a book, and in turn extend or reconstruct possible meanings of the original. "The character in this book reminds me of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz because..."


Readability: Level of text difficulty based on a variety of factors (sentence length and structure, number of sentences on a page, vocabulary). Lexile levels (see www.lexile.com) are now a commonly used measure for determining text difficulty as well as reader match, and we will be using these along with other measures as we evaluate content texts. Because Common Core State Standards (CCSS)  are moving away from a Guided Reading Approach (Fountas and Pinnell), which is founded on the idea of matching text to readers at their instructional level, teachers will now be challenged to match readers to text, in order to make optimum learning gains at more challenging levels.  With a greater need to motivate children to engage with "close readings" of increasingly challenging texts, choosing a variety of books for student and content interest will become an important of a teacher's professional skill-set.

Due to the growing influence of web sourcing, picture book and graphic novel genres, readability will also need to consider the relationship between print language and illustrations/ sign system use.

Tradebooks: Books available to the general public. The children's tradebook market has grown considerably in the past ten-fifteen years, and authors are now much more attentive to educational needs, particularly content standards within informational texts (check out Ink Think Tank on the BB resource list posted for Content Reading this week).