Linguistics And Reading

Reading & Writing with English Learners offers kindergarten through fifth grade reading and writing educators a user-friendly guide and framework for supporting English learners in balanced literacy classrooms. Authors Valentina Gonzalez and Melinda Miller lead readers in exploring the components of Reading & Writing with English Learners with a special eye for increasing the effectiveness of instructional methods and quality of instruction to serve English learners. This book shares practical and effective techniques for accommodating reading and writing instruction to design learning that simultaneously increases literacy and language development. Reading & Writing with English Learners was written for: • K-5 Classroom Teachers • ESL Teachers • Reading and Writing Instructional Coaches • District Leaders Reading & Writing with English Learners includes: • the components of Reading & Writing Workshop • accommodations that support English Learners • high yield practices for Reading & Writing Workshop during remote teaching • the role of phonics • a culturally inclusive booklist • activities that support Reading & Writing Workshop And more!

Shows parents how to help their child communicate and learn language during everyday activities.

In this "important and alarming" book, see why so many American students are falling behind in their reading skills while others around the world excel (New York Times). In 2011, when an international survey reported that students in Shanghai dramatically outperformed American students in reading, math, and science, President Obama declared it a "Sputnik moment": a wake-up call about the dismal state of American education. Little has changed, however, since then: over half of our children still read at a basic level and few become highly proficient. Many American children and adults are not functionally literate, with serious consequences. Poor readers are more likely to drop out of the educational system and as adults are unable to fully participate in the workforce, adequately manage their own health care, or advance their children's education. In Language at the Speed of Sight, internationally renowned cognitive scientist Mark Seidenberg reveals the underexplored science of reading, which spans cognitive science, neurobiology, and linguistics. As Seidenberg shows, the disconnect between science and education is a major factor in America's chronic underachievement. How we teach reading places many children at risk of failure, discriminates against poorer kids, and discourages even those who could have become more successful readers. Children aren't taught basic print skills because educators cling to the disproved theory that good readers guess the words in texts, a strategy that encourages skimming instead of close reading. Interventions for children with reading disabilities are delayed because parents are mistakenly told their kids will catch up if they work harder. Learning to read is more difficult for children who speak a minority dialect in the home, but that is not reflected in classroom practices. By building on science's insights, we can improve how our children read, and take real steps toward solving the inequality that illiteracy breeds. Both an expert look at our relationship with the written word and a rousing call to action, Language at the Speed of Sight is essential for parents, educators, policy makers, and all others who want to understand why so many fail to read, and how to change that.

Abstract:

What does it mean to teach reading in the context of the middle and high school classroom? Don’t students already know how to read by the time they get to secondary school? And how can a busy teacher take time away from the packed curriculum of science, history, mathematics, or language arts to teach reading? This book presents a linguistic approach to teaching reading in different subjects; an approach that focuses on language itself. Central to this approach is a view that knowledge is constructed in and through language and that language changes with changes in knowledge. As students move from elementary to secondary schools, they encounter specialized knowledge and engage in new contexts of learning in all subjects. This means that the language of secondary school learning is quite different from the language of the elementary years. While in the elementary years the subject matter of reading materials is often close to students’ everyday life experiences, the curriculum of secondary school deals with knowledge that is removed from students’ personal lives and everyday contexts. The language that constructs this more specialized knowledge thus tends to be more abstract, technical, information-laden, and hierarchically organized than the more familiar and “friendly” language that students typically encounter during the elementary years. Students need to develop specialized literacies (literacy relevant to each content area) as well as a critical literacy they can use across subject areas to engage with, reflect on, and assess specialized and advanced knowledge. This functional language analysis approach is shown using actual secondary social studies, science, and math textbooks and using a literary text.

English L2 Reading: Getting to the Bottom, Second Edition remains a comprehensive, myth-debunking examination of how L1 features (orthographic system, phonology, morphology) can influence English L2 reading at the “bottom” of the reading process. It provides a thorough but very accessible linguistic/psycholinguistic examination of the lowest levels of the reading process. It is both theoretical and practical. The goal is to balance or supplement (not replace) top-down approaches and methodologies with effective low-level options for teaching English reading. Core linguistic and psycholinguistic concepts are presented within the context of their application to teaching. The text clearly explains the strategies that readers of other languages develop in response to their own writing systems (Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, other alphabets, or transparent Roman alphabetic systems), contrasted with an explanation of the strategies that English readers develop in response to the opaque orthography of English, and explicates how other low-level processing strategies for L1 morphology and word formation may aid or hinder processing in English L2 reading acquisition. A complete, balanced reading ideology should be big enough to embrace all reading theories and practices. In particular, it should be able to accommodate those researchers and teachers who find that attention to the details of language can also help students learn to read better. Many ESL/EFL teachers are interested in supplementing their successful whole-language methods with bottom-up reading strategies, but aren’t sure how to do it. This book fills that gap. Changes in the Second Edition: *updated content in each chapter and clearer organization for the student to make the text more reader friendly; *expansion in Chapter 2 on alphabets, writing systems, and a brief history of written English and spelling; *extended discussion in Chapter 3 of the cognition of written language and reading transfer; *addition of phonemic, vocal, subvocal, and articulatory development and L2 reading processing in Chapter 4, as well as instructional activities and strategies for teaching these skills to L2 readers; *elaboration of graphs and graphemes in Chapter 5, including discussion of developing graphemic knowledge, processing strategies, and their instructional application, and new sections on reading speed, pattern recognition, and word recognition; *development of the probabilistic section in Chapter 6, particularly the probabilities in context of L2 reading; *updated information on the topic of brain activation studies; and *new treatment of the topic of reading fluency, added in responses to requests from many readers of the first edition. Intended for ESL/EFL reading researchers, teacher trainers and teachers, and as a text for MATESOL students, most chapters contain practical suggestions that teachers can incorporate into whole language methods to teach beginning or intermediate ESL/EFL reading (letters, pronunciation, “smart” phonics, morphemes, and vocabulary acquisition) in a more balanced way. Pre-reading discussion and study questions are provided to stimulate interest and enhance comprehension. End-of-chapter exercises help readers apply the concepts.

Understanding reading abilities and their development is fundamental for language comprehension and human cognition. Now in its second edition, this book draws on research from multiple disciplines to explain reading abilities in both L1 and L2, and shows how this research can be applied in practice in order to support reading development. Research into reading has progressed a great deal since the first edition was published, so this edition has been completely updated and revised, in order to reflect these advances. All chapters present updated research studies, and completely new chapters are included on the neurocognition of reading, reading-writing relationships, and digital reading. If you want to know how reading works, no matter the language(s) involved, as well as how it can be taught effectively, this book provides a persuasive research foundation and many practical insights. It is essential reading for academic researchers and students in Applied Linguistics and TESOL.