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Ava's Post
April 19th reading directly related to many struggles I deal with in my classroom daily. Zwiers said "readers are able to reread confusing parts of the text, acknowledging that they are confused and thus repeating the mental comprehension strategies to better understand the text. This "mental multitasking" Zwiers says, is one of the biggest benefits students get from reading academic language.
Mental strategies for reading are so hard for me to explain to my students. I read much better silently and during read aloud times I have always struggled. If a person reads and comprehends through only certain strategies should we push them to read in other ways?

Zwiers gives strategies to help students better digest academic language. The one that I am most familiar with and like the most is the "think aloud." My school pushes this but many times my students tune out and are not doing the heavy lifting it takes to truly master a reading skill or strategy. I feel like more guided lessons and group work then a significant amount of you do time helps students utilize these skills effectively.

Christine D's post
This week's reading really addressed an conundrum I have been dealing with since I started teaching - the fact that my students struggle a great deal with accessing, processing, and producing academic language, in both reading and writing. When asking myself the question, "what really are the tangible benefits of putting academic language in front of my students, knowing they are going to struggle with it?" Zwier's following point struck a cord: readers are able to reread confusing parts of the text, acknowledging that they are confused and thus repeating the mental comprehension strategies to better understand the text. This "mental multitasking" Zwiers says, is one of the biggest benefits students get from reading academic language. Zwiers also provides several strategies to help students better digest academic language. The one that I am most familiar with and like the most is the "think aloud." I have been coached a great deal on presenting great think-alouds during my model in reading class. This provides a lens into my strong reader's mind and allows students to witness all the mental processes that accompany reading academic language. My question is, however, is it best as a teacher to model think-alouds that verbalize all the thinking that accompanies reading academic text or just the thinking that connects to that lesson's aim? As I was reading this, I realized all my think-alouds had been geared toward one specific objective, but rarely encompassed all the advanced thinking that goes on in my head when reading the text. Are these think-alouds really showing my students how an advanced reader dissects academic language?

I also really appreciated the fact that Zwiers includes a section on text organization. I, as a new teacher, completely overlooked the importance of these for less-advanced readers. When teaching a lesson on text features, however, I was shocked to see how little my students knew about the importance of things like titles, headings, and pictures. It became clear to me that understanding the importance of and extracting meaning from text features is in fact a very important skill necessary to really understand most academic texts.

Finally, I thought a lot about my own teaching practices with respect to pre-writing that does very little to set students up for success in producing writing using academic language. The pre-writing organization we have taught our students at my school is very structured, but we stress that each box in this chart must only contain a word or phrase so that too much time is not taken up in the pre-writing process. While I think this is important point to stress for some students who struggle with time on timed tests, Zwiers discussion of more "academic language" - focused pre-writing encouraged me to think about how to use academic words and phrases in pre-writing organization. All too often I see students who have set up elaborate pre-writing charts with great ideas and evidence, but they unfortunately are unable to weave them together into a cohesive essay. Many times, the "brick" words are even there, but the "mortar" words/phrases are missing and result in writing that is far from academic.

Amanda Hall's Post
Chapters 7, 8, and 9 are by far the most practical and also most profound in his entire book. I thoroughly enjoyed reading these chapters each of the practical applications that he discussed aligned with the larger theme that spanned across the three chapters which was: academic writing is a cyclical process that requires both teaching into as well as ownership over (via production).

Chapter 7 focused primarily on the common core skills that readers must be taught and develop to read academic language and to write with it as well. His key skills bare similar relation to Bloom’s taxonomy. I particularly, enjoyed his section on creating scaffolds for teaching academic language. I think that the “read aloud, comprehend aloud, and improv aloud” will work really well for my students with attentional disabilities. His “marking up long sentences” is another strategy I will also teach to my students so that they don’t feel so overwhelmed by academic language in their reading.

Chapter 8 had a really profound statement that I liked: “writing requires deeper processing than reading alone entails.” While this may seem obvious, I thought it was nicely worded to describe the multifaceted complexity of the writing process. In this chapter Zwiers also broke writing up into genres and explained how to teach academic language into different genres of writing. He really pushed the reader to think about the suitability and purpose of different forms of writing and then contextualize academic language within that framework. I thought that idea of proper placement was really fundamental to our understanding of academic language for writing.

Finally, chapter 9 might just be a teacher’s best friend. It discussed ways in which we should assess academic language, formally and informally, orally and in print. His piece about the importance of academic feedback was the most important part to me because like he said, I agree that “the most powerful modification that enhances achievement is feedback.” This idea makes academic language a practical means of communication between student and teacher which serves as critical practice for the world that awaits them.

Jason Miller Post
One key point that Zwiers raises is that we need to be aware that very often it is the structure of the academic sentences that throws off our students. It may be the constant use of pronouns or inverted sentence structure that presents challenges to our students. One way to combat this issue is by using think aloud strategies to model how we as content experts comprehend these sometimes cryptic and arcane passages.
I know that I sometimes focus too much of my working brain power on the content and less on how it is presented in text. As a reform to this practice, I hope to pay more attention to the way things are phrased in order to make comprehension clearer for my students. Zwiers also suggests that in we need to make sure that we are not just translating academic language for our students. We need to provide the tools so that they can comprehend by themselves. I think the challenge is creating the space and time in our classroom so that it becomes second nature to focus on the literacy aspects of the content that our students can access the content on their own. I am definitely a fan of the role playing of different parts of the readings to encourage comprehension and engagement !

Lemontrel's Post
Lemontrel,
I too like the idea of a written recap for math. Like yourself I usually reserve a few minutes at the end of class in order to verbally review what was covered that day and to attach the day's learning to what's coming up the next day. I would recommend that you also try using a non-stop writing activity for your math class. This was the literacy activity that I had used for our last assignment in this class and it turned out to be a pretty great way to assess where my students were at in regards to their understanding of more conceptual math scenarios. I've used this for finding the Relative error, measures of central tendency, and misleading stats and graphs. The task requires students to articulate their understanding of the lesson at hand. In addition I'd recommend having the students provide, in their own words, a real life example of the concept.

Douglas Schall's Post
Chapters seven, eight, and nine of Jeff Zwiers book, “Building Academic Language,” were, in my opinion, extremely insightful and useful. Chapter seven begins with a description of the skills a reader must possess in order to comprehend the academic language of many texts and school related readings – the combination of comprehension strategies and other higher order thinking skills such as, “classifying, synthesizing, inferring cause and effect, predicting, interpreting...” and so forth. He then presents different strategies that will aid in the teaching of brick terms, as well as common mortar words and phrases found in academic writing. In addition, chapter seven discusses the use of academic grammar. This section was particularly helpful for me, because I have struggled to come up with a way in which I can break down sentences in a meaningful, and timely, way for my students. Such a skill is vital for math students when tackling multiple choice questions. (I must also thank Zwiers for the visual that shows what students can do so as to provide a visual/kinesthetic display for the differences between the measures of central tendency.)
Chapter eight discusses the importance of teaching, or more accurately modeling, the differences between written and spoken language. Again the importance of teaching academic grammar is nicely summarized by Zwiers: “Grammar is important, though, because knowing certain rules and patterns can accelerate the growth of [students’] academic writing abilities.” Zwiers then proceeds to offer many different examples/templates from graphic organizers to prompts and posters that address common pitfalls—organization, conventions, and grammar—for students who are poorly equipped to write in an academic setting.
Lastly, in chapter eight, assessment-driven instruction was discussed. It was asserted that as teachers we should view assessments as tools that will enable us to better teach content, not simply a way to calculate a grade. The highlight of the chapter was the detailed sample lesson plan. I like all the rubrics, performance based basements, and other tools that Zwiers details, but I can’t help coming back to the fact that as a math teacher most of these tools will not be of great use for me. Assessing one’s mathematical performance is simply not as subjective as is assessing a persuasive essay. Sadly, there seems to be little that Zwiers suggests that well really addresses the numerical illiteracy of many of my students. That is, what is a good solution for teaching basic mathematical skills? We’ve spent much time discussing literacy as a reading and writing component, but what to do when a student is struggling with basic mathematical computational skills?!!

Lemontrel's Post
Lemontrel,
It's great that you're still looking for ways to incorporate reading and writing into your math classes. Another strategy that Zwiers suggests is to have students assume different roles during a lesson in order to create a more literacy based lesson even in a math class. For example, one of your students could be an exponent for the entire period and explain the function of an exponent when ever it arose in a problem.

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Cultural Literacy Debate:
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{cultural literacy, ch. 4.pdf}