Workshop Summary #4
We are in our 7th week of our English
studies, which means another group discussion has been held. This week’s discussion
was based on the key theme of various reader rolls. We began by discussing the
weekly readings, which allowed us to identify and discuss the different reader
rolls. As a group we listed the four reader skills which allow efficient readers
to understand and analyse texts in depth more efficiently. These reading
practices or rules can be used by readers when they are trying to achieve a particular
purpose of the text by interacting with it.
These reader skills are:
~ Code-breaking practices:
This reader skill is where the reader uses
basic decoding of the text in order to work out what the words and sentences in
the text are.
~ Text-participant practices:
This reader skill is where the reader uses their
prior knowledge to make some informed assumptions about the meanings of a particular
text.
~ Text-user practices:
This reader skill is when the reader works
to understand the different ways they can use a particular text to achieve a particular
social purpose.
~ Text-analyst practices:
This reader skill refers to the ways that the
reader critiques, analyses the language and how it is used to portray
particular characters, situations, cultural groups, or scientific positions.
The activities this week required us to
bring in newspaper articles and cereal packets to be analysed and deconstructed.
When deconstructing our articles we noticed that the authors of a lot of them used
any strategy to get their point across trying to persuade the reader that what
they were saying was correct, even if it wasn’t correct. Although one member of
the group bought in an article on the same topic that was written by different
authors, but they both had different point of views and were almost fighting
each other by using various verbs and adjectives to portray their particular views.
The cereal packets we bought in were frosties,
fruit loops, coco-pops, weet-bix and nutri-grain. We discussed what reading
skills we used when analysing each packet. We would use the code breaker skill
to dissect tables, graphs, like the daily intake %, sugar, fibres, calories and
ingredients.
The books that were bought to class for our
group discussions included such titles as “Where the wild things are”, “You and
Me: our place” and even a Dr. Seuss favourite, “The cat in the Hat”. This then
led to a group discussion about what we thought each author was trying to
portray and what particular reader skill we believed would be suited for each
text.
Overall, I believe that the groups
discussion was great as we were able to discuss any questions or issues we had
with the readings or concepts looked at in the workshop.
Kris Batsiokis
There are a variety of strategies we as teachers can use to help students interpret text. Depending on which teaching method we use from shared reading, guided reading or allowing the students to read independently, students will interpret text differently than others. Interpreting text is way more than making connections with text and images.
ReplyDeleteAs Kris briefly mention, we looked at the four reading practices which facilitates readers to interpret text in a more efficient way. Most readers including myself are unaware that we actually use all these practices to help us interpret a piece of text.
One of the activities allocated for that week was comparing two cereal boxes is a good example of how we use these practices. Frosties and a Nutri-Grain are two different cereals, one targeting the audience of young children and the other one to adolescence and young adults. We looked the images and the colours, the words used on the product that attracted the audience and the layout of the words and images on the product and also looked at the advertisement of the product on television and how it promotes the product.
The four reading practices are mentioned throughout and were indeed the focus of this week. But how much do we really understand? I recall a large degree of difficulty from the whole class in trying to put across their own understandings of the concepts, let alone put them into practice. This will be a point of renewed focus for me personally as I hope to gain the correct understanding before I should head into a classroom.
ReplyDeleteThe text break down activity was a helpful exercise to get me thinking about the different types of texts and just how one message can be expressed and perceived in an almost polar fashion based on author and structure. It was good to have other items to share and discuss in class as the insight provided by other students was a good basis of discussion and the solidifying of concepts.
Joel Blackie.