Monday, November 7, 2011

Mitra's Response to "Why Is Everyone Talking About Adolescent Lit..."

Snow and Moje make the argument that the inoculation fallacy- “the fallacy that an early vaccination of reading instruction protects permanently against reading failure” (66) - is failing, as proved by the increased demand for adolescent literacy instruction. What I believe further complicates this failure is the vast range in literacy skills presented by students beyond elementary school. For struggling readers, for example, comprehension strategies including previewing, predicting, monitoring, questioning, and summarizing may be effective. But Snow and Moje make the claim that proficient readers already do these things, and that “making them aware of skills they automatically employ or strategies they don’t need may actually interfere with comprehension” (67). 

I appreciate the authors’ emphasis on reading instruction across the curriculum, and professional development that supports this instruction. I particularly like the approach of making apparent to students the differences in structure, language conventions, vocabularies, and criteria for comprehension that the text of each content area includes. Snow and Moje write, “While these differences may be obvious to skilled adults, adolescents benefit from being let in on the secret” (67). In the same way that writing instruction focuses on the differences in genres, reading instruction needs to acknowledge that not all reading is done the same, for the same reasons and purposes , or according to the same rules.

I was confused by the last point about literacy across multiple domains and media. Snow and Moje write, “Digital texts tend to be approached laterally, with ideas running across different chunks of text, whereas paper texts present ideas embedded in a hierarchical structure within a single text and need to be read linearly” (68). I have never heard of reading “laterally” versus “linearly” and am unsure what it means.

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