Week 4

Why?

This week I wanted to focus on the Freebody and Luke article, In particular I wanted to explore what it means to be a participant and explore how children are participants in literacy and numeracy. 

What?

Freebody and Luke (1990) discuss that to be successful readers children need to develop the roles of a “code breaker (how do I crack this?),a text participant (what does this mean?), text user (‘what do I do within this, here and now?), and text analyst (what does this all do to me?) (p. 7). Throughout this topic we have already discussed children as text users, this week’s focus will be on children as participants.  After reading Freebody and Luke (1990) here is my understanding of a text participant:

Participants develop the ability to engage with and make meaning from the text itself. Essentially it is the process of comprehension, this process requires participants to draw interpretations from connecting written elements, and prior knowledge and experiences in order to understand the unexplained parts of the text. When discussing young children as participants in literacy and numeracy we are essentially talking about how they make meaning. To help broaden my understanding of participants and how teachers facilitate and support children as participants in literacy and numeracy, I did some further reading. Which is when I came across Maine’s (2013) ‘How children talk together to make meaning from texts: a dialogic perspective on reading comprehension strategies’.

The article builds on the meaning of a participant recognising that that children bring their own experiences, expectations and motivations to reading; therefore influencing  their meaning making. “Meanings are not fixed but fluid and situational, created by readers who draw on their experiences, ask questions, evoke images and make predictions to comprehend” (Maine, 2013, p. 151). To facilitate children's meaning making if texts, comprehension instruction should place importance on reading together and on prompting open-ended discussions to enable children to conclude their own meanings.

What Now?

I agree that teachers should view comprehension as “thinking that is a dynamic and continuous process of thought, rather than a series of pre-packaged skills” (Maine, 2013, p. 155). It is the teacher’s role to encourage this thought process, to offer rich and varied literacy experiences for children, and to model the crucial metacognitive skills that enable creative thinkers to develop their own understanding and reasoning (Maine, 2013). In practice I will value comprehension as a thinking process, children’s meaning making, and their varied interpretations and responses of texts in literacy. Although this weeks reading has not discussed numeracy the same principles of thought process and meaning making can be applied to children's numeracy experiences, particularly when their engaged in problem solving. 

References

Freebody, P., and Luke, A. (1990). Literacy programs: Debates and demands in cultural context. Prospect: An Australian Journal of TESOL, 7(3), 7-16.

Maine, F. (2013). How children talk together to make meaning from texts: A dialogic perspective on reading comprehension strategies. Literacy, 47(3), 150-156.