Readicide Chapter 4 ppgs. 99-109

In Chapter 4 of Readicide Gallagher discusses various ways of breaking down text for better understanding. One of the ways he mentions is by breaking the reading up into parts that way the students won’t be so overwhelmed when it comes to reading the difficult and very long text. Another way, which seems very simplistic and common, but at the same time surprised me was the idea of providing topics and or themes to students during the reading. Providing topics for students not only helps the child become more aware of what the text is about, but allows them to search for context clues within the text that further enhances understanding of the reading. I truly believe that this method is one of many that have been very successful. Providing topics and or themes does in fact allow the student to be able to read complex material and gather information about it that is needed. This teaching strategy can also be used in other forms of literacy such as communication. When it comes to communicating, especially in foreign languages, I find it interesting that if given topics, I am capable of singling out the context clues within the sentence and forming a better understanding of what the person is trying to say. For example, in Spanish class, when we first begin to learn the language, our teacher would say various statements in Spanish although we had no clue what each meant. However, as the class progressed, and we became more familiar with certain vocabulary, our teacher begins to speak even more in Spanish. Here intentions were to get us to understand the context clues and be able to determine what the sentence meant.

Readicide Chapter 3

Chapter three in Readicide was very interesting to me. It talks about how the over-analyzation of teachers can be one of the main causes. Who would have ever thought that a teacher reading a story to the children and then decides to ask questions coud be a cause of why students lose interest in reading. This idea or thought could very well be true for the students in elementary school. However, for those students in middle school and high school definitely lose interst due to the text being boring, laziness, and ways to find shortcuts. I noticed that the author also mentioned how one page papers (REFLECTION BASED) were good ways to keep the interest of readers. I find that to be very true due to the fact that each student is capable of expressing how they feel. It also allows the child read deep into the text and gather a better understanding. It assures them that their is no right or wrong answer and builds their confidence in expressing their opinions.