Text Structure and Access

I don't mean to start off on a sour note, but I summed up the majority of the first chapter of BBR as, "standard introductory tripe." The only noteworthy thing in the entire passage was the list on page 27, which had already been covered in greater depth by our other readings.

Moving over to the D&Z selections, we were first shown that the authors' definition of "strategy" could mean one of four different things, which is not something that English usually permits its vocabulary words to do. Once I got past that initial moment of disequilibrium (and wondered why they didn't tidy that up with different terms for each definition), the authors gave us a veritable avalanche of reading strategies for student use before, during and after reading assignments. I was particularly interested in the Anticipation Guide, RAFT and Dramatic Role-playing. How I'll manage to work those into a foreign language classroom on most days, I know not. But I'm aware of them now, and can be pondering it.


The second D&Z chapter on making text readings more accessible flowed quite nicely after the first one (how to help students read them). The main take-away I had was that educators are often under great pressure to cover "everything," but we have nowhere near enough time for that. The primary work-around to the issue is the identification of "fenceposts" which are the biggest, most important ideas and concepts and hit those hard and thoroughly. I can see this being of more use in a history or literature class than a foreign language, or at least in my Latin class. If I had to use a visual metaphor, I would say Latin is more akin to a tower; nearly everything builds off of the first few concepts learned at the beginning of study.