Part 2:
Review
The Units in Part 2 of the
Going the Distance: Reading website have argued that
curricular units on reading consist of at least five phases
(pre-reading, initial reading, reading to integrate
knowledge, short- and long-genre production), and that the
five phases must build on each other in light of the
Standards. Moreover, such curricular units must
build on each other both cognitively and linguistically, so
that students increase their abilities to comprehend a text
and produce language on the basis of that comprehension.
Most crucially, teachers should
be careful to match the input into a task (what kinds
of linguistic and cognitive readiness their students have,
and how that readiness is focused on the task at hand) with
the output they expect (what Standards the
tasks further). If these criteria are upheld, teachers
across the curricula can reuse reading materials, all
the time spiraling upward on the task difficulty
applied to them. In a very real sense, there are few
age-appropriate texts which are too difficult to be read by
a foreign-language student, but there are many tasks which
are too difficult, even while they look simple.
In describing the various levels
at which a reading text can be used, we are arguing that
most reading activities (in the traditional sense) are too
difficult for Grade 4 learners, but that pre-reading
activities that use texts without actually reading
them as message systems must be introduced into the
classroom, so that various skills required to fulfill
Standards are introduced. Grade 4 students will
also probably engage primarily with communication and
connection standards -- the ones with single
triangles, because at this age, students are neither
socially nor cognitively ready to perform more complex
negotiations with cultures, comparisons, or
communities.
By Grade 8, however, students
should be engaged more actively with texts, working through
Phases 1 through 3 (as described in Units 4 through
6). These students are nearing cognitive maturity, and
have a considerable amount of social experience. They
must therefore be engaged with many activities furthering
the communication and connection standards,
and they are ready to work on the culture and
comparison standards more fully. If they are
not linguistically prepared in German (if they are just
starting in a German curriculum), they can still begin to
engage with German culture and make
comparisons, even if they are using English to
express their insights.
Students in Grade 12, just as
those in the college curriculum, should be exposed to the
short- and long-genre production exercises required in
Phases 4 and 5 (as described in Unit 7). Without such
practice in locating and assimilating the social/cultural
information that will enable them to compare cultural
features and join communities, they will not be able
to perform the age-appropriate tasks that the Standards
suggest as appropriate. Reading must therefore be
tied closely to production exercises, because comprehension
cannot remain in the abstract, but is demonstrated most
suitably through students' involved production on the basis
of the world (the community and the culture)
of the text, making connections and
comparisons, not only communicating their own
subjective reactions, moods, and desires.
Finally, as curricula and
facilities permit, reading skills should be extended to the
electronic media: "reading" video and audio clips, and
websites. The latter were the focus of the exercises
outlined in Unit 8. The WorldWideWeb is a very novel
medium that requires particularly high-level reading skills:
unless the reader approaches the web with clear goals in
mind, s/he is very likely to get lost in a maze, since the
web offers many coherent building blocks of information, but
few finished messages.
"Reading" the web in terms of
the Standards means that the connections,
culture, comparisons, and communities
have to be set up by the tasks that make the students
synthesize actively. Unless tasks further that
synthesis, the web can be as much a distracter as a
facilitator for special kinds of cultural learning. In
the best curricular scenario, a web task is Phase 6 of a
reading assignment: a place for a student to exercise his or
her own judgment about what is to be learned in the act of
reading, but a place with very clear boundaries for
successful comprehension and production, as described in the
Standards -- the student must exercise independent
judgment in reading, but that reading must be directed
towards clear goals that expand students' skills in
fulfilling the Standards in appropriate fashion.
A final note: younger students
will need to be walked through these Phases step by step,
because they are not necessarily ready to structure their
own learning actively; poorly-prepared older students may
need to have their learning environments structured
carefully, as well. In contrast, older or more mature
students (well-prepared Grade 8 students and all
non-remedial Grade 12 students) may benefit from knowing
explicitly about the developmental sequence that the teacher
is structuring, moving from pre-reading (Phase 1) through
long-genre production and the web (Phases 5 and 6).
For these older students, the assignments for the various
phases may be profitably gathered into a worksheet that
indicates how one phase builds on another. (For an
example of a blank worksheet, followed by examples of how it
can be filled out and implemented, see the sample
worksheets included here.)