The Use of Independent Reading in the Middle School Classroom

Currently, I am observing in an 8th grade language arts class, where the students I work with like to do the bare minimum to get by in school. The teacher has concerns that the students\u27 reading is not self-motivated. To address this problem, the teacher and I would like to see an independent reading plan be required for the students. The surveys I have developed will ask students, before and after they are reading independently, how prepared they feel for class each day. Also, I will be interviewing the teacher to hear her opinions about the positive and negative aspects of making students read independently

COMPARATIVE STUDY OF STUDENTS’ READING COMPREHENSION ACHIEVEMENT TAUGHT THROUGH GROUP WORK AND INDIVIDUAL WORK

The objectives of this research are to find out whether there is significant difference of students’ reading comprehension achievement between students who are taught through group work and individual work and to determine which one of those two teaching techniques is better for students’ reading comprehension achievement. The research design used true experimental pretest posttest design. Two classes; class X.4 and class X.5 were taken as the sample of the research. Each class consists of 38 students. The result shows that there is a significant difference of students’ reading comprehension achievement between students who were taught by using group work and individual work. The significant increase of students’ achievement in the experimental class 1 (group work) was (p0.05, p=0.000) with the increase of mean in pretest and posttest was 19.52 points. Meanwhile, the significant increase of students’ achievement in the experimental class 2 (individual work) was (p0.05, p=0.000) with the increase was only 7.81 points. The researcher suggests that the English teacher should apply group work techniques in teaching reading comprehension as one of the alternative techniques especially because it has been found that the technique can make the students successful in learning reading comprehension.  Keywords: Group Work,Individual Work, Reading Comprehension Achievement, and Teaching Techniques

A Whole-Class Support Model for Early Literacy: The Anna Plan

The Anna Plan is a unique delivery model for enhancing schoolwide literacy instruction in the primary grades. Based on the principles of Reading Recovery and Four Blocks literacy instruction, it provides supplementary reading instruction through the distinctive use of teaching staff. Over six years, it has resulted in sweeping changes in the way literacy instruction occurs as well as noteworthy increases in children\u27s reading abilities. This article gives a brief history of the authors\u27 work within the Anna Plan, explains each of the model\u27s seven tenets, and describes the research base that drives it. The focal point of the article is the detailed description of the organization and components of the five-day framework used to augment classroom reading and writing instruction. Finally, the authors recount how the Anna Plan has been embraced by two elementary schools and offer some conclusions about what contributes to the success of whole-class support models for early literacy

The impact of literature circles on reading comprehenson in a fourth grade class

In a fourth grade class where the majority of students were reading below grade level, literature circles were introduced and monitored for their ability to (a) raise student motivation to complete class work, (b) improve student interaction and behavior, and (c) raise Fountas and Pinnell reading comprehension levels. Students\u27 class work in the literature circles was compared to similar work from whole group instruction. A rubric measured the attentiveness and behavior of the students in literature circle, whole group, and small group settings. The study was bookended by two Fountas and Pinnell benchmark reading assessments that were compared for signs of reading comprehension improvement. The results show that the students successfully completed literature circle activities with greater frequency and fewer mistakes than other observed class activities. The attentiveness and behavior of the students was improved in literature circle settings over whole group and small group settings. Reading comprehension levels rose at the end of the study, but can not be attributed solely to the introduction of literature circles

The effects of a school intervention on year 10 students : a cognitive and attitudinal perspective : thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in Education (Guidance)

This study examined the effectiveness of a school's new intervention called The Diploma Programme, which aimed to increase academic achievement by encouraging students to develop into self-regulated learners. The programme monitored and rewarded the study skills punctuality and attendance, social co-operation, class-work and homework completion, and bringing correct equipment, by awarding credits towards a diploma. Participants were 33 self-selected Year 10 students who were placed in three groups based on the Year 10 PAT reading comprehension class percentiles. A questionnaire administered before The Diploma Programme and at the end of the school year, examined students' self-reported changes in study skills, as well as in the attitudinal factors academic motivation, locus of control, and self-efficacy. Diploma credits were also examined for significant difference over the year, within and between the three groups. Results indicated that The Diploma Programme was initially effective in encouraging study skills across reading skill levels, but dropped in effectiveness over the year. Results also indicated that while reading skill level influences both study skills and academic achievement, the internal locus of control factor 'effort' can modify levels of performance. The group with high reading skills achieved the highest academically, tended to use the most study skills and to exhibit the highest levels of academic self-efficacy. However, the group with low reading skills, who reported using more 'effort' than the other groups, achieved higher academically and tended to use more study skills by the end of the year than the group with moderate reading skills. Recommendations made to develop and maintain the effectiveness of The Diploma Programme over the year included changes within The Diploma Programme, as well as changes in classrooms and the wider school

Teaching Machines to Read and Comprehend

Teaching machines to read natural language documents remains an elusive challenge. Machine reading systems can be tested on their ability to answer questions posed on the contents of documents that they have seen, but until now large scale training and test datasets have been missing for this type of evaluation. In this work we define a new methodology that resolves this bottleneck and provides large scale supervised reading comprehension data. This allows us to develop a class of attention based deep neural networks that learn to read real documents and answer complex questions with minimal prior knowledge of language structure.Comment: Appears in: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 28 (NIPS 2015). 14 pages, 13 figure

Mockery and Morality in Popular Cultural Representations of the White Working Class

We draw on \'new\' class analysis to argue that mockery frames many cultural representations of class and move to consider how it operates within the processes of class distinction. Influenced by theories of disparagement humour, we explore how mockery creates spaces of enunciation, which serve, when inhabited by the middle class, particular articulations of distinction from the white, working class. From there we argue that these spaces, often presented as those of humour and fun, simultaneously generate for the middle class a certain distancing from those articulations. The plays of articulation and distancing, we suggest, allow a more palatable, morally sensitive form of distinction-work for the middle-class subject than can be offered by blunt expressions of disgust currently argued by some \'new\' class theorising. We will claim that mockery offers a certain strategic orientation to class and to distinction work before finishing with a detailed reading of two Neds comic strips to illustrate what aspects of perceived white, working class lives are deemed appropriate for these functions of mockery. The Neds, are the latest comic-strip family launched by the publishers of children\'s comics The Beano and The Dandy, D C Thomson and Co Ltd.Chav, Children\'s Comics, Cultural Representations, Disgust, Distinction, Humour, Middle Class, Ned, Ridicule, Working Class

Manacled to Identity: Cosmopolitanism, Class, and ‘The Culture Concept’ in Stephen Crane

This article begins with a close reading of Stephen Crane’s short story ‘Manacled’ from 1900, which situates this rarely considered short work within the context of contemporary debates about realism. I then proceed to argue that many of the debates raised by the tale have an afterlife in our own era of American literary studies, which has frequently focused on questions of ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ in its reading of realism and naturalism to the exclusion of the importance of cosmopolitan discourses of diffusion and exchange across national borders. I then offer a brief reading of Crane’s novel George’s Mother, which follows Walter Benn Michaels in suggesting that the recent critical attention paid to particularities of cultural difference in American studies have come to conflate ideas of class and social position with ideas of culture in ways that have ultimately obscured the presence of genuine historical inequalities in US society. In order to challenge this critical commonplace, I situate Crane’s work within a history of transatlantic cosmopolitanism associated with the ideas of Franz Boas and Matthew Arnold to demonstrate the ways in which Crane’s narratives sought out an experience of the universal within their treatments of the particular

Reading Assignment: Group Work, Impacts on Students’ Reading Comprehension

The objective of the research was to know the differences between the ninth grade students of SMPN 1 Rajeg in reading comprehension used group work technique and those used conventional method. The research was conducted to the ninth grade students of SMPN 1 Rajeg which consist of two classes as sample, IX.G as experiment class and IX.J as control class. The IX.G used group work technique in teaching reading comprehension while IX.J used conventional method. The methodology of the research was quasi experimental design and quantitative method. The data of this research were collected by giving the test (pre-test and post-test) to the sample. The collected data were analyzed by using t-test formula. It was used to test hypothesis to know whether there is difference in reading comprehension between the students given group work technique and those given conventional method. The result of the data analysis showed that  was 4.78 higher than  1.99 with 5% of significant level. The data  was higher than   (4.78 > 1.99). It was mean that Hı was accepted while Ho was rejected. It also means that there was significance of students’ reading comprehension between students in experiment class who were taught by group work technique and the students in control class who were taught by using conventional method at SMPN 1 Rajeg. Keyword: Group Work Technique, Reading Comprehensio