I would say that I agree with the philosophy Weaver discussed in
chapter 15. He discussed the whole language approach, the importance of
students to understand print, and also the practice of decoding texts. All of
these methods are extremely beneficial to students learning and reading
achievement. When Weaver (2002) discussed early reading instruction he made a
very good point about the benefits of teaching the comprehensive literacy
approach. Weaver (2002) explained, “There is a large body of comparative research
that has found that children with comprehensive literacy instruction such as
shared reading, shared writing, phonics taught in context, and lots and lots of
experiences of being able to read to and opportunities to read self-selected books
and write on self-selected topics learn to make sense of print better than
children with traditional, part-to-whole reading instruction” (p. 369). Through
this evidence, it is apparent that all of the different methods of literacy
instruction help students to focus on the print, understand more about the
topic, and learn more from the comprehensive literacy instruction. I think this proof will encourage my
teaching to still incorporate these different comprehensive literacy methods
because they are very valuable and beneficial to student’s literacy growth. My
perspective has changed drastically since I initially took the DeFord TORP. My
score increased the second time so I feel as though I have learned a lot over
the course of this class. I have learned many new valuable teaching methods of helping students comprehend text and increase their literacy rates.
Like you, my score increase on the DeFord TORP as well and I like you, I like the comprehensive literacy methods. I do some of these in my class already but I plan on using more of the methods in the future. I agree with you in that different methods of literacy instruction help students to learn. This course was very informative in giving valuable teaching methods.
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