The Importance of Academic Vocabulary with Struggling Readers

Secondary students often struggle with content area reading because of a “slump” that occurs around the fourth grade. While secondary teachers cannot monitor everything that happens around this time, they can provide strategies for combating this slump and increasing the confidence of struggling readers. Some of these strategies include: activating prior knowledge, questioning, creating mental images and summarizing (Session 3 PowerPoint, Gritter). For a math classroom, constantly defining and reviewing academic vocabulary are going to be key strategies for me to include on a daily basis both for my struggling readers and for my grade level and beyond readers (Daniels & Zemelman, 2014). Tier 1 and tier 2 vocabulary will tend to be the dominant focus in my classroom as common, everyday words and words that span across various disciplines will be the most beneficial for struggling readers in the long run. Boosting their vocabulary a few words at a time, a “slow and steady” approach, will glean the highest results in improving their reading skills. Lastly, I want to incorporate content area reading and investigation that goes beyond just my lessons, textbook chapters and word problems. This may take longer to incorporate, as I will have to be creative in where I look for math based reading, but it will be a welcomed challenge to be able to really apply our classroom topics to the real world while boosting the reading level of my students.

Daniels, H. & Zemelman, S. (2014). Subjects matter: Exceeding standards through powerful content area reading, second edition. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Textbooks

Since textbooks were introduced into American classrooms, they have been the main focus and source of information for our classes. Using only one resource provides a one sided and narrow view of the world. I may not face this specific issue on a daily basis in my secondary math classes but an issue I will face is combating the specific type of thinking that textbooks fosters throughout the year. Each text has it’s own outline and structure, which funnels students into this “one way” mindset for solving problems. We need to allow students to glean “specific practical thinking strategies that help [them] to dig meaning out of a document in any content field” (Daniels & Zemelman, 2014, p.4). As a math teacher, I constantly want to be incorporating other content areas into my lessons so as to create real world connections for my students. While textbooks try to provide these connections, I would prefer to utilize other sources such as newspaper or scientific articles, literary texts and technology. Allowing students to find our math topics in their everyday lives will increase retention rates and help them draw deeper connections to the material.

Daniels, H. & Zemelman, S. (2014). Subjects matter: Exceeding standards through powerful content area reading, second edition. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.