Why Is Reading Important?

In “Reading for Understanding” chapter 2, Schoenbach and her colleagues outline a “reading apprenticeship framework” that underlies their pedagogical strategies. Among the four dimensions – social, personal, cognitive, and knowledge— they listed, I feel that the social dimension is most significant and compelling in literacy teaching in my content area, which is Chinese language teaching. It is most crucial to create a classroom environment that has met the students’ social needs, where students can benefit from the “more competent others” by participating the social interactions; and teacher is the key role in creating such an environment.

Literacy is a social activity. Social needs have propelled language development. The contemporary literacy pedagogy encourages teachers to rebuild an inviting environment in classroom that is as authentic as possible as the real outside language world, so students can make sense of all their classroom literacy study aiming at practical use. This method motivates students, and arouses students’ interests. It has been proven efficient in both my classroom teaching and my private tutoring.

In my previous classroom teaching in a community college, I designed all classroom conversations associated with the students’ daily life, for example, expressions about their families, their study and work, their personal interests and activities. My students were eager to learn sentences about themselves in Chinese. For my private tutoring, I had lost students because I could not provide appropriate reading material that the students could relate themselves to. Once I realized that there was no way I could find age and level appropriate reading material in the market, I decided to prepare it on my own. I have been writing reading material for different level’s students based on interesting newspaper news, and I try to prepare different topics for different students based on their personal interests and career needs. This strategy has been working quite well with all my private students. I plan to get my reading material published someday if possible.

In classroom, where the “a social-cognitive interactive process” (page 21 in “Reading for Understanding”) is taking place, the expert of the apprenticeship – the teacher, is the key role of the apprenticeship. This is my reflection especially after I have observed some elementary lower grade literacy classes; it is also my personal experience as an English learner.

In childhood (from K to 5th grade) education, literacy occupies most of the daily class time. Especially with lower grades like Kindergarten, first and second grade, the children consistently listen, speak, read and write; all of these activities were monitored and guided by the classroom teacher. In one of the literacy teaching method class I took at Brooklyn College, the professor, who was also an elementary school classroom teacher, showed us a “student reading and writing journal” to us. She monitored each individual student’s reading and writing progress and kept track of it, and made conferences meetings with different groups of students every day in class, talking to students about their reading and writing progress and problems, helping them solve their reading problems and making suggestions. She also emphasized that teacher must use a nurturing tone during the daily conference. This is exactly what the authors of “Reading for Understanding” suggest in chapter 2. The authors suggest that the students learn by participating in activities with “more competent others” who provides support for the activities which the students cannot yet by themselves. Who is the number one “competent others?” No doubt, it is the teacher.

As an adult English learner and a language teacher, I have been reflecting on why it has taken me so many years to acquire English language and why it takes a much shorter period for immigrant children to acquire English language skill in general. I have also discussed this with my English tutor, and the conclusion I have is that I have not had a classroom teacher, a “more competent others” who could constantly provide me with an intensive and supporting learning tool and environment. No matter how motivated I was, no matter how hard I tried, I was on my own, an apprentice without a master. A learner cannot win without a teacher, the most important role in literacy’s social dimension.