Learning Blog #6- Chapter 6: Moving Beyond the Traditional Textbook

Why Textbooks Cannot Stand Alone
The textbook has limitations: The strength of a textbook can provide one source of great information, and over viewing of information of topics, but the inability to provide the depth that is truly needed.  To me, it seems like a catch 22, because many educators and readers say that the book is not in depth enough to truly do what it needs to do, but on the other hand complain that it is too big and too long, and it makes it too difficult for students to use it to do homework.  I think the textbook is stuck in a place between wanting to be enough of a source on its own for papers and homework assignments, but not wanting to be overwhelming and therefor not useful.

Multimodal Text and Multitext
Multimodal texts are something that incorporate visual, auditory, spoken, and nonverbal cues to help understanding and learning through technology.  Technology is quickly becoming the most common, frequent, and useful means of learning at all age levels and populations.  Some of the new school teachers prefer it, while "old-school" teachers cannot stand it, but I think it is inevitable.  However, Jewitt says that no one mode is enough alone to teach and do everything it needs to do, but that all of the forms of learning put together can as a group become effective in learning (to read).

Trade books are books that are considered to be in general use, that the students can get from a library or book store.  These are useful when students are starting to write research papers, or reading stories on certain topics and subjects, because textbooks do not contain novels, poems, fiction, non-fiction, sports, etc. all in one, that is again why textbooks are not enough, and we need trade books.  At the same time, we still need the textbooks because they teach the student how to read and comprehend what they are reading in the trade book.

Content Area Literature Circles
Literature circles are researched based and seem to be widely accepted for reading instruction.  At first, fiction was the genre of choice for the small-group based strategy, but now non-fiction has been used also.  The teacher will introduce the book selections to the class, and each group member is given a role, and the roles rotate.  The literature circles are highly interactive which is my favorite way for students to learn, and are appropriate for a wide range of topics and concepts.

Barriers to Comprehension and Learning

Inconsiderate Discourse
Many college students, along with high school students complain that they are too long, too in depth, too hard to understand, the paragraphs are too long, and they have trouble following along and reading the text.  As we have discussed in class before, textbooks seem to be transforming into more graphic organizers, images, features, and layouts that are easier for students to read, they have more examples to look at and read, and in general are written in a more convenient format to help students comprehend what they are reading.

How to Determine Readability of Textbooks and Resources

Checklists: Teachers can use a checklist in judging the strengths and weaknesses of the readability of text material, to see if they feel the textbook, or book will be useful and appropriate for their class.

Rule of Thumb: I think is a pretty cool way to see if the book is appropriate, the student will flip to a random page, and if they spot an unknown word while reading, they put down a thumb, if on that page they put down a whole hand, the book is probably too hard and they should try a different one.

Readability Formulas: 
Frequently used for determining the difficulty of material texts.  There are many different ones, I need to read up more on before I am comfortable discussing each one, but I know they are used to calculate the textbook difficulty in terms of reading-level scores.

Assessing Students' Ability to Use Books
Cloze Procedure: To perceive things as a whole, even if parts are missing.  By using a cloze test, a teacher can find out whether students have prior knowledge about upcoming material and are able to adapt to the author's style.  The purpose is to help the teacher quickly see whether students have adequate background knowledge and understand the language.

The Maze: This is similar to cloze, but easier for students to respond to.  The teacher selects a passage of 100 to 120 words from a representative part of the textbook and deletes every 5th or tenth word, the students then get 3 choices, the correct word, a similar word, and a distracter, a maze takes more time and is harder to construct, but many teachers prefer it.  I love this and use it with my students, for a variety of reading/spelling/comprehension activities:)

This chapter has highlighted the importance of going beyond the textbook and traditional instruction models in the content classroom.  Textbooks can no longer stand alone, and multiple resources are more efficient for learning.