WEEK 7 - The Reading and Writing Process
DEFINITION OF TERMS

Kucer, Chapters 5 and 6, and "What Else Matters Besides Strategies and Skills?"

I will also read and comment on "Toward a Theoretical Model of Text Complexity for the Early Grades: Learning From the Past, Anticipating the Future."

For our initial post, let's start with the terms Dr. Beach presented. I'll post them here, with some defintions I've derived from the reading. Please feel free to add your own ideas to mine. To share the list, I've given you each one or two terms to define. We can read each other's definitions and add to them. So at the end of the word list, please look for your name next to two terms --- those will be yours to define. We can come up with common definitions for the words at the end of the week.

In a later post, I'll discuss the readings.

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perception - How we make meaning of language. The traditional view was that perception was a one-way and passive process. The more recent view is that it's an active and transactive process, with interaction between visual and onovisual memory. Some perception is selective, some is constructive.

short term memory - STM - the print being attended to at the moment. It has a limited capacity and it's relatively easy to retrieve information from STM.

long term memory - LTM - contains a person's knowledge of the world, both conceptual and linguistic. It is structured and interrelated to other knowledge in our brains. The capacity for information in LTM is unlimited, as far as we know now, but information in this part of our brain is difficult to retrieve. Storing information here is slow and it's most efficiently done when information is linked to prior information/knowledge and the information is made meaningful.

cognition - wfact-based knowledge, valued in school. This is different from affective knowledge, which is feelings-based, and is less valued in school.

saccadic movement - These are eye jerk movements people experience when they read  text. Our eyes jump along as we read. They do not sweep smoothly across the words. As we read, our eyes jump ahead or go forward (progression), then jump backward (regression).

fixations - Our eyes focus on the first third of most words, but when words become difficult to understand or decode, we stop, or fixate on them longer. Readers experience more fixations on content words, longer words, and unfamilir words, moreso than shorter, familiar words. The number of fixations required to process text varies from text to text and reader to reader.

regressions - when our eyes return to words we've seemingly already read. We look back to check for meaning and understanding.

readablity - is the number of words and sentences, diffiult words and sentences, and average sentence length in a text passage. Readability formulas are word based and tend to be limited to strictly the number of words read. This formula discounts other important aspects of readability such as sentence complexity, similar language patterns, and chunking of interrelated, embedded ideas.

text complexity - Texts can be very different from linguistic aspects, which includes syntactic sentence complexity, an author's language patterns and words choices, and the hierarchy of interrelated ideas. It's also affected by the reader's conceptual background and perception of the text.

predictability - how readily a reader can predict what comes next in text. It's the relationship between the reader and the text/author. Predictability makes reading easier or harder, fluent or disfluent, depending on how predictable it is. Factors that affect predictability include the match between the author's and reader's language, the use of natural language patterns, the use of repetitive sequences, the overlap between print and pictures, and the reader's conceptual background as it relates to the text.

MEGAN:  transaction - what transpires between two entites. In the case of reading, transaction occurs between the reader and the text/author. There's a conversation going on between the two, and it can vary greatly from reader to reader, or from text to text by one reader.

JENNY:  skill - a skill is a learned way to do something. It helps do a task more efficiently, more quickly. Reading is composed of many skills.

JENNY:  strategy - a way a task is accomplished. There are various strategies when one reads. Some strategies include rereading, deep reading, asking questions as we read, and visualizing as we read.

MEGAN:  metacognition

COURTNEY:  epistemic beliefs

COURTNEY: self-efficacy

KAITLIN:  motivation

KAITLIN:  engagement