Entry 11. Final Reflection

Throughout the semester, we have taken the time to dive deeper into different elements of literacy. Not only did we discuss the various elements and their definition, but we also discussed what these elements mean for students beyond their skill and how we can support students development. Prior to our class discussions, I understood the importance of automaticity (or so I thought). Automaticity was important because it allowed students to read effortlessly and fluently. But, what I was missing in my understanding is why. Through our readings and deeper dive discussions, I learned about the relationship between fluency and comprehension. While I understood these two elements separately, I was unaware of their interaction. As readers, we have a set amount of cognitive energy available. If we need to use that cognitive energy to break down words and decode them, we take up a majority of this cognitive energy leaving only a small amount to work towards comprehending the text (Rasinski, 2014). Therefore, if you can't automatically recognize words and read them, you will struggle to comprehend what you're trying to read. This concept creating a whole new understanding of automaticity, fluency, and comprehension. 

Coming into the course, I had had previous discussions on background knowledge and how it can affect students learning and understanding. However, once again, I didn't realize how deeply background information affected students literacy. We have all heard the statistics about how students from low income families have less background knowledge and therefore will struggle more in school. One thing I learned in this class and from the article by Kucer (2015) is that all students have background knowledge and it is up to the teacher to help the student use that to their advantage. For example, if a student is learning English as a second language, one might assume that they dint have much background knowledge in English. However, these students have an understanding of language and a set of rules that help them communicate. These understandings and rules from a previous language can be used to create understanding and rules in English too. This is something I had never considered before. 

While there are ways to use students background knowledge, sometimes students do simply lack it, and this can affect more than just their understanding of a topic. For example, in a class activity we discussed how different letters and letter combinations can create many different sounds. This can greatly complicate things for English language learners. Not only are there many ways to make the same sounds, but some letters in the English alphabet make different sounds than in the other alphabets. This difference in background knowledge can create difficulties when ELLs try to spell or sound out words.

Looking back over the past 11 entries, I can see how my blog helped deepen my understanding. These blogs required me to not only sit and reflect on what we were learning, but by making me type out my response I had to organize my thoughts. This time to organize helped me notice gaps in my understandings in topics. It also helped me notice new aspects that simply reading and comprehending didn't prompt me to realize. Overall, the blogs helped me deepen my understanding and also now provide me with quick glimpses to my journey of understanding literacy more deeply.

References

Rasinski, T. (2014). Fluency matters. International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education, 7(1), 3–12.