My First Encounter with Content Area Reading and Writing

Content Area Reading and Writing

MY REFLECTION

As teachers, we are put in a position to educate the youth, equipping them with skills that they need to be effective and competent citizens in society. This implies that we not only help create an awareness of these skills but also that we need to provide opportunities for our students to use and practice these skills. In is the hope of the genuine teacher that students develop an appreciation for the skills learnt through their use of it in the classroom setting and otherwise. Now, keeping this in mind, we examine the pedagogy deemed acceptable not only for teachers in St.Lucia but world wide. Despite the variations in the role of the teacher and student over time, it is a common fact that to emerge from the education system successfully, a student must be able to read and write efficiently. The undisputed truth of this statement stems from the realization that all classroom instruction consists of some form of interaction between students and some form of written (or otherwise) text. Students then need to be able to read, understand what they read and produce text of their own.

As a language arts teacher, those skills seemed to be solely my responsibility to teach and the lack of a child’s ability to perform these skills fell to the most part on the language arts teacher. To be quite honest, I cannot recall any of my lessons deliberately aimed at making connections with language arts and the other subject areas that my students were in. My philosophy governing my choice of teaching strategies and lesson activities was for my students to find meaning in the content taught by seeing its usefulness in everyday life, not in their other subject areas. The stigma attached to the area of language art was bad enough far less for me to make the mistake of affiliating it with other subjects that a student possibly disliked or found unimportant. Because of the premise of many students and even teachers, that English was usually one of the most boring classes, I found myself being put a position where making the class as exciting as possible was as equally important as the delivery of the content. This for me went beyond the selection of exciting topics for students to read/research and write on but also to the creation of seemingly outrageous activities to grab their attention and stimulate their minds.

Fortunately for me, I also taught Principals of business and the reality of how poorly my students wrote, whether they were answering questions on a test or writing a research paper, left me with a critical question that changed my perception of Language Arts instruction. Was it my responsibility to teach these children how to write properly for P.O.B assessment or that of their English teacher, my colleague? When asked this question, she of course responded that I should teach the students to answer the questions the way I wanted them to and that her focus was on completing the syllabus. A non English teacher expressed that it actually was the language arts teacher’s responsibility to teach the students how to do research papers and so on. To me, the shifts in responsibilities seemed like excuses to get away from the extra work and effort needed to produce competent Language Arts Students. Despite my initial ignorance of the undeniable notion that a child’s ability in the area of language arts affects their performance to a significant degree in other subjects, I had come to a realization that this was so. Therefore a new challenge had been placed in my hands with so many questions arising that can only now begin to be answered through my introduction to and examination of Content Area Reading and Writing, which from henceforth will be abbreviated as CARW.

CARW instruction is in part based on a constructivist view that students build their own knowledge given the appropriate materials and resources to interact with and the fact that teaching and learning requires some form of interaction of students with text. Keeping in mind that teachers are largely responsible for skill development towards competent citizenship, CARW instruction is aimed at developing students’ ability to understand and communicate their understanding of text read in any content or subject area. The focus of CARW instruction is to arm students with the skills they need to become critical readers, thinkers and writers, no matter what the content of the text entails. Helping these students develop such expertise would not only prove beneficial in the English class but in any subject area as well.

Had I known of the existence of CARW and its implications in classroom instruction prior to my enrollment in the programme, I would have considered myself a more efficient Language Arts teacher. Nevertheless, as novice teachers like myself strive to develop new literacies that are associated with the pedagogy of the modern student. It is hoped that we are able to become competent and effective teachers who will in turn provide the appropriate learning experiences that would encourage development of competent and effective students, to build our nation.