New England Reading Association

students and the potential power of engagement withliterature in “First things first: Why good books and timeto respond to them matter.” Pegi Deitz Shea shares manywonderful ways of “Eliciting picture book responses upand down the grade level ladder, and back and forthacross the curriculum.” Complementing Lee’s and Pegi’sarticles, Mary McMackin and Nancy Witherell explorehow “Using leveled graphic organizers to differentiateresponses to children’s literature” benefit all children.From an international perspective, Sasan Baleghizadehand Zeinab Dargahi’s “The effect of nursery rhymeson EFL children’s reading ability” describes how theyhave successfully used nursery rhymes to support theirbeginning English language learners in Iran developtheir language skills.We are also delighted to have Jana Echevarria andMaryEllen Vogt, co-developers of the SIOP Model,share with us the article “Using the SIOP Modelto improve literacy for English learners”. Jana andMaryEllen emphasize the importance of providinginstructional support for children who are acquiringEnglish-language proficiency so that they developEnglish proficiency as quickly as possible, and thereforeexperience success in the classroom where Englishis spoken. They present convincing argument for theSIOP Model as “the type of instruction that makes adifference, the kind of instruction that gives Englishlearners the best chance of achieving academically whiledeveloping English proficiency.”In his article “The reading strategies used bymale and female English language learners: A study ofColumbian high school students” Alex Poole reportsthat overall both males and females use problem-solvingstrategies with high frequency, but that females usereading strategies much more frequently than males.He calls attention to the fact that English languagelearners who are not active strategy users would havedifficulty in becoming proficient readers unless theyreceive explicit strategy instruction.Jenna Cambria and John T. Guthrie’s “Motivatingand engaging students in reading” talks about readingmotivations as interest, dedication, and confidence;Jenna and John then proceed to offer six motivationpractices that teachers can implement daily in theclassroom.Further, we present you with an article on acurrently “hot” topic—Response to Intervention (RtI).iv EditorialKatharine Shepherd and George Salembier sharetheir experience with Response to Intervention (RtI)in “Leading, learning and literacy: Implementing aResponse to Intervention approach in the RiversideElementary School” that has resulted in significantchanges in classroom practice for teachers.In “From lecture-based to discussion-based instructional approach: The pedagogical journey of aChinese professor” we bear witness to Wen Ma’s transformation as a learner and as a teacher educator. “Mylived experience has taught me that as educators, weneed to critically reflect on and expand our thinkingand practices to better respond to our students’ learningneeds in the new socio-cultural realities in which weteach and live.”In keeping with our theme: “Children’s response toliterature” our departmental columns begin with Reviewof Professional Books focusing on “Response to literatureand creating worlds from words: Armchair travelersand artifacts of journeys in images and connections.”Department Editor Sandip L. Wilson, and a teamof reviewers: Jane Ellen Brady, Janet Hill, JenniferJohnson, Jane E. Kelley, Kara Tripp, Jane WellmanLittle, and Terrell A. Young reviewed eight excellentbooks that present “a wealth of practices that bringsbooks and children together and powerful argumentsfor the role of literature in the lives of children in andout of the classroom, connecting family, friends, andclassroom with home and school.” Sandip also takesthe lead in Book Beat with co-authors Laura Dunbarand Barbara S. Lovley. In this column, “Response toliterature: Perspectives, voices, discovery, and identity”,the authors review books that are appropriate for PK12 readers and are rich in opportunities for responseto literature. In Review of Research in the Classroom,Diane Kern’s “Reading and responding in the 21stcentury” turns to three young readers of reader responsetheory to gain research-based insight into teachingreader response in 21st century classrooms. Finally,in Computers in the Classroom, Paula Saine and JuliaKara-Soteriou’s “Using podcasts to enrich responses toglobal children’s literature” describes “a possible wayteachers can draw upon their students’ backgroundknowledge and experiences to construct meaning, and respond to literature while incorporating newtechnologies and teaching new literacies .”Enjoy!

First things first:Why good books and time to respondto them matterLee GaldaUniversity of Minnesota, MinnesotaIwas just 21 when I began teaching and now Iam nearing retirement. In the intervening 40years, I have watched the careful selection andsystematic use of children’s books ebb and flowin schools as short-sighted educational mandatesand ill-conceived “scientific” studies have pushed books,and time to read and respond to them, out of the schoolday; as “time on task” has come to mean time on test,or worksheet, instead of time engaged in reading realbooks. Yet the achievement gap keeps growing, withmany of our young people graduating from high schoolnot only not reading well, but not reading at all. Forthose of us who feel that engagement with books andthe development of literate lives is important for ourstudents, and that literate citizens are important for ourworld, this is troubling.To make my argument that children’s andadolescent books, and time to respond to them, areimportant, I begin with “anecdotal evidence” of thepower of literature (Galda & Cullinan, 2003), and thenmove to a consideration of some of the many reportsof systematic data-based research on response, andreading in literature-based classrooms. While I focuson my own work in this area, I contextualize it withinthe larger research community. Finally, because of theretrospective nature of this article, I consider both earlyand current research. But first, the anecdotal evidence.I began my teaching career as a middle schoolEnglish teacher with a B.A. in English and minimalpreparation to teach, not particularly well-equippedto teach the diverse group of students in my classes,especially the seventh graders in those three classes ofThe NERA Journal (2010), Volume 46(1)more than 35 each. The smaller, eighth-grade classeswere marginally easier to manage. I struggled, as mostfirst year teachers do, and so I attempted to rescuemyself, and my career, with the best lifesaving device Iknew—books. I established a library in my classroom,filling shelves with cheap paperbacks from the bookclub that was available, books from library sales, booksfrom my own library. Some students contributed booksas well. I also established Wednesday as our sustainedsilent reading day, and it turned out to be the best day ofthe week. Everyone read, even those who didn’t like to.So did I, even when my principal asked me if I “didn’thave any work to do.” My response, that I didn’t seehow I could ask kids who didn’t like to read to sit andread a book while I did something else, surprised him,but he said okay, shook his head, and left me to it. Afterjust a few months, something interesting happened; mystudents began exchanging opinions about the booksthey were reading, sometimes writing their commentson note cards that we kept in a box on the bookshelf,sometimes in oral exchanges. Then other students, kidswho were not in my classes, began dropping by beforeand after school to borrow books. We had createda community of readers without lesson plans, bookreports, tests, or mandates. We got our other work doneMonday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday; Wednesdayswere for books. Most of my behavior managementproblems disappeared, at least on Wednesdays. Thatyear I learned the “communalizing” nature of thelanguage of books as they drew my students and othersin the school into a reading community.Several years later, after adding a master’s degreeFeature Articles 1

in reading to my bachelor’s degree in English, I workedas a reading specialist in a large, urban, public schoolsystem in the mid-west, in one of the most populousand poorest elementary schools in the city. These werethe days of ability grouping, and I taught intact classesas the reading/language arts teacher for those second,third, and fourth grade students who were in thelowest quartile in reading achievement. It became clear,quickly, that most of these students could learn to read,but they didn’t want to learn to read. When reading waskits, worksheets, tests, and low-level comprehensionexercises done with contrived texts, why should theyhave wanted to? So, while I worked with the standardinstructional materials, I began to gradually diminishthe time we spent with them and to increase the amountof time I spent reading aloud, they spent “reading”independently, and we spent talking about books. Wehad an abundance of good books, thanks to Title Imoney. Over the four years I spent in that school, everychild learned to read. Not all were on grade level, butthey all learned how to read and to like reading, at leastenough to spend time doing it. I was not the magic inmy classroom; it was the books. During these years, Ilearned the power of a book left unfinished by me sothat my students would hunger to read to find out whathappened. I learned the lure of even books like Go, Dog,Go when peers invested it with importance. I learnedthe effectiveness of books-on-tape with book-in-handas a way to make struggling readers feel successful. Ilearned the power of reading aloud from books thatwere just beyond the reach of my students as readers,but well within their reach as thinkers. In other words,I was taught how books help children learn to read bymaking them want to learn to read.Twenty years later, after conducting several researchprojects exploring children’s literature, response, andliterature-based instruction with elementary and middleschool students, I spent an entire academic year in thesecond-grade classroom of one of my graduate students.I was there three mornings each week, and anothergraduate student observed three mornings as well;we overlapped on Fridays, when we also met with theteacher, who had begun implementing a response-basedreading program and wanted us to observe, critique, andhelp her plan. During that year, we saw Lisa’s secondgrade student become not only increasingly fluent withgreater comprehension, but increasingly sophisticatedand engaged readers (Galda, Rayburn, & Stanzi,2000).Out of the many anecdotes that I could relate aboutthis year, one in particular stands out. The first chapterbook that Lisa read aloud was Patricia MacLachlan’sArthur, for the Very First Time. The students respondedwith such enthusiasm that, after winter break, theyasked me to read it to them again, over their lunchhour, which meant they would eat in the classroom and2 Feature Articleseven miss recess, all in order to hear the book again.Towards the end of the book, sometime in January, Iasked them a question—why is it important to “lookthrough the faraway end?”—that related to a rathersophisticated theme in the book—learning to see frommultiple perspectives. We talked, briefly, but no oneresponded with great enthusiasm or insight, so we wenton to other ideas. Yet, over the course of the next fewmonths, many of their discussions of the chapter booksthat they read for their discussion group revolved aroundthe idea of perspective taking, without those words everbeing uttered. Finally, one bright April day, one of thestudents, Amarchi, came up and hugged me when Ientered the classroom, shyly whispering that she knewwhy it was important to look through the “faraway end.”Amazed, I asked why, and she told me “Well, I waslooking through my binoculars at a bird in a tree. WhenI looked through the close-up end, I saw the bird, butwhen I looked through the faraway [other] end, I sawthe whole tree” (Galda, Rayburn, & Stanzi, 2000, p. 1).This eight-year-old had kept both book and questionin her heart, and brought them into her life, coming tothe realization that there i

New England Reading Association JOURNAL Volume 46 Number 1 2010 EDITORIAL iii Children’s response to literature Helen R. Abadiano, Central Connecticut State University, CT Jesse P. Turner, Central Connecticut State University, CT Lynda M. Valerie, Central Connecticut State University, CT FEATURE ARTICLES