Friday Night

After a lovely evening when I wore sandals outside, we awoke this morning to a wintry mix of snow and rain. Fortunately, I didn't have to go outside, as the Westin is attached to the convention center. I did notice that the roooms were freezing, however. I am wondering what transpired weatherwise in Maine. Specifically, I am worried about my crocuses and am now thinkng of heading home.

But let's get back to the day at TESOL. Melissa and I got ourselves out of bed and down to the convention center to hear the Plenary. We were intrigued by the title (The Evolving Reading Brain:Implications for Cognitive and Linguistic Development)of reading and brain research and we were really glad we went. The speaker was Maryann Wolfe from Tufts. if you have the chance to hear her, please go! She is extremely passionate and articulate-and very interesting. She began by talking about how it took 2000 years to develop our writing system and we expect students to learn the basics of it in about 2000 days.

Dr. Wolfe explained how groups of cells get together in our brains and specialize. Concepts develop and create webs in our brains. She showed semantic webs around the words lime and lion. Lion has a much richer web of associations, but is the more difficult to decode. It turns out that lion, because of the rich associations is the more recognizable word to young readers, not the more easily decoded lime.

Another highlight for me was the importance of semantic flexibility, the knowledge that words can have more than one meaning-polysemous words. Dr. Wolfe stresses that we should be teaching this awareness early on in the literacy curriculum. I intend to do that when I return.

It was a great plenary and I forced myself to attend afterward a session on a topic that did not promise to be as exciting, a two hour panel discussion on RTI and ELLs. It was difficult to sit through in some ways, but I did not come away with answers, but I now have a few questi

In the afternoon I went to a workshop by William Grabe where he shared the results of a research project on reading. He tried to find an effective strategy for reading comprehension and the answer is graphic organizers, outscoring comprehension questions and vocabulary exercises by a long shot.

Lastly, Ruth and I went to a workshop ld by our friends Jane Yedlin and Caroline LInse. They spoke about the importance of non-fictin books in primary reading instruction. We looked at various books and evaluated their effectiveness using a rubric they had devised. I was suprised to see how many books had pictures that do not match the print.

Now it's Friday night and we will -Lindabe heading home tomorrow. I am looking forward to going home, but there is one more day of TESOLing. I'll try to make it worthwhile