My Thoughts on Chapter 5

According to the text, students need to bring knowledge, experience, and motivation to a text. By reading this chapter, I understand that it is very importnat for students to have knowledge about a text they are reading. When a student is learned in a specific subject, they can confront more complicated text that deal with that subject. This is because they have a broader knowlege of the subject matter. Experienced readers are also very important when reading a text. When I was in school, I loved to read. Sometimes I would read a book that was not of the best quality, and I would have extreme difficulty trying to understand what was going on. I would use context clues and write them down in my notebook. That was one way I used my experience as a reader. I also believe if a student is allowed to read something of interest to them, it will enhance motivation. This is very important as they grow as a reader.

Information text, narrative text, and digital text were all mentioned in chapter five. The one that I really enjoyed reading about was digital text. The book states, "Digital texts are noteworthy for their prevalence in students' lives." I believe this statement is very true. Many students keep blogs or things on the internet. I also think it is important for teachers' to use digital text in their classroom, since it is so prevelant in society today. Dr.Bishop showed us a digital text on Cairbou on the national geographic website. I think this would be very informative to use in the classroom. Many students do not have the opportunity to travel and see other places or animals, so I think digital text would be a great way to bring it to the students. If a class is studying about Africa, since a field trip would be impossible, the teacher could show digital text of Africa. This could be used in many various, educational ways.

Another point I saw that was very important in the book was finding a variety of texts. Many teachers have a very limited selection of text that are available for the students. I believe that it is important to have a wide variety of text because it will better meet the need of the wide interest areas of the students. Teachers can find great information on different types of text by using the search engines on the internet. The book gives great search engines that could be used including google, yahoo, answers, and dogpile. Teachers really have no excuse for knowing the range of different text that are available for topics being taught. The only thing they must do is find and computer and start searching.