Buehl 3 and 4

Towards the beginning of chapter 3, there are two different sample passages that require a lot of background knowledge. The first is about Yemen, and the whole time I was reading, I could think about what a challenge this passage could pose to students. The second was about Nicotine, and I read the whole thing without once thinking about the range of background knowledge. The passage about Yemen revealed to me my own lack of understanding and presented concepts where my background knowledge is shallow, while I was completely comfortable reading the nicotine passage. It will be much harder for us to detect stumbling blocks for students in our areas of expertise. Maybe we should swap texts with a history teacher to spot difficult parts.

Chapter 4 is all about anticipation of what’s coming in the reading to prepare students. Some of these methods introduce the students to the topics to be covered later. Heather, how does this align with what we were saying in methods about only introducing students to vocabulary once they are ready to use it? These reading strategies seem to me to be saying the opposite.