What Readers Really Do ─ Teaching the Process of Meaning Making

Barnhouse, a literacy consultant for elementary through high school, and Vinton, a literacy consultant who works in public schools, consider how students make meaning of texts. They begin with chapters on what it means to understand a text and read, and what readers know and do to create a significant, personal meaning from a text, and also discuss the concepts of comprehension, interpretation, and understanding. They outline their experiences with reading instruction in various classrooms, analyzing how readers make their way from confusion to clarity, infer the significance of details, look closely at patterns to create understandings, put all the parts together to revise their understandings, and evaluate the worth of a text by questioning and considering its relevance. For these chapters, they describe their classroom observations and implications, lessons that address the issues they observed, their instructional practices, and additional ideas and examples for learners in diverse classrooms. There is no index. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Dorothy Barnhouse is the coauthor of the Heinemann title What Readers Really Do. She has built her professional life around her love of reading and writing. A freelance editor and writer for many years, she began teaching through a fellowship at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. She is currently a literacy consultant working in elementary, middle, and high schools in New York City and across the country. Dorothy also teaches graduate and undergraduate writing workshops and has received several grants for her writing, including one from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Email planningservices@heinemann.com if you would like to contact Dorothy Barnhouse directly about professional development support.Vicki Vinton is a literacy consultant and writer who has worked in schools and districts across the country and around the world. She is the author of Dynamic Teaching for Deeper Reading: Shifting to a Problem-Based Approach (2017), and coauthor of What Readers Really Do: Teaching the Process of Meaning Making and The Power of Grammar: Unconventional Approaches to the Conventions of Language. Vicki is also author of the novel The Jungle Law. Additionally, you can find Vicki online, at the popular literacy blog To Make a Prairie (www.tomakeaprairie.com).