Terrance On His Own With Course Texts

By Author: AMANDA
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We can trace the impact of such instruction into students' independent reading of challenging academic materials. A few days later, Terrance reads a press release on a recent First Amendment case while being interviewed about his reading process and comprehension of the text. To begin, he scans the text and responds to the interviewer's question, "Do you have a sense of what it might be about?"

SAN FRANCISCO—The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California announced today that a student group at Deer Valley High School had won the right to hold a peace rally in the fall. The Antioch Unified School District agreed to allow the rally to continue after the ACLU of Northern California intervened on behalf of the students.

Schools um, schools agree to allow students' peace rally to be held in the fall. I guess that means that they can like rally together, not make any noise I guess, and like assemble, like the rights to assemble, but you Omega Seamaster Replica have to be peaceful with it, so that's what it sounds like to me.

Terrance ...
... reveals to the interviewer that he is making a connection to another text he has read: "Um, your rights, the First Amendment rights, actually, I was thinking, when I was reading this." Terrance then reads the title of the press release aloud and confirms his initial ideas about the text. As he speaks, we hear echoes of Terrance's experience reading and discussing the First Amendment in class:

That's almost like what I was just saying. You have the right to assemble and freedom of speech and things like that. And so, that's what they just got, they won their First Amendment. I was thinking of, your, the right to assemble, but it has to be peaceful. 'Cause if it ain't peaceful, then some'n, then the department might take you to jail. Well, you'll most likely go to jail if you start throwing bombs and things like that.

The interviewer probes, "What about those numbers next to, um, the title? What does that mean to you? Anything?" In his response, we see more of Terrance's ability to draw on what he knows to interpret textual clues:

Terrance: Yeah, it actually does. The day that they, that north California school had won the case, or either it's the date that they started the trial or started the case for them to win their peace rally.
Interviewer: So, it doesn't say anything here about a case. You're predicting there's some sort of case? How did you know that?

Terrance: Because it says, -when it says, "Following ACLU actions, Northern California high school students win their First Amendment victory." And it says they won, and then it says a victory, so I guess it got to do with a case, and then this is a press release, so I guess it got to do with the news, and a courthouse and stuff like that, and so. And it is the First Amendment, so...
Interviewer: You are bringing so much schemata to this, because often I think a lot of students who read something about winning some sort of victory might be thinking about athletics, or you know, but you're thinking of a victory like a, like a legal victory.
Terrance: Yes, ma'am.
Having made a prediction about the text, Terrance goes on to read the first paragraph and think aloud to show the interviewer how he is making sense of it:

And what I just read was about how the students just won the right to have their peace rally. And yesterday I learned that the ACLU was the protectors of the First Amendment, well the amendment rights, all the rights that you Breitling Replica Watches have in the amendments. So I guess that this is just what you will read in the rest of the document.

Terrance read the entire press release, stopping to share his thinking and interpretations, and just as often, to share what he found confusing or puzzling in the text. In this independent reading, we see Terrance drawing on his experiences in class, his considerable background knowledge about the topic, his growing strategic repertoire, and his understanding of how texts work, to make sense of a complex text and to connect that text to other texts he has read. Terrance enacts an identity as a knowledgeable, confident, resilient reader, undaunted in the face of complexity, interested in the outcome of the case, and able to bring a repertoire of text-based, discipline-specific, problem-solving strategies to bear on his reading (Schoenbach & Greenleaf, 2009).