Teaching the Word "Restaurant": A Deweyan View
George Demetrion
George.Demetrion@lvgh.org
Literacy Volunteers of Greater Hartford
July 2003

Part I

Some time ago I was working with a group of adults who were reading at an intermediate level as determined by our program in our Basic Literacy program. In terms of the CASAS, their scores ranged in the low 200s. In terms of the LVA created READ, they scored on the C-D range on an A-F scale. This group was able to read short narratives of 2-3 pages in a given two-hour session.

One story that they read was titled Good-Bye Television that includes the following paragraph:

"I looked at my family. They were sitting quietly in front of the television set watching a football game. No one was talking. 'That is the way we act every night and every weekend!' [the mother] thought. 'We are in the same room, but we are never really together. I have to do something about this right now.'"

The mother then shut the TV off, the family began to talk. Certain problems arose. The family began working on the problems and set a one-hour rule per day for the TV.

It was an interesting lesson and raised a lot of discussion. We worked hard both on proficiently reading the text and probing the content.

With this group, I may preview some words in advance. We'll read through the narrative. I'll note words with which they're having difficulty. I give time for students to sound them out. I try to hold back other students who want to jump in. We work through and continue probing the content of the narrative all the way through the lesson. At the end, I'll jot down the words on the white board that they had trouble with. We work on them by (a) sounding them out, (b) breaking them into syllables, (c) or (d) through sight word memorization. Then I'll do some drill activities with the words.

Here's a question. In one of our stories the word "restaurant" came up. I wrote the word on the board. We began to sound it out. They got "rest," and were working on the sounds in the last two syllables. They just couldn't put the word together. I spent a few moments working through the word, depending only on phonemic awareness clues, as I thought it was important for them to master that word in that way. I eventually gave up. I told the students, “it is a place where you can get something to eat.” They got “restaurant” immediately. In formal terms, I activated the schema that provided the context where they were able to perceive the word in a flash. The work we did on the word helped to “prime the pump,” which resulted in the students "earning" the word once the appropriate schema was activated.