Response to Chapter 6: Note-making Skills in Literacy

Literacy refers to not only the literate ability to use the letters to read and write, but also the cognitive ability to encode meanings and decode symbolic forms. Students’ literacy is enhanced in the instruction of reading comprehension, the ability to understand, recall, summarize, and synthesize the main ideas they have read. Teachers can teach the second/ foreign language learners the process of reading comprehension explicitly (from eye fixation of words to decoding) and help them monitor their strategies to increase reading comprehension. Making notes is one of the strategies that teachers can teach students to improve reading comprehension. Making notes highly emphasizes the ability to identify the important points and paraphrase or summarize them. Teachers can ask second/ foreign language learners to share their notes in an academic paper in a group, so they can compare and contrast each other’s note-making method. Students can learn from each other to improve their note-making styles. For example, different students summarize the same paragraph in different ways in their notes. Teachers can ask students to explain why they include these points in the summary while others do not, or how they include the same points in different ways. Students can vote for the best summary of a paragraph and discuss why they think the winner’s summary is superior to others and why others’ summaries fail to convey the gist effectively. Recognizing that students need to learn beyond the ability to read and write, teachers need to sharpen students’ ability to read and write to think and learn.