Blog Assignment 2

In one of my literacy classes we were required to summarize several articles. The article I chose for this assignment was written by Sharon Kletzien and was published in a magazine called, The Reading Teacher. The article entitled, Paraphrasing: An Effective Comprehension Strategy, explains how teaching students to effectively paraphrase what they are reading will help with their comprehension skills. Kletzien discusses the differences between paraphrasing and summarizing, and mentions how paraphrasing is effective in measuring how much of what is being read is being understood. Also mentioned in the article is the fact that simply because one can recite the text of a particular selection, does not mean it was understood or that full comprehension was achieved.
The magazine that this article appeared in is a reputable, professional publication read mainly by teachers. The author of the article was a general education classroom teacher for many years and, at the time of the article's publication,was teaching at West Chester University, in Pennsylvania. The intended audience is the educator in general. The author does not single out any particular grade level or subject because this strategy would be effective across the curriculum and for all grade levels. The article is written in the academic language of teaching. The author uses many phrases that a majority of teachers should be familiar with such as, metacognition, textbase, modeling, and scaffolding. Since the author does not explain many of these terms in the context of the article, it would appear that the writer assumes that the reader is an educator of some sort and is familiar with the terms she is utilizing.
The writer did a good job in convincing the reader of the benefits of teaching students to paraphrase what they are reading in order to build comprehension. The author used multiple strategies to achieve her goal. Kletzien begins the article with a vignette about a student named Heather. This was an effective strategy to gain the reader’s interest and keep him or her reading. The author also employed case studies of two other students in order to make her point. Collectively, this showed three students with three separate situations learning to paraphrase in different ways, but all for the purpose of improving the students’ comprehension. The author also used results of research based studies in order to further convince the reader of the effectiveness of paraphrasing. The author appears to understand the need to approach the reader from multiple angles and utilizing many different strategies in order to show the effectiveness of paraphrasing.
Overall, the writer succeeded in what she set out to do, which was to convince the reader of the benefits of paraphrasing as a strategy for reading. The only that I can think of that the writer could have done differently would have been to explain some of the academic language she utilized in her article. This would have made the piece more easily understood by parents, beginning teachers, or the public in general and therefore, could have ended up benefitting more readers than the author may have previously intended.