Reading Sources for Support

17 Pages·2012·0.99 MB·English

by  Sheila Curlin

English

Reading Sources for Support

About this Lesson
Students must learn to read and evaluate sources to find support for assertions and positions
when writing a research paper or a synthesis essay. This lesson provides students with a strategy
to approach a text with this task in mind.

Passages for LTF® lessons are selected to challenge students, while lessons and activities make
texts accessible. Guided practice with challenging texts allows students to gain the proficiency
necessary to read independently at or above grade level.

This lesson is included in Module 15: Issues and Assertions.

Objectives
Students will
 take a position on an issue.
 read source material to determine whether it contains evidence that can be used to support
their position.

Level T
Grades Eight to Twelve E
A
Connection to Common Core Standards for English Language Arts C
LTF® Foundation Lessons are designed to be used across grade levels and therefore are aligned
H
to the CCSS Anchor Standards. Teachers should consult their own grade-level-specific
E
Standards. The activities in this lesson allow teachers to address the following Common Core
R
Standards:

Explicitly addressed in this lesson
Code Standard Level of Depth of
Thinking Knowledge
R.1 Read closely to determine what the text says Understand III
explicitly and to make logical inferences from it.
Cite specific textual evidence when writing or
speaking to support conclusions drawn from the
text.
R.2 Determine central ideas or themes of a text and Analyze III
analyze their development; summarize the key
supporting details and ideas.

R.6 Assess how point of view or purpose shapes the Analyze III
content and style of a text.
R.9 Analyze how two or more texts address similar Analyze III
themes or topics in order to build knowledge or to
compare the approaches the authors take.
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Teacher Overview—Reading Sources for Support
R.10 Read and comprehend complex literary and Understand II
informational texts independently and proficiently.
W.5 Develop and strengthen writing as needed by Evaluate III
planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a
new approach
W.7 Conduct short as well as more sustained research Create IV
projects based on focused questions, demonstrating
understanding of the subject under investigation.
W.8 Gather relevant information from multiple print and Evaluate III
digital sources, assess the credibility and accuracy
of each source, and integrate the information while
avoiding plagiarism.
W.9 Draw evidence from literary or informational texts Analyze III
to support analysis, reflection, and research.

Implicitly addressed in this lesson
Code Standard Level of Depth of
Thinking Knowledge

L.4 Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and Understand II
multiple-meaning words and phrases by using
context clues, analyzing meaningful word parts, and
consulting general and specialized reference
T
materials as appropriate.
E
W.1 Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of Create IV
A
substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and
C
relevant and sufficient evidence.
W.10 Write routinely over extended time frames (time for Apply III H
research, reflection, and revision) and shorter time E
frames (a single sitting or a day or two) for a range R
of tasks, purposes, and audiences.

SL.1 Prepare for and participate effectively in a range of Understand II
conversations and collaborations with diverse
partners, building on others’ ideas and expressing
their own clearly and persuasively.

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ii
Teacher Overview—Reading Sources for Support

LTF Skill Focus
The foundation for LTF English lessons is the Skill Progression Chart that identifies key skills
for each domain, beginning with grade 6 and adding more complex skills at each subsequent
grade level while reinforcing skills introduced at previous grade levels. The Skill Focus for each
individual lesson identifies the skills actually addressed in that lesson.

Levels of Thinking
Remember Understand Apply Analyze Evaluate Create
Close Reading Grammar Composition
written, spoken, and visual texts purposeful use of language for effect written, spoken, and visual products
Reading Strategies Types (modes)
Annotation Persuasive (argumentative)
Determining Audience The Process of Composition
Determining Author’s Prewriting
Purpose determination of purpose
Determining Fact and generation of ideas
Opinion

Determining Main Idea
Summary
Literary Forms
Nonfiction
Elements of Research T
Evaluation of Sources E
Use of Print Sources A
Use of the Internet C

H
Connections to AP*
E
Students must be able to read, analyze, evaluate, and synthesize information for the synthesis
R
question on the AP Language and Composition Exam. This lesson helps students develop the

skill of reading a text to find support for a position in an argument or synthesis essay.

*Advanced Placement and AP are registered trademarks of the College Entrance Examination Board. The College
Board was not involved in the production of this material.

Materials and Resources
 copies of Student Activity

Assessments
The following kinds of formative assessments are embedded in this lesson:
 written summaries
 annotated texts

Teaching Suggestions
Teachers should spend some time introducing and discuss the PETSOX reading strategy with
students. The first couple of texts should be read, annotated, and evaluated as a class, with the
teacher modeling the thinking strategies involved. Students can complete the other two texts
individually. Teachers may want to cover the cartoon together as a class, depending on students’
experience with analyzing a visual text.
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English
Reading Sources for Support

Activity One: Purpose for reading

When reading any text, you must understand your purpose for reading. Are you reading for
entertainment, for exploration of an idea, or for factual information?

What is the difference?

Look at the list below and indicate which reading strategy is appropriate for specific reading
purposes. Mark an E for entertainment reading, X for exploratory reading, and I for
informational reading. If the strategy works for more than one type of reading, mark each type.

ask questions as you read

decide what is fact and what is opinion

determine the bias of the writer

evaluate the source of the text

highlight important ideas

keep a dialectical journal

look up unfamiliar words in a dictionary

pay close attention to visuals (pictures, graphs, diagrams, etc.)

read all the “extras” (headings, footnotes, etc.)

re-read the parts you don‟t understand

skip the parts you don‟t understand

write a summary of what you just read

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Student Activity—Reading Sources for Support
Activity Two: Reading the Prompt and Taking a Position
Introduction: In genealogy, the study of the history of families, the researcher usually
concentrates on surnames (last names) because they help identify people who are related. A
surname is usually passed down from parents to children. On the other hand, given names can be
more important in a way because they represent a choice, usually the parents‟, of the name an
individual will identify with his or her entire life. Given names can say much about the thoughts
and feelings of the parents.

However, some parents have chosen to bestow quirky, unusual, and even ridiculous names on
their children, leading some countries to enact legislation restricting the names that can be given
to children.

Issue (n): the matter in question or in dispute.

What is the issue?

Assignment: Decide how you feel about parents‟ freedom to choose a name for their child.
Should there be restrictions, or should parents be free to give their child any name they choose?
Read the information provided in the following sources on this topic; then write an essay in
which you develop your position with evidence drawn from both the sources and your own
experience, observations, or reading. You must use at least three of the sources in your essay.

Position (n): an opinion about an issue that is in opposition to another in an argument or debate;
a side.

What does the prompt mean by “develop a position”?

Without having read the sources, what is your position on this issue?

Copyright © 2012 Laying the Foundation®, Inc., Dallas, TX. All rights reserved. Visit us online at www.ltftraining.org.
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Student Activity—Reading Sources for Support
Using the P E T S O X strategy for reading text to gather information:

If you are reading a text because you have a specific task in mind, you can use the steps outlined
by the acronym PETSOX to help you remember what you need to do.

P—Purpose

Think about why you are reading this text. What are you trying to discover? What is the writer‟s
purpose in writing the text? Purpose makes a difference in how you read the text and in how the
writer wrote the text. If a writer is trying to describe or inform, he or she will not be trying to
sway the audience in any way. If the writer is trying to persuade, the reader must be aware of any
bias or manipulation by the writer.

E—Everything on the page

When reading a text for a specific purpose, such as gathering information or trying to find
support for a position on an issue, the reader must pay attention to everything on the page. Titles
can supply hints to hidden meaning (especially in fiction), or they can give the main idea of an
article. Headings can also help outline the main points of an article. Pictures, graphs, or charts
can also provide valuable information. Footnotes should not be ignored, as they will usually clear
up unknown or obscure information or vocabulary.

T—Thesis and topic sentences

Paying close attention to thesis and topic sentences will help you understand the main points of
an article. The thesis and topic sentences should provide an outline of the points an author is
making about the subject.

S—Summary

There are some good reasons to write a summary of what you‟ve read: 1) a summary will make
sure you understand what the text is about and what the main points are; 2) a summary will let
you return to the text later and refresh your memory about it quickly without having to re-read it;
3) a summary is a good way to include context about the article when you are using evidence
from it in your essay.

O—On my side or Opposed?

If you are trying to find evidence to support a position, you have to make a determination
whether the text supports your opinion or opposes it. If the text opposes your opinion, you will
want to avoid using it, unless you can take something from the article and disprove or effectively
challenge it. If the article is “On your side,” you can quote from it in your essay.

X—Mark usable text

You need to mark text you want to use as evidence to support your opinion so that when you go
back to the article, you can find that text easily. Marking an “X” in the margin is an easy way to
do this.
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Student Activity—Reading Sources for Support
Activity Three: Reading the sources to gather support for your position
There are four articles about names on the next few pages. Read them, using the PETSOX
strategy. The thesis and a topic sentence are highlighted as an example for the “T” step.

Source A
Satran, Pamela Redmond and Linda Rosenkrantz. “Bizarre Baby Names: A Growing Trend?:
You named your kid what? Welcome to the latest extreme sport.” Reader’s Digest. July
2009. Web. 22 March 2012. <http://www.rd.com/family/bizarre-baby-names-a-growing-
trend/>
When Lum and Chin Nguyen had their first child, 26 years ago, they wanted to give him an
American name. Newly settled in North Carolina after being rescued floating off the coast of
Vietnam, they chose Duke, in honor of nearby Duke University and the television show The
Dukes of Hazzard. Best of all, the name could work in both their old and new cultures by
spinning its spelling to Duc.
Or Duck, as the boy‟s teachers insisted on pronouncing it, to the great amusement of his
classmates. Mortified, Duc Nguyen decided to reinvent himself and his name. His new choice
was tried-and-true Americana and impossible to screw up: Wes.
Ever since the Puritans1 named their babies Through-Much-Tribulation-We-Enter-the-Kingdom-
of-Heaven, America has been a land of naming freedom and self-expression. While other
governments impose restrictions—German parents have to choose a name that clearly indicates
the gender of the child and is not a surname, and the French, among others, forbid names that
might expose a child to mockery—in the United States, anything goes.
In 1950, nearly 30 percent of all babies were given one of the top ten names, a proportion that‟s
now shrunk to less than 10 percent. Goodbye, Dick. Goodbye, Jane. Hello, Addison and Nevaeh
(heaven spelled backward), both names in the current top 40.
Popular baby names today include locales that epitomize hip, like Brooklyn and London;
surnames as given names that summon images of Waspy dynasties, such as Morgan and
Whitney; and brand names of upscale products (think Armani and Lexus).
“My wife and I wanted a unique name for a baby we perceive to be special in this world
brimming with 6.7 billion souls,” says Gunther Lie, 35, whose infant daughter is named Amstel.
Yes, like the beer—a choice designed to forge a bond between the baby and her beer-loving
grandfather with Dutch roots.
“Your name is a way of marketing yourself,” says Wes Nguyen, who turned his personal
adventures in naming into a career as a corporate product namer. “When we create a new name
for clients, we create imagery behind it, and I did that when I chose my own new name. Wes
reminds me of the West Coast, of someone young and sophisticated and innovative. I think of a
surfer, of someone who has work-life balance.”

1 Puritans—one of the earliest groups of immigrants to settle in America in the 16th century

Pamela Redmond Satran and Linda Rosenkrantz. in Reader’s Digest. Permission pending.
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4
Student Activity—Reading Sources for Support
A century ago, immigrants often changed their names as a first step toward assimilation, with
Bridgets morphing into Bettys and Giovannis naming their sons plain old John. Now parents are
going back to their ethnic roots for inspiration. With assimilation no longer the issue, the classic
Italian name Giovanni is close to being in the top 100 names for boys, and Gianna has already
made it into the top 100 names for girls.
Giving your child an ethnically distinct name can be a double-edged sword. “I grew up hating
my name,” says Orly Telisman, 35, named for her grandfather Orrin. But in college, she
discovered an unexpected advantage: Orly comes from the Hebrew word for light. “Explaining
my name gave me a way to say, I‟m Jewish, which culturally and spiritually means a lot to me,”
she says. “To appreciate my name, I had to grow into my own skin.”
The search for a name that screams “I‟m unique!” leads some parents to invent names or play
with traditional spelling. Besides the classic Irish Aidan in the Social Security list of top 1,000
names, for example, there are also Aiden, Ayden, Aden, Adan, Aaden, Aydan, and Aedan.
Nouns that symbolize a feeling, a value, an animal, or even a thing that carries special meaning
for the family are rocketing up the charts. Just look at kids named Sincere, Justice, Colt, and
good old Cash. Noble is the name chosen by Paulette Kouffman Sherman, 38, for her infant son.
“We were looking for something original, spiritual, and strong, and Noble means „aspiring to
high values,‟” Sherman says. “We wanted to give him an individual name, not so much so he
could get attention, but as a way of saying, I am myself, I am different, and I‟m proud of it.”
Sometimes bucking the latest trends means choosing something that others might see as
decidedly out of style. Lee Krasny, 34, named her now-two-year-old daughter Dorothy, after the
girl‟s maternal great-grandmother. “We struggled for a long time with whether to name her
Dorothy or just use the D and select a modern-sounding name, but it seemed most authentic to go
straight up.”
The reaction to using the original, most popular in the 1920s and ʼ30s, was mixed, Krasny says.
“We‟ve gotten curious, intrigued, and „Are you insane?‟”
A downside of a “creative” name is that it may come with baggage, not all of it positive. “I
always felt I was prejudged by my name,” says Gestin Skaggs, 43, whose parents named her for
a word they heard in a German love song. “I‟ve either had to overcome some stereotype of a
short, fat German man or live up to an expectation that I‟m a really wild and creative thinker.
People ascribe all kinds of personality traits to me that I don‟t have.”
But that‟s a small price to pay, say the teens with offbeat names we spoke with. “I‟ve met a lot of
people because of my name. They hear it and think it‟s cool,” says Calypso Gibaldi, 15, named
by her ocean-loving father for Jacques Cousteau‟s boat. “If my name was Jane, I‟d be average
like everyone else.”
Reading for Support using PETSOX

P—Purpose
1. What is your purpose in reading this text? To find evidence to support my position on this
issue.

2. What is the author‟s purpose in writing it?

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Student Activity—Reading Sources for Support
E—Everything on the page
3. What do you know about the source of this article?

4. Does the source suggest a trustworthy source or one that might need to be investigated as to
reliability?

5. Is there any extra information anywhere else in the article? Does it have headings or visuals
that reveal ideas?

T—Thesis/topic
6. Underline or highlight the thesis sentence of this article. (This has been done for you)

7. Highlight or circle the topic sentences that contain important main ideas. (One has been done
for you.)

S—Summary
8. Write a summary of the article‟s main points:

O—On my side or Opposed
9. Does this article support your position on this issue or not? Or is the article “neutral,” giving
only an objective look at both sides of the issue?
Write a statement about why this article supports, doesn‟t support, or is neutral to your
position on the issue.

X—X marks usable text
10. Put an X in the margin beside any text that could be used to support your position on the
issue.
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Student Activity—Reading Sources for Support
Source B
Israel, David K. “Oh no, you can‟t name your baby THAT!” Mental Floss. CNN Living. 3 July
2010. Web. 22 March 2012. < http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/07/03/
mf.baby.naming.laws/index.html>

Laws limiting what you can name your baby can be strict in some countries.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
 Some countries have some very strict rules for what you can name your child.
 In Denmark parents can choose from a list of 7,000 pre-approved names.
 In Germany, you must be able to tell the gender of the child by the first name.
Here in the U.S., you can name your kid almost anything, but that‟s not the case everywhere in
the world. Let‟s take a look at some countries with pretty strict or otherwise fascinating baby-
naming laws.

1. Sweden
Enacted in 1982, the Naming law in Sweden was originally created to prevent non-noble families
from giving their children noble names, but a few changes to the law have been made since then.
The part of the law referencing first names reads: “First names shall not be approved if they
can cause offense or can be supposed to cause discomfort for the one using it, or names which
for some obvious reason are not suitable as a first name.”
If you later change your name, you must keep at least one of the names that you were
originally given, and you can only change your name once.
Rejected names: “Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb111163 (pronounced Albin,
naturally) was submitted by a child‟s parents in protest of the Naming law. It was rejected. The
parents later submitted “A” (also pronounced Albin) as the child‟s name. It, too, was rejected.
Also rejected: Metallica, Superman, Veranda, Ikea and Elvis. Accepted names: Google as a
middle name, Lego.

2. Germany
In Germany, you must be able to tell the gender of the child by the first name, and the name
chosen must not negatively affect the well-being of the child. Also, you cannot use last names or
the names of objects or products as first names.
Whether or not your chosen name will be accepted is up to the office of vital statistics, the
Standesamt, in the area in which the child was born. If the office rejects your proposed baby
name, you may appeal the decision. But if you lose, you‟ll have to think of a different name.
Each time you submit a name you pay a fee, so it can get costly.

When evaluating names, the Standesamt refers to a book which translates to “the international
manual of the first names,” and they also consult foreign embassies for assistance with non-
German names. Because of the hassle parents have to go through to name their children, many
opt for traditional names such as Maximilian, Alexander, Marie and Sophie.
Rejected names: Matti was rejected for a boy because it didn‟t indicate gender.
Approved names: Legolas and Nemo were approved for baby boys.

David Israel. in CNN Living. Permission pending.
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