This is the first in a series of blogs about The Fountas & Pinnell Literacy Continuum. In order to understand The Literacy Continuum it is essential to understand the Systems of Strategic Actions (SOSA). Read on to learn more.
The authors categorize the SOSA into three ways of thinking:
Thinking within the text refers to searching for and using information, monitoring and self-correcting, solving words, maintaining fluency, adjusting, and summarizing. By engaging in these strategic actions, readers acquire a literal understanding that they will use to expand their understanding of the texts as they think beyond and about the text.
When readers think beyond the text, they bring their prior knowledge and understanding of how the world works to the text in order to:
Readers link their literal understandings of the text to their own experiences in order to construct an understanding of the deeper messages of the text.
When readers think about the text, they are required to recognize the text as an object. Readers notice and analyze the crafting decisions that the writer made when writing the text. They critique these decisions by determining how effective the choices were in achieving the purpose. Thinking about the text enables the reader to learn more about how texts are structured and crafted by writers.
Because these strategic actions happen inside of each reader’s head, they are not directly observable. We can only hypothesize about the ways in which each reader is becoming increasingly proficient by noticing behavioral evidence of these systems of strategic actions at work.
Ways to observe evidence of the processing systems at work:
Through carefully observing each student’s oral reading, their talk about text, and their writing about reading, the SOSA wheel comes to life.
When Fountas and Pinnell created the wheel graphic with its three color-coded “ways of thinking,” and named the twelve Systems of Strategic Actions, their goal was to help teachers conceptualize the thousands of simultaneous actions the brain engages in as we read. Understanding these twelve interconnected Systems of Strategic Actions supports teachers in developing:
When teachers in a school system make instructional decisions based on a shared theory of reading, they are able to provide students with text opportunities and responsive teaching across the grades so that readers move along a coherent path to proficiency.
~The Fountas & Pinnell Literacy™ Team
Read the rest of our series on The Literacy Continuum:
How Does The Literacy Continuum Support Teachers of Reading?
Who Can Benefit from The Literacy Continuum?
6 Suggestions for Getting Started with The Literacy Continuum
*This blog was originally published on October 13, 2016.
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