What Really Matters for Struggling Readers Designing ResearchBased

What Really Matters for Struggling Readers: Designing Research-Based Programs By Richard L. Allington

What does this mean for Holmes School? n n n What are we doing that coincides with the reading research? What changes, if any, do we need to make? How will these changes affect our budget, staff, and scheduling?

The “information age” places higher-order literacy demands on all of us. n n Bill Kovach and Tom Rosentiel point to a new “journalism assertion” as the dominant mode of delivery of information. This mode has fewer checks and balances and places greater demands on the reader, viewer, listener. The Internet imposes virtually no controls on information quality and reliability. Because of the increase in the unfettered flow of information, American schools need to enhance the ability of children to search and sort through information, to synthesize and analyze information, and to summarize and evaluate the information they encounter.

Principle 1: Kids Need To Read A Lot n n n Practice makes perfect; just reading is a powerful contributor to the development of accurate, fluent, high-comprehension reading. The average higher-achieving student read approximately three times as much each week as their lower-achieving classmates. Collins (1986) reported on first-grade instruction noting that the higher-achieving students spent approximately 70% of their instructional time reading passages and discussing or responding to questions about the material they read. By way of contrast, the lower-achieving readers spent roughly half as much time on these activities with word ID, letter-sound activities, and spelling and penmanship activities occupying large blocks of lesson time.

Major Findings based on Foertsch’s research (1992) 1) 2) 3) 4) The amount of reading that students do in and out of school was positively related to their reading achievement. Many children spend an inordinate amount of time on workbook activities which show no positive relationship with reading achievement. Students who reported home environments that fostered reading activity had higher reading achievement. Students demonstrated difficulty in providing details and arguments to support interpretation of what they read.

Basal v. Literature-Based Framework n n Researchers documented substantial differences in the volume of reading recorded in schools using basal reader series and those using a literature-based framework. In the latter classrooms the students read roughly twice as many words per week as their counterparts in the basal classrooms. Mervar and Hiebert (1989)

Importance of Good Teaching n n Even very small increases in the amount of daily teacher demonstration produced improved reading achievement. Only one minute a day was observed, on average, of the teacher offering explanations or demonstrations of elements of reading, though about 14 minutes a day were spent in providing general directions about assignments. Leinhardt, Zigmond, and Cooley (1981)

Sample Items from a Recent Fourth Grade NAEP n n n After the students read a two and one-half page Ashanti folktale entitled, “Hungry Spider and the Turtle, ” the following written response questions were posed: • There is a saying, “Don’t get mad, get even. ” How does this apply to the story? • Who do you think would make a better friend, Spider or Turtle? Explain why. • Think about Spider and Turtle in the story. Pick someone you know, have read about, or have seen in the movies or on television and explain how that person is like either Spider of Turtle. In each of these short written responses students had to think about the story, not just recall the story (though recalling characters and their traits noted in the story is obviously essential to responding adequately). The point to be made is that being able to locate or remember the correct answer (word or phrase) to a multiple -choice item, the traditional measure of comprehension, is simply much less demanding than responding to these new measures of reading comprehension.

How much reading do children need? n n n Allington suggests one and one-half hours of daily in-school reading. A key problem with commercial reading series is that they often fill up vast amounts of lesson time with activities other than actual reading. The excerpts in most anthologies require no more than 20 to 30 minutes to read. When we plan to spend six weeks on Island of the Blue Dolphin, we plan to limit children’s reading and fill class time with other activities.

Create Standards for Reading Volume n n Schools should develop an agreed on standard for expected volume of reading and writing. When schools have no such standard, wide variation from classroom to classroom seems to be the norm. Reading in all content areas should be counted toward this norm. Thirty to forty-five minutes should be allocated to writing every day. Volume standards should also be set for a week rather than a day. (Think about when you read and write for authentic purposes).

Principle 2: Kids Need Books They Can Read n The evidence points to the fact that “easy reading” is absolutely critical to reading development and to the development of positive stances toward reading.

Task Difficulty and Achievement n n n Hard tasks produced off-task behaviors and negative attitudes. (Berliner, 1981) When lessons were redesigned so that success was more widespread, student engagement rates improved as did their learning. (Berliner, 1981) Oral reading error rates of 5 percent or greater were linked to significant increases in off-task behavior (Gambrell, Wilson, and Grant, 1981)

Classroom Libraries n n The classrooms that were best able to put appropriate books into kids’ hands had hundreds of titles available in the classroom collection; these titles represented a substantial range of difficulty as well as range of genres. Allington recommends at least 500 different books in every classroom with those split about evenly between narratives and informational books Beginning readers should read multiple books every day. In the exemplary first-grade classrooms Allington studied it was common for children to read 10 or more titles every day (counting rereading of books).

Research On Low-Income Families n n n Schools that enroll many children from low-income families have half as many books available as do schools in wealthier communities (Guice et al. , 1996; Krashen, 1993; Mc. Quillan, 1998). Children from lower-income homes especially need rich and extensive collections of books in the school library and in their classrooms if only because these are the children least likely to have a supply of books at home. As Mc. Quillan (1998) so powerfully demonstrates, library adequacy is among the better predictors of reading achievement with a correlation of. 85 between library adequacy and NAEP reading achievement scores.

Book Rooms n n n A fully stocked book room would have a collection of books that spanned the grades in the school. Bins can be organized by genre, author, or topic. Bins are typically multi-level and are linked to science, social studies, etc.

More On Reading n n n Children from wealthier families are far more likely to have one or more magazines delivered to their homes each month. (e. g. Ranger Rick, Cobblestone, and Sports Illustrated for Kids) Allington recommends series books due to the fact that students tend to enjoy the characters. Put books in their bedrooms. Build and display classroom collections (author displays or genre displays). Provide daily book talks from teacher or students.

Principle 3: Kids Need To Learn To Read Fluently n n n La. Berge and Samuels (1974) linked the concept of “automaticity” to the development of proficient reading. Scientific evidence of the positive impact of repeated readings. Research indicates that teachers are more likely to have lower-achieving readers read aloud than the better readers. (Allington, 1983; Chinn et al. , 1993; Collins, 1986)

Struggling Readers Are… n n n More likely for them More likely prompt More likely to be reading material that is difficult to to be asked to read aloud be interrupted when they miscue be interrupted more quickly pause and wait for a teacher to to be told to sound out a word

Effects on Struggling Readers n n n When struggling readers grow used to a study stream of rapid, external interruptions, they begin to read with an anticipation of interruptions – word-by-word. We literally teach some children slow reading and the slow reading becomes a habit. Struggling readers often look up to check with the teacher after every word

Implications on Instruction of Struggling Readers n n n Provide struggling readers with lots of opportunities to develop self-monitoring skills and strategies (Samuels, Schermer & Reinking, 1992). Provide repeated reading with limited, if any, interruptions while the child reads. The reason why some children don’t develop adequate fluency is quite simple: They have had limited reading practice in appropriately leveled materials.

Instructional Approaches n n n n Choral Reading Teacher models initial pages Echo Reading Repeated Readings Readers’ Theatre Be The Character Being On Oprah Puppet Shows

Principle 4: Kids Need To Develop Thoughtful Literacy n n When you consider the richness of the talk about texts that occurs outside of school, the typical patterns of school talk about texts seem shallow and barren (stock market). Literate talk about texts involves summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and evaluating the ideas in the text.

School and Thoughtful Literacy n n n Children are most likely to learn what they are taught. Researchers report that in the typical classroom the assigned tasks overwhelmingly emphasize copying, remembering, and reciting with few tasks assigned that engage students in thinking about what they’ve read. Researchers report that lower-achieving readers spent little of their school day on comprehension tasks of any sort (lesson focus was often on words, letters, and sounds)

The Effects of Thoughtful Literacy Instruction n n Commonly reported that creating thoughtful classrooms was often difficult. Thoughtful literacy lessons seem to require a different organization of instructional time and a different sort of curriculum design. Thoughtful literacy lessons need larger blocks of uninterrupted time. More thoughtful lessons produced more thoughtful readers.

Research On Effective Comprehension Instruction n Reading comprehension performance CAN be significantly improved with effective teaching. Teachers can learn to provide effective instruction in strategy development but this requires moving away from traditional notions of how to foster comprehension and away from heavy reliance on teacher guides. The most successful interventions taps a single strategy and developed that strategy through longer-term instruction and repeated application activities.

What does this mean for Holmes School? n n n What are we doing that coincides with the reading research? What changes, if any, do we need to make? How will these changes affect our budget, staff, and scheduling?