The authors of this extensive review stress that the findings
• support the current RTI model that focuses on giving struggling readers high-quality instruction to start, and following that up with intensive instruction for those few students who continue to have reading difficulties despite the high quality of instruction (e.g., Gersten et al., 2009);
• show that one-on-one rather than small-group instruction works best for students with the most serious difficulties;
• support the idea that high-quality interventions over several years are required if we are to expect progress to endure, instead of the expectation that brief, intensive tutoring will put struggling readers back on track permanently; and
• are consistent with those of previous reviews of reading programs that found that programs offering extensive professional development to teachers had more positive effects than those providing technology, alternative curricula, or other interventions that essentially do not change daily instructional practices.
PROGRAMS FOR OLDER STUDENTS
Educators cannot assume that strategies that are effective for students in the primary and intermediate grades will be equally effective with struggling adolescent readers, although some are. Older students may have already had numerous interventions addressing phonological awareness but few interventions to improve comprehension of text. Furthermore, older struggling readers may be better at hiding or compensating for their reading difficulties and thus require interventions that are more targeted and of longer duration.
Research studies assessing the skills of struggling adolescent readers reveal that their greatest needs are additional instructional support in fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension (Dennis, 2013). These studies further reveal considerable variability in the development of reading skills among this adolescent population (e.g., Brasseur-Hock, Hock, Kieffer, Biancarosa, & Deshler, 2011). The prominent high-stakes tests of today do not generally provide the information needed to make decisions about how to help individual students. Therefore, there is no one approach that will meet the needs of all struggling readers. Rather, it becomes necessary to use multiple measures of achievement to determine the strategies needed to address the individual variability in reading skills that exists among these students.
There are currently more than two-dozen commercial reading programs in the North American markets asserting that they can improve the reading skills of older struggling readers. Some have been subjected to controlled studies to measure their effectiveness, and some have not. (To find out more about research on specific programs, see the What Works Clearinghouse information in this book’s “Resources” section.) Rather than recommend any specific commercial programs, I will suggest here some instructional strategies, approaches, and processes that are compatible with what we know about how the brain learns to read. Whether intentionally or inadvertently, the components of these suggested strategies are consistent with current research findings in educational neuroscience. Furthermore, when teachers add new instructional strategies—rather than self-contained programs—to their repertoire, they often see ways of using them when teaching other skills and different content areas. Finally, employing these strategies does not involve the significant expenditures required to purchase commercial programs.
How Do I Develop Fluency and Comprehension in Older Struggling Readers?
Older struggling readers are able to develop strong reading capabilities when provided with effective instructional conditions. To be effective, reading programs must include activities that promote reading fluency. Shaywitz (2003) strongly supports the notion of short, intense daily practice sessions in reading in order to develop fluency. The children’s practice continues over weeks and months as they reread passages until they attain high accuracy. Intense practice helps children build fluency because decoding becomes automatic, the same way that practice assists athletes and musicians with performing motor skills almost without thinking (Shaywitz calls this overlearning, the ability to perform something without attention or conscious thought).
Fluency comes through repetition of words and sentences. Such repetition increases the chances that words and common phrases will be stored in long-term memory, allowing for faster word recognition during subsequent encounters. The National Reading Panel (NRP, 2000) and subsequent studies (e.g., Strong, Wehby, Falk, & Lane, 2004) recommended reading programs that emphasize repeated oral reading accompanied by teacher feedback and guidance, a strategy referred to as guided repeated oral reading. The feedback is necessary because it gives children the opportunities to modify their pronunciation so that the stored representation of the word in their mental lexicon continues to approach its correct pronunciation and spelling. Whenever readers mispronounce words, it means that they do not have accurate mental representations of those words in their brains and will thus have difficulty storing or retrieving information related to them. Guided repeated oral reading is an especially effective technique for helping readers practice aloud unfamiliar vocabulary. Such practice builds accurate neural representations of the vocabulary and enhances comprehension. However, it is important to recognize that improvements in oral fluency do not necessarily correlate with improved comprehension. These are separate skills, and comprehension is a more complex cerebral process. Studies show that although oral fluency may improve in older students, comprehension may suffer, particularly as the text gets increasingly difficult (e.g., Paris, Carpenter, Paris, & Hamilton, 2004). This finding tells teachers that they should include instruction that targets comprehension skills while also working on fluency and advanced decoding strategies (Underwood & Pearson, 2004).
What Strategies Teach Fluency and Comprehension to Struggling Readers?
Studies have shown that older students with reading problems are able to master the learning strategies that improve reading comprehension skills (e.g., Edmonds et al., 2009). For students with learning problems, learning to use questioning strategies is especially important because these students do not often spontaneously self-question or monitor their own reading comprehension.
Here are some strategies that researchers and teachers have found particularly effective.
Questioning and Paraphrasing: Reciprocal Teaching
Reciprocal teaching is an approach that fosters student interaction with the text being read (Palincsar & Brown, 1984). In reciprocal teaching, students interact deeply with the text through the strategies of questioning, summarizing, clarifying, and predicting. Organized in the form of a discussion, the approach involves one leader (students and teacher take turns being the leader) who, after a portion of the text is read, first frames a question to which the group responds (“How . . . ?” or “Why . . . ?”). Second, participants share their own questions. Third, the leader summarizes the gist of the text (“The author is saying that . . . ” or “The main idea here is . . . ”), and participants comment or elaborate upon that summary. At any point in the discussion, either the leader or the participants may identify aspects of the text or discussion that need to be clarified (“I didn’t understand . . . ” or “I was confused when . . . ”), and the group joins together to clarify the confusion. Finally, the leader indicates that it is time to move on and solicits predictions about what might come up next in the text (“I am wondering if . . . ” or “I think that . . . ”).
The value of paraphrasing, self-questioning, and finding the main idea are well-researched strategies. Students divide reading passages into smaller parts, such as sections, subsections, or paragraphs. After reading a segment, students are cued to use a self-questioning strategy to identify main ideas and details. The strategy requires a high level of attention to reading tasks because students must alternate their use of questioning and paraphrasing after reading each section, subsection, or paragraph.
Reciprocal teaching is an effective strategy because it requires the brain to integrate prior knowledge with new learning, to make inferences, to maintain focus, and to use auditory r
ehearsal to enhance retention of learning. Research studies support the value of reciprocal teaching from middle school to college. One study of 50 at-risk postsecondary students enrolled in a community college showed that the reciprocal teaching group performed significantly better than the comparison group on reading comprehension and strategy acquisition. There were no differences on perception of study skills. Poorer readers in the reciprocal teaching group outperformed poorer readers in the comparison group on both reading comprehension and strategy acquisition measures (Hart & Speece, 1998). Other studies report success using reciprocal teaching with college students who are struggling readers (e.g., Gruenbaum, 2012; Yang, 2010).
Another study involved more than 300 fifth-grade students, including those with typical and poor reading fluency skills (Schünemann, Spörer, & Brunstein, 2013). Those students who participated in reciprocal teaching had better reading comprehension than those in the control group. Furthermore, the improvement was sustained over an extended time period. See more about reciprocal teaching in Chapter 7.
Questioning to Find the Main Idea
This self-questioning strategy focuses primarily on identifying and questioning the main idea or summary of a paragraph. Here’s how it works. Students are first taught the concept of a main idea and how to do self-questioning. Students then practice, asking themselves questions aloud about each paragraph’s main idea. They can use a cue card for assistance. Following the practice, the teacher provides immediate feedback. Eventually, following successful comprehension of these short paragraphs, students are presented with more lengthy passages, and the cue cards are removed. Continuing to give corrective feedback, the teacher finishes each lesson with a discussion of students’ progress and of the strategy’s usefulness. Studies show that students with learning disabilities who were trained in a self-questioning strategy performed significantly higher (i.e., demonstrated greater comprehension of what was read) than untrained students (Solis et al., 2012; Sousa, 2007).
Story Mapping
One major challenge for older struggling readers is their difficulty in determining the relative importance of the material they are reading. They often cannot pick out main ideas from text or identify the information that leads to the main idea. Here is where story maps can help. Studies show story mapping to be an effective strategy with struggling readers (e.g., Edmonds et al., 2009), including those with emotional and behavioral problems (Vannest, Harrison, Temple-Harvey, Ramsey, & Parker, 2011).
In this strategy, students read a story, generate a map of its events and ideas, and then answer questions (Figure 6.2). To fill in the map, students have to identify the setting, characters, time, and place of the story; the problem, the goal, and the action that took place; and the outcome. The teacher models for students how to fill in the map, and then gives them many opportunities to practice the mapping technique for themselves and receive corrective feedback. The map is an effective visual tool that provides a framework for understanding, conceptualizing, and remembering important story events. The reading comprehension of students can improve significantly when the teacher gives direct instruction on the use of the strategy, expects frequent use of the strategy, and encourages students to use the strategy independently.
Focusing on Comprehension
Students with reading disorders often have difficulty deriving meaning from what they read. If little or no meaning comes from reading, students lose motivation to read. Furthermore, meaning is essential for long-term retention of what they have read. Strategies designed to improve reading comprehension have been shown to improve students’ interest in reading and their success.
Figure 6.2 These are just two examples of story maps. They help students discover the author’s main ideas and to search out information to support them.
One such successful and brain-friendly strategy, suggested by Deshler, Ellis, and Lenz (1996), is a four-step process called by the acronym PASS (Preview, Ask, Summarize, and Synthesize). The teacher guides the students through the four steps, ensuring that they respond orally or in writing to the activities associated with each step. Grouping formats, such as cooperative learning, can be used to encourage active student participation and reduce anxiety over the correctness of each student’s response.
1. Preview, Review, and Predict: This step helps the brain’s frontal lobe search out some clues for determining the text’s main ideas. Prediction engages the brain’s creative networks and raises student interest.
• Preview by reading the heading and one or two sentences.
• Review what you already know about this topic.
• Predict what you think the text or story will be about.
2. Ask and Answer Questions: If we expect the brain to remember what it has learned, the information must make sense and have meaning. These questions prompt the student to search long-term memory to find already-stored information that can help with sense and meaning.
• Content-focused questions:
Who? What? Why? Where?
How does this relate to what I already know?
• Monitoring questions:
Does this make sense?
Is my prediction correct?
How is this different from what I thought it was going to be about?
• Problem-solving questions:
Is it important that it make sense?
Do I need to reread part of it?
Can I visualize the information?
Does it have too many unknown words?
Should I get help?
3. Summarize: By summarizing, the students are able to explain the text in their own words, thereby increasing the probability that it will make sense and have meaning.
Explain what the short passage you read was all about.
4. Synthesize: This step helps students decide in which memory networks they will store the newly learned information.
• Explain how the short passage fits in with the whole passage.
• Explain how what you learned fits in with what you knew.
If students have difficulty with any particular step, they can go back to the previous step to determine what information they need in order to proceed.
Collaborative Strategic Reading
Another excellent brain-friendly technique for helping students comprehend what they read and build vocabulary is called collaborative strategic reading (CSR). It is particularly effective in classrooms where students have many different reading abilities and learning capabilities. The strategy is compatible with all types of reading programs.
CSR uses direct teaching and the collaborative power of cooperative learning groups to accomplish two phases designed to improve reading comprehension (Klingner, Vaughn, & Schumm, 1998). The first phase is a teacher-led component that takes students through four parts of a reading plan: Preview, Click and Clunk, Get the Gist, and Wrap-Up. The second phase involves using cooperative learning groups to provide an interactive environment where students can practice and perfect their reading comprehension skills. A variation of this strategy incorporates computer technology where appropriate.
PHASE 1
Teacher-Led Activities
• Preview the reading. Students know that previews in movies give some information about coming events. Use this as a motivational hook to the new reading. The learners preview the entire reading passage in order to get as much as they can about the passage in just a few minutes’ time. The purpose here is to activate their prior knowledge about the topic and to give them an opportunity to predict what they will learn.
Refer to student experiences about a movie, television program, or book that might contain information relevant to the new reading. Also, give clues to look for when previewing. For example, pictures, graphs, tables, or callout quotes provide information to help predict what students already know about the topic and what they will learn.
• Click and clunk. Students with reading problems often fail to monitor their understanding while they read. C
licks and clunks are devices to help students with this monitoring. Clicks are parts of the reading that make sense; clunks are parts or words that don’t.
Ask students to identify clunks as they go along. Then the class works with the teacher to develop strategies to clarify the clunks, such as
rereading the sentences while looking for key words that can help extract meaning from the context;
rereading previous and following sentences to get additional context clues;
looking for a prefix or suffix in the word that could help with meaning; and
breaking the word apart to see if smaller words are present that provide meaning.
• Get the gist. The goal of this phase is twofold. First, ask the readers to state in their own words the most important person, place, or thing in the passage. Second, get them to tell in as few words as possible (i.e., leaving out the details) the most important idea about that person, place, or thing. Because writing often improves memory, occasionally ask the students to write down their gists. Students can then read their gists aloud and invite comments from the group about ways to improve the gist. This process can be done so that all students benefit by enhancing their skills.
How the Brain Learns to Read Page 21