Reading Specialists Research Articles

Reading Rescue: An Effective Tutoring Intervention Model for Language-Minority Students Who Are Struggling Readers in First Grade

The Reading Rescue tutoring intervention model was investigated with 64 low–socioeconomic status, language-minority first graders with reading difficulties. School staff provided tutoring in phonological awareness, systematic phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and reading comprehension. Tutored students made significantly greater gains reading words and comprehending text than controls, who received a small-group intervention (d = 0.70) or neither intervention (d = 0.74). The majority of tutored students reached average reading levels whereas the majority of controls did not. Paraprofessionals tutored students as effectively as reading specialists except in skills benefiting nonword decoding. Paraprofessionals required more sessions to achieve equivalent gains. Contrary to conventional wisdom, results suggest that students make greater gains when they read text at an independent level than at an instructional level.

Training Paraprofessionals to Effectively Work With all Students

Paraprofessionals can serve a vital role in supporting the literacy achievement of all students. However, many times their services are underutilized.As instructional leaders in a school, the principal and reading specialist can facilitate training for paraprofessionals that supports classroom instruction, is cost effective, and is relatively simple to implement. This article presents what that training might look like, beginning with a needs assessment, continuing with training, and concluding with follow‐up consultations.

INADEQUACY OF HATCH'S MODEL OF FORMAL SCHEMA FOR AMERICAN SHORT STORIES

Reading specialists have already argued for the existence of content and formal schemata. Anderson (1980) defines schemata as ‘..., complex, units of knowledge that organize much of what we know about general categories of objects, classes of events,…’. Research has shown that stories have schematic structures and that readers employ them to both facilitate and enhance comprehension and recall. The most recent story schema model, proposed by Hatch (1992), includes ‘an abstract, an orientation, a story line, a resolution, and a coda’. In order to test the adequacy of Hatch's model, seven popular American short stories were selected and the formal schema of each story was represented in the form of a tree diagram. Results demonstrated the inadequacy of Hatch's Model for the natural, relatively long, short stories. As a result, two more elements were added to complement the model.

Using Early Literacy Monitoring to Prevent Reading Failure

MOST CHILDREN who do not to during the primary grades will probably never to well. Children who reach the end of third grade with low literacy skills typically have less access to the regular curriculum, require long-term support, and fall further behind their peers in literacy achievement and curricular knowledge. The negative ramifications of low literacy skills are pervasive and well documented--poor self-esteem, low motivation, behavioral difficulties, academic underachievement, and, ultimately, reduced occupational and economic status. However, these negative trajectories can be altered. Children experiencing reading difficulties can be identified early and, with appropriate early intervention during the primary grades, can to read. (1) Reading is a complex process, and that complexity is reflected in the range of philosophies, pedagogies, curricula, and programs available to guide early elementary reading instruction. It is little wonder, given the myriad of options available and the constraints imposed by limited resources and students' diverse skills, that a crucial question for practitioners and researchers alike is how best to ensure that children do to early and well. The Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children suggests a three-tier framework to address that question: 1) provide excellent classroom literacy instruction for all children, 2) further reduce literacy failure by allocating supplementary resources and offering enhanced learning opportunities to at-risk children, and 3) ameliorate the effects of established reading difficulties by providing intensive interventions. Efforts to translate research into practice always generate additional questions, and early literacy is no exception. As with most issues in education, responses to concerns about early literacy programming must take into account the needs of multiple stakeholders--students, parents, teachers, and administrators--while at the same time respecting empirical evidence of what constitutes effective practice. Research strongly supports both the vital role of early identification in the prevention of reading difficulties and the urgent need to teach children to during the first few years of school so that they can read to learn in grade 3 and beyond. These issues were the driving force behind a yearlong process in which a group of researchers from the Canadian Research Institute for Social Policy consulted with the New Brunswick Department of Education and five district school boards. The consultation evolved into a five-year pilot program aimed at lowering the rate of reading failure at the K-2 level. The pilot program involves implementing a school-based, continuous monitoring system during those crucial years to assist teachers in the early identification of children who encounter difficulty in their literacy development. This early literacy monitoring program, currently in its third year of data collection, is being piloted in 20 public schools and six federal First Nations schools. It responds to needs expressed by teachers, department officials, and school administrators and provides a mechanism for keeping parents apprised of their children's progress. IDENTIFYING WHAT WE NEED Throughout the first year of our five-year program, two members of our project team traveled frequently to participating schools and district offices to gather input from teachers, reading specialists, program coordinators, and school administrators. After each round of meetings, the entire research team, including researchers, programmers, analysts, early reading consultants, and support staff, would review partner specifications in order to design the components of the monitoring program. At each stage, return visits to districts and schools sought further input that the research team would again take into account, a process that continued over the course of the year until we had a structure in place that met the expectations of all partners. …

Assessing Comprehension: A Classroom‐Based Process

Standardized tests are increasingly used to determine students' growth in reading comprehension. In some U.S. school districts, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 has led to a focus on multiple‐choice questions to better prepare students for these types of tests. Even though such questions can provide some important information, they do not enable the teacher to get at the heart of comprehension. To truly understand students' constructed meanings, teachers should use ongoing, classroom‐based assignments to distinguish variations in comprehension and adjust instruction.This article describes an authentic classroom‐based comprehension assessment process. The authors have been collaborating with one district in Wisconsin where reading specialists and teachers have developed a unified approach to classroom‐based assessment of comprehension, and they describe how this process influenced practice. Student examples are provided that demonstrate how one teacher used this assessment process in her fourth‐grade classroom to inform instruction and support her students' individual needs.

Revisiting the Role of Miscue Analysis in Effective Teaching

Miscue analysis has been used by teachers and reading specialists for more than 30 years. Its purpose is to reveal strengths and weaknesses in how children process text and thereby inform instruction for individual learners. But is it still a useful approach?The authors assert that miscue analysis can indeed be a useful tool, though not for all the reasons its advocates have asserted over the years. Instead, educators should use miscue analysis more narrowly to monitor children's use of particular strategies during reading, particularly as they move from context dependency to automatic decoding.

One Reading Specialist's Response to High-Stakes Testing Pressures

Pressures to help students pass high-stakes tests affect teachers' reading instruction, their responsiveness to students' learning needs, and their professional effectiveness. This article reports on how one reading specialist responded to testing pressures in her urban elementary school. She believed that what was “right” for her students was to nurture them as real readers and give them opportunities to engage in authentic book discussions, but she felt pushed to consider test scores over all other literacy practices and found herself neglecting long-term goals for short-term test success. The author considers the difficulties this reading specialist experienced and provides insights on ways teachers can push back against pressures to teach to the test in order to stay true to their own educational values and professional knowledge.

Preparing Reading Specialists to Become Competent Travelers in Urban Settings

This article poses an alternative to traditional teacher education methods of preparing reading specialists in university programs focused solely on outcomes. An equally important issue to explore is that of process and how candidates are prepared. Studying outputs with limited attention to process factors leaves teacher educators with incomplete action steps and ambiguous mandates for change. Using qualitative applications, this case study of one university’s preparation program for reading specialists reflects a phenomenological stance centered on the nature of the preparation process. Through methods of naturalistic inquiry-including field observations, interview data, written evaluations and use of applied research-the course instructor participates as the researcher, embracing the notion that “we can only know what we experience by attending to perceptions and meanings that awaken our conscious awareness.” Because of that awakening, the author hopes that useful modifications to programs are made, which in turn lead to increased readiness of those who are prepared to teach in urban settings.

Introduction to response to intervention: What, why, and how valid is it?

On December 3, 2004, President Bush signed into law the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA, 2004). The revised law is different from the previous version in at least one important respect. Whereas practitioners were previously encouraged to use IQ–achievement discrepancy to identify children with learning disabilities (LD), they now may use “Response to Intervention,” or RTI, a new, alternative method. It is also a means of providing early intervention to all children at risk for school failure. IDEA 2004 permits districts to use as much as 15% of their special education monies to fund early intervention activities. All this has implications for the number and type of children identified, the kinds of educational services provided, and who delivers them. RTI may be especially important to Reading Research Quarterly readers because roughly 80% of those with an LD label have been described as reading disabled (Lyon, 1995). With RTI, there may be a larger role for reading specialists, which in turn might affect preand inservice professional development activities conducted by universities and school districts. Yet much still needs to be understood to ensure that RTI implementation will promote effective early intervention and represents a valid means of LD identification. In this article, we explain important features of RTI, why it has been promoted as a substitute for IQ–achievement discrepancy, and what remains to be understood before it may be seen as a valid means of LD identification. What is RTI?

A Rising Star in Appalachian Literature

FEATURED AUTHOR—GRETCHEN MORAN LASKAS A Rising Star in Appalachian Literature George Brosi In an important way, the career of Gretchen Moran Laskas as a traditional Appalachian writer started in 1992 in a Burger King parking lot in New Haven, Connecticut. Her husband, Karl Laskas, was working on a Masters in International Relations at Yale. He was pretty clear about his career path, but Gretchen was feeling like she was merely his appendage. Karl asked, "What do you want to do?" Gretchen answered that she would like to be a writer. "Who's stopping you?" Karl replied. At that moment, more than ever before, Gretchen fully realized that she really could make it a priority to concentrate on this dream and try to make it a reality. Just a few months earlier, Gretchen's maternal grandmother, Virginia Kuhn Wilson of Fairmont, West Virginia, had died, and Gretchen had become the family's leading genealogist. Her knowledge of family stories provided real substance for Gretchen's writing focus. Gretchen's maternal grandfather was the son of a Fairmont clothier who was the grandson of a man Laskas refers to as a "ruthless land-owner," himself the son-in-law of David Trowbridge, a Methodist Circuit Rider whose stepmother was the only family member in her generation—centered in Preston County, West Virginia, and Winchester, Virginia—who was not killed by Indians. This colorful family, which had been in America since 1631, the Virginia mountains since 1752, and West Virginia since 1774, had long intrigued Gretchen. The family of her father was equally fascinating. Gerald Moran was born inArthurdale, West Virginia, the town created by the New Deal to serve coal miners like his father, Bruce Moran from Gladesville in Preston County, and his mother's father Martin Riggleman, who married Bessie Dalton. Both of Bessie's parents had the same last name and were "Guineas," multi-racial isolates from Barbour County whose background is presumably similar to the Melungeans of Hancock County, Tennessee. The Dalton family tree goes back simultaneously to Valley Forge and to an indentured servant who married a slave. "This was one of our big family secrets, until the 1970s," Gretchen admits. Martin Riggleman's mother was raised in the Elkins Orphan's home, and his father was a Randolph County teamster, the son of a Methodist minister. "If you pick a point in my family tree, either side," Gretchen avers, "you can't go back more than a generation or two before you find a minister. That's been true for hundreds of years, and is still true today, which makes it awfully hard on the rest of us." Gretchen's parents, Gerald and Emily, met while studying to be teachers at Fairmont State College. Gerald went on to attend Vanderbilt University and became a librarian at Alderson-Broadus College in Philippi, West Virginia. Gretchen was born there in 1969, followed by Laura, now a reading specialist, and Gerallyn, now an accountant, both born there in the early 1970s. In 1975 the family moved to Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, north of Pittsburgh, where Gerald Moran became head librarian at Geneva College. Gretchen graduated from Beaver Falls High School in 1987 and met her future husband, Karl, at a church-sponsored ice cream social during freshman orientation at the University of Pittsburgh. "That sounds too wholesome to be true," Gretchen admits, "doesn't it? But it is." They started dating the next February and married in August of 1990 after he graduated. She graduated in 1992 with double majors in English Literature and Philosophy and minors in German and Spanish. Gretchen's first success as an author came soon after she resolved in the Burger King parking lot to concentrate on writing. In 1992 a piece about using genealogy to understand history was accepted by Wonderful West Virginia magazine. In 1993 Karl finished at Yale, and the couple moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked at the Center for Strategic and International Studies under Zbigniew Brzezinski. Gretchen worked as a researcher in the law firm which had represented Ronald Reagan during Iran-Contra. Karl later began working for the international wing of the AFL-CIO and Gretchen went...

The reading specialist: leadership for the classroom, school, and community

The reading specialist: leadership for the classroom, school, and community

Intervention after Grade 1: Serving Increased Numbers of Struggling Readers Effectively

The present study replicated the original evaluation of the Howard Street tutoring model (Morris, Shaw, & Perney, 1990), an intervention for struggling readers in second and third grade. It also evaluated the effectiveness of supervised paraprofessionals (Title I aides) in delivering that tutorial. For an entire school year, teachers or paraprofessionals, working under the supervision of a reading specialist, tutored 40 struggling readers twice per week for 45 minutes per session. The tutored group's instruction included guided reading in leveled texts with controlled vocabulary, word study, and reading for fluency. The control group's instruction, which was provided daily in a small-group context, featured guided reading and phonics work in the classroom basal reader. Analysis of covariance was used to compare the performance of the two groups on several end-of-year reading measures. Results showed that, overall, the tutored group outperformed the control group on each of the posttest reading measures (standardized and informal). In addition, the subset of students tutored by paraprofessionals outperformed the control students. In fact, results indicated that in the structured tutoring context, paraprofessional tutors were almost as effective as certified teachers.

Reading Coaches: Adapting an Intervention Model for Upper Elementary and Middle School Readers

Students in the middle grades need the skills not only to read independently but also to make decisions, so that interest in text and thorough comprehension will be promoted. This article describes integrated techniques and activities that the author used to develop these sophisticated skills in a one-on-one setting in her regular classroom with 30 students. The students acted as reading coaches for one another and learned to prompt, question, and probe their peers' thinking, in much the same manner as a reading specialist does. The author asserts that due to the appropriateness of this approach in relation to the developmental characteristics of adolescence, her students made dramatic improvements in word identification, comprehension, discussion, and decision making. She includes an overview of the reading intervention model used to develop the reading coaches design, a narrative of how she developed cooperation with her students, a description of minilessons used to train the students to be coaches, and a transcript of student coaches in action. The purpose of the article is to provide enough practical information so that teachers can integrate some or all aspects of the reading coach design in their own curricula.

The reading specialist: Leadership for the classroom, school, and community; Designing early literacy programs: Strategies for at-risk preschool and kindergarten children; and Assessment for reading instruction

The reading specialist: Leadership for the classroom, school, and community; Designing early literacy programs: Strategies for at-risk preschool and kindergarten children; and Assessment for reading instruction

'Further Study': Teaching Unfamiliar Texts

Drawing on the experience of teaching an introductory course in university-level practical criticism, an argument is made for the importance of an element of professional improvisation in the teaching of English Literature undergraduates, based on the discovery and demonstration in the classroom of an unfamiliar text’s formal arrangement, rather than a schematically prepared reading or more specialist extratextual knowledge. Poems by Tom Raworth, John Ashbery and Ron Padgett are briefly cited.

Remembering Dr. Anne E. Fowler editor, annals of dyslexia, 1994–1999

Dr. Anne Elizabeth Fowler, developmental psychologist, psy cholinguist, and reading specialist was a gifted researcher and inspired teacher. A senior research scientist at Haskins Labora tories in New Haven, Connecticut, she conducted developmen tal studies of language and reading acquisition, and pursued her passion for helping teachers improve the effectiveness of reading instruction. She passed away on March 27, 2004, after a long courageous battle with cancer. Anne Fowler, who lived in Madison, Connecticut, was born in Dedham, Massachusetts, on April 15, 1953. She grew up in Pembroke, New Hampshire, a daughter of the late Charles and Katherine (O'Donnell) Fowler. Anne began her undergraduate education at Connecticut College, transferred to Rice University in Houston, Texas, and graduated in 1975 with a dual major in Russian and linguistics. She earned a master's degree in linguis tics from Yale University in 1977. There, Professor Alvin

Why Mei Still Cannot Read and What Can Be Done

Reading difficulty is often the result of a host of interacting factors, including cognitive, linguistic, psychological, social, emotional, physical, and educational, but educational factors are at the heart of many instances of low achievement in English learning. This study explores the educational factors that failed Mei, a 14‐year‐old sixth grader from China, in her attainment of proficiency in English in a U.S. public school. Four sources of data were collected: researcher's field notes, interview transcripts, textbooks used in class, and informal reading inventory test results. Analysis of the data revealed the following: (a) all of Mei's teachers expressed positive attitudes toward ESL students but said that they were not well prepared to teach ESL students; (b) Mei's teachers needed not only effective instructional methods but also age‐appropriate materials for Mei; (c) Mei was left out by both the state and local assessment and accountability systems; and (d) there was a lack of communication and collaboration among Mei's classroom teachers, her ESL teacher, and her parents. The article concludes with discussions on how schools can prevent ESL students like Mei from failing to learn.

RESOLVING STRUGGLING READERS' HOMEWORK DIFFICULTIES: A SOCIAL COGNITIVE PERSPECTIVE

Struggling readers often fail to complete homework or complete it in a slipshod, haphazard fashion. Often, this adversely affects grades, erodes motivation for academics, and causes conflict between readers, parents, and school personnel. To help teachers and educational consultants (e.g., reading specialists, school psychologists) help struggling readers improve their homework submission rates and improve the quality of their homework, this article discusses reasons for homework problems and suggests how teachers and educational consultants can apply social cognitive theory to resolve homework problems.

A Road Map for Reading Specialists Entering Schools Without Exemplary Reading Programs: Seven Quick Lessons

A reading specialist who worked in a high‐poverty urban elementary school that initially did not have an exemplary reading program provides seven lessons that can serve as a guidepost for other reading specialists. Several approaches that led to improved reading achievement of upper elementary school children are described. The seven lessons, when combined with lessons from reading specialists who work in schools with exemplary programs, have implications for current and future reading specialists. There are also implications for those responsible for preparing reading specialists. The focus is on increasing reading achievement schoolwide.

Helping Parents Make the Most of Shared Book Reading

This article presents practical, research-based strategies for parents to use when reading with their child. The intended audience is classroom teachers and reading specialists who work with parents of the children they teach. Each strategy provides supporting research, followed by a description of how the strategy can be implemented by parents. The strategies presented are (a) establish a routine, (b) make reading an enjoyable experience, (c) read often, (d) reread favorite books, (e) bridge the language between the book and the child, (f) pay attention to the clues your child is giving you, (g) talk about the print, (h) read various types of books, (i) engage the child in analytic talk, and (j) encourage book-related play.