Struggling+Readers

= Struggling Readers =



Adolescents may struggle to read for many reasons. Good readers are phonemically aware, understand the alphabetic principle, apply these skills in a rapid and fluent manner, possess strong vocabularies and syntactical and grammatical skills, and relate reading to their own experiences. Difficulties in any of these areas can impede reading development. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), approximately one in four students in the 12th grade (who have not already dropped out of school) are still reading at "below basic" levels, while only one student in twenty reads at "advanced" levels. Teaching reading is not just an elementary school problem. Middle- and high-schools need to provide interventions and support for older struggling readers. Struggling readers are all around our schools but as this generation continues struggling readers in middle school and high school have increased dramatically.

Reasons Struggling Readers Struggle?  As teachers it is important to detect these students right away that way we can help them build those skills. The reasons some children struggle with reading are as varied as the children themselves.

Some of the skills that struggling readers lack:


 * text-based difficulties
 * such as limited vocabulary
 * poor background knowledge
 * fluency
 * poor comprehension

Most of struggling readers have trouble decoding words to problems retaining information, reading difficulties are complex. In this research I am going to focus on strategies that work well for struggling readers.

How do we meet the needs of struggling readers?


 * Identify problems and monitor progress
 * Provide instruction targeted to the needs of the students
 * Provide a rich, motivating environment for learning to read
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">Evaluate the effects of our instruction

<span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">Building Supportive Relationships <span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">One of the most important If not the major component to help students the skills necessary to read is building “trust”. Teachers need to show students that we care about their education. That we believe they can succeed and that they will do it. In the subjects matter book the author mention that struggling readers feel that adults have somehow abandoned them or pre-concluded that they are failures (Harvey Daniels and Steven Zemelman, 2004).

<span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">Build on Comprehension Skills <span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">One of the reasons most of our students struggle with reading I not being able to understand the text that you are reading. That could be because the text is too difficult. Therefore to build on comprehension skills will need to water down the level of reading to the child’s level of reading. Most of the time students get frustrated and that leads to a negative effect in reading. Students who have experienced failure with reading and are discouraged when they encounter lots of vocabulary they don’t understand. It is crucial that for any giving topic teachers should provide material at a variety of levels. That way these students will want to read. In subjects Matter Book (Harvey Daniels and Steven Zemelman, 2004). They emphasize that if resistant readers need to work with books that they can read rather than simply being defeated again and again by ones they can’t. If a student can’t read the material, he can’t get anything out of it or get any better at comprehending it (subject matter pg 26).

<span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">Modeling

<span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">One of the most effective strategies to use with struggling readers is for teachers to model their thinking while they read aloud. Many of these students don’t have that skill so therefore the teacher will have to use “think-alouds”. It is important to use this strategy because many of our students are unaware of the mental activity that takes place during effective reading. Think-alouds help students to really see how active their thinking needs to be for higher comprehension. Think-alouds will demonstrate a wide variety of mental strategies, showing students very concretely how to bring the material to life.

<span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">Prior Knowledge

<span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">One of the critical factors in reading proficiency is background or prior knowledge. Struggling readers frequently lack sufficient knowledge about the topics presented in high school. Similarly, students without reading difficulties will not partake enthusiastically in learning if they do not understand the topic. Effective teachers will activate or introduce background knowledge so that students can engage with the task. Activating prior knowledge or introducing new vocabulary or concepts before reading will lead to engaging all students in the classroom.

<span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">Scaffolding <span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">Scaffolding is one of the best strategies that you can use with struggling readers. Because poor readers do not generalize what they learn unless it is explicitly taught. media type="custom" key="7815811" width="25" height="33" align="center"

<span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">Engagement in the classroom

<span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">It is crucial for students to love going to school rather than misbehave or don’t participate in any activities. That’s why teachers need to make lessons more relevant to our students covering every child needs. The following are some of the many strategies you can use to create engagement in the classroom. One of the activities I personally like is “story drama”. In the “You Gotta Be the Book” Wilhelm talked about the use of drama to help struggling readers achieve their reading goals. Drama is a way of entering and responding to literature. It’s not only acting, it is about making connections, analyzing, discussing, and evaluating characters, plot, setting, problems, etc. The author wanted his students to have access to a “secondary world”. This means being able to put them in the role of the character, imagining the story in their heads, and entering this new world where they become the book. This activity engaged the students to want to read because they could understand and comprehend what they are reading. Teachers need to find engaging lessons to make the learning fun.

<span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">Drawing is another helpful skill that will help with engagement.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">Sketching my way through the Text: in this strategy students create a sequence of sketches to illustrate thoughts, steps, or stages of a process described in their reading. (Subjects Matter Book pg.120) Drawing is very powerful because it helps students visualize what they are reading about, and that’s one of the most effective thinking strategies that good readers employ. A sequence of drawings expands thinking, further revealing processes of change and development or multiple perspectives around a topic. (Subjects Matter Book pg.120)
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">Symbolic Story Representation: involves creating cutouts for characters, the reader, the author, and any props, setting, ideas, or forces that played a part in the student reading. The students then use the cutouts, explaining them and moving them around to describe the action of the story and how the story had been read and experienced by the reader. (You Gotta Be The Book pg162)

<span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Many other creative artistic activities may also hold the promise for changing student’s attitudes toward reading.

<span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">Multiliteracies

<span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">The use of multiliteracies in the high school curriculum can help to engage students and improve literacy skills. Teachers need to use more technology in their classrooms. Technology will enhance students learning.

<span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">Teenagers access all types of print outside the classroom such as: <span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">media type="youtube" key="-JTc9HeTh1A?fs=1" height="264" width="447" align="right"
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">Blogs
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">Wikis
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">video games
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">Podcasts
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">Facebook and MySpace
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">digital images
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">you tube

<span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">Fluency <span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">Reading fluency was recognized as one of the five essential components of reading development, and it has been described as an essential skill in a reader’s transition from “learning to read” to “reading to learn” (National Reading Panel,2000). Reading fluency has also been recognized as an important indicator of overall reading acquisition and is thought to be essential to reading comprehension. When students do not attain reading fluency, their abilities to participate in the general education curriculum and to attain academic success are severely impaired.

<span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">The purposes of reading fluency instruction are: <span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">(a) to provide reading practice at students’ independent or instructional reading levels; and <span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">(b)to increase both reading rate and reading accuracy as measured by the correct number of words read per minute.

<span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">Research suggests that increasing a student’s reading fluency at his or her independent reading level will heighten the student’s reading comprehension on independent-level texts, and it may increase the student’s reading fluency on instructional-level and grade-level texts. If a reader reads with less than 96% accuracy, it is likely that the text is too difficult for reading fluency practice (McKenna& Stahl, 2003; Rasinski, 2004).

<span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">Activities for Fluency:
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">Do Repeated Readings In Class: In their landmark book, Classrooms That Work (Addison-Wesley, 1998), Patricia Cunningham and Richard Allington stress the importance of repeated readings as a way to help students recognize high-frequency words more easily, thereby strengthening their ease of reading. Having students practice reading by rereading short passages aloud is one of the best ways I know of to promote fluency.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">Echo Reading: is a strategy where you read a line and all the students repeat the line back to you.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">Read Alouds :Students, of all ages, hear fluent readers read and read alouds provide this opportunity
 * <span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">Reader's Theater In Class: is an oral performance of a script, it is one of the best ways to promote fluency.

media type="custom" key="7815829" align="center"

<span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">Motivation <span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif;">Motivation is crucial with adolescents. Most of the time struggling readers hide from everybody else because they want to hide that they can’t read. A lot of our adolescents don't want other people to think they are stupid, so they begin to do anything they can to hide their reading difficulty and to avoid reading. When cornered, often these children act-out or misbehave. Teachers can offer prizes to students or do a competition among each other.

<span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">Group Discussions media type="custom" key="7815861" align="center"

** References **

Harvey Daniels and Steven Zemelman. Subject Matters. Portsmouth, NH: Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data, 2000.

Wilhelm, Jeffrey D. “You Gotta Be The Book”. Teachers Collage, Columbia University, 2008.

Eddy, John, et. Al. (1997)”Technology Assisted Instruction,” Education, 117(3), 476480.

Gardner, Howard (1993), Multiple Intelligences: Theory into Practice. New York: Basic Books.