Building Reading Proficiency at the Secondary Level: A Guide to Resources

What is it? How does it work?

Background:
A set of four strategies to aid decoding and comprehending content-area text. It was developed for students with learning disabilities who are in general education classrooms. CSR integrates word identification, reciprocal reading, and cooperative learning.

Overview:
Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR) is a set of four strategies struggling readers can use to decode and comprehend as they read content area text. Researchers Janette K. Klingner, Sharon Vaughn, and Jeanne Schumm developed CSR for struggling upper elementary and middle school readers with learning disabilities by adapting reciprocal reading and cooperative learning strategies. CSR can be used by content area teachers in inclusion settings as well as by reading teachers.

To implement CSR, students of mixed reading and achievement levels work in small, cooperative groups of 4-5 students. They support each other in applying a sequence of reading strategies as they read orally or silently from a shared selection of text. The four strategies are as follows:

1. Preview: Before reading, students brainstorm prior knowledge and predict what will be learned.
2. Click and Clunk: Students identify words or word parts that were hard to understand (called "clunks"). A sequence of "fix-up strategies" is used to decode the "clunk." These strategies are: (a) re-reading the sentence for key ideas, (b) looking for context clues in the sentences before and after, (c) looking for prefixes or suffixes, and (d) breaking the word apart to find smaller words.
3. Get the gist: Students learn to ask themselves: What is the most important person, place, or thing? What is the most important idea about the person, place or thing?
4. Wrap up: After reading, students construct their own questions to check for understanding of the passage, answer the questions, and summarize what has been learned.

To learn to work in the cooperative group, students are taught the following roles that correspond to the strategies:
1. Leader, who says what to read next and what strategy to apply next,
2. Clunk expert, who uses cards to remind the group of the steps,
3. Gist expert, who guides the group to articulate the gist and then evaluates it,
4. Announcer, who calls upon group members to read or share ideas and
5. Encourager who gives praise and encourages and evaluates discussion.