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

What is it? How does it work?

Background:
READ RIGHT focuses on developing reading fluency. Developed by Dr. Dee Tadlock, it was first successful in workplace settings and has been implemented in secondary schools since 1993.

Overview:
Read RIGHT is a program for developing fluency in elementary through adult readers. Groups of three students work daily with a trained Read RIGHT tutor for 45 minutes. The program goal is to produce "excellent readers" who read aloud smoothly and with intonation, much like oral speech. Although the developers present the program in terms of current brain research, its three strategies are supported by research in reading.

In Excellent Reading, students read along while listening to an audiotape modeling fluent reading text that is at their instructional level. After silent rereadings, a student signals readiness to reads aloud to the tutor. If needed, the tutor prompts the student to predict a problem word, and then teaches it as a vocabulary word if the student still cannot decode it.

In Coached Reading, students read aloud a passage of unfamiliar text. A tutor provides specific, individualized feedback.

For Pleasure Reading, students practice reading in books at their independent level of readability. They choose from titles that have been selected from publishers to be included in the Read RIGHT library.

The program has been implemented with students classified as having dyslexia, developmental disabilities, and ADHD. It has also been implemented with bilingual and ESL programs.