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

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

Definitions of Terms

The following definitions are arranged by the five questions used to organize the programs and strategies in this guide.

What is it? How does it work?

• struggling readers: students experiencing difficulties reading materials required for academic success.
• elementary readers: students through grade 5.
• secondary readers: students from grades 6 through 12.
• culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) readers: students whose culture, dialect, or native language is not that of the larger society.
• programs: packages of multiple components--such as materials, strategies, and protocols--prepared by an entity, often commercial, for improving reading proficiency.
• campus programs: programs that require an administrative commitment at the district, campus, or department level for implementation across classrooms (note: comprehensive school reform programs are beyond the scope of the Guide).
• classroom programs: programs designed to be implemented by teachers at the classroom level.
• strategies: consistent plans, consciously adapted and monitored for improving performance in learning.
• teacher strategies: strategies designed to be implemented by teachers for developing student reading ability. They may be delivered to the whole class, to small groups, or to the individual student.
• student strategies: internal procedures used by students in the process of reading.
• assessment: the act or process of gathering information about students in order to better understand their strengths and weaknesses.
• formative: informal assessment of students during learning so that instruction can be adapted appropriately.
• summative: formal or informal assessment to determine whether students met the objectives of a unit of instruction.
• diagnostic: formal or informal assessment of the areas of an individual student's reading strengths and weaknesses.

What professional development is required?

• prerequisite expertise: what someone needs to know and be able to do in order to implement the program or strategy with struggling secondary readers.
• certified teacher: a teacher who has completed professional development courses in education and holds a state-issued teaching certificate.
• reading teacher: a certified teacher who teaches reading as a separate subject and who has at least one undergraduate course in reading.
• reading specialist: a certified teacher whose has completed a prescribed sequence of graduate course work in reading.
• formal training time: professional development sponsored by the developer or publisher of the program or strategy.
• informal or independent training time: the personal preparation time needed in order to learn how to the program or strategy.
• support materials: materials for both teachers and students, including teacher manuals, research articles, student readings, assessments, and activities in varied formats, including print and electronic.
• additional learning opportunities: workshops, mentoring, and materials support teachers as they implement the program or strategy, after initial training.
• local adaptation: the degree to which a program or strategy can be modified by the classroom teacher.
• additional learning opportunities: additional materials, expertise, and workshops.
• teacher training model: a major approach to training teachers to implement a program or strategy, such as expert-led workshop or constructivist coaching.

How does it develop reading proficiency?

• affective: the reader's emotions, feelings, and sentiments that are centered around the reading task, oneself as a reader, and the meaning gained from reading.
• transaction: connecting the author's message to one's own emotions, feelings, and experiences (that is, the stance one takes toward the text). Two stances are "efferent" (information seeking) and "aesthetic" (making personal responses).
• motivation: the intention of the reader to begin to read and to persist in the reading task. The reading behavior may be perceived as under one's control (intrinsic motivation) or as controlled by external factors (extrinsic motivation).
• cognitive: the mental processes through which the reader obtains knowledge or conceptual understanding--for example, perceiving, judging, abstracting, reasoning, imagining, remembering, and anticipating.
• basic decoding: the ability to recognize spoken words based on their printed representations. In English this requires recognizing both the regular ("kernel") and irregular ("colonel") relationships between written and spoken words.
• fluent decoding: a level of speed and accuracy of word recognition required in order to comprehend connected text at one's instructional level.
• language comprehension: the ability to construct meaning from spoken language.
• linguistic knowledge: knowledge of the language system: its semantics, including phonology (sound structure), morphology and vocabulary (word-level meaning), its syntax (grammar structure), and the discourse of connected sentences.
• background knowledge: knowledge of how environments operate that affects what is comprehended as well as how much is comprehended. It is general world knowledge as well as domain-specific knowledge (for example, "baseball") that is both declarative ("knowing that") and procedural ("knowing how").
• inferencing: comprehension beyond the word level, requiring the comprehender to activate what is known and to use it in integrating meaning across sentences, drawing conclusions about causes, relationships, and social meaning.
• self-regulated comprehending: metacognitive control over language that allows the comprehender to know if comprehension has failed and also what to do about it, given the purpose for comprehending.

How does it support effective reading instruction?

• authentic materials: generally any text not written for the purpose of teaching students how to read or to practice reading.
• instructional materials: text that can be decoded with relatively few word identification problems and is challenging but not frustrating to comprehend when provided classroom instruction and support.
• independent text: text that is easy for a student to read with few word identification problems and high comprehension.
• high interest: text that appeals to most readers. Some materials are written specifically to a low level of textual difficulty.
• narrative: a story or event, actual or fictional, expressed orally or in writing.
• expository: text that presents information following a pattern of organization--such as time order, cause and effect, problem and solution, comparison, and simple listing.
• authentic purpose: the purpose for reading the text is not only for school but for sharing reading with classmates or beyond the classroom.
• student choice: student self-selection of topics or readings.
• transfer activities: provisions made for transferring the reading to other reading contexts.
• direct instruction: teacher-led instruction through explanation or modeling, followed by guided practice and independent practice.
• diagnostic instruction: adapting instruction based on formative assessment of a student's strengths and weaknesses during learning.
• constructivist learning: inductive, student-centered instruction in which students construct their own understanding of strategies and text through questioning and sharing with others.
• cooperative learning: instructional model in which students work in a structured group with differentiated tasks to reach a common goal.
• tutorial: one-on-one instruction between tutor and tutee, either of whom may be teacher, other adult, peer, or younger student.
• prereading scaffolds: strategies provided to support the reader in setting a purpose for reading, activating background knowledge, and making predictions about the text.
• during-reading scaffolds: strategies that prompt active comprehension during reading.
• postreading scaffolds: strategies that stimulate questioning and reflecting after reading to extend understanding and improve learning.

How effective is it?

• type of documentation: the forms of public description and evaluation of a program or strategy. The highest quality of documentation is of data that are both qualitative and quantitative, in peer-reviewed publications and conferences at local, state, and national levels. Independent evaluation is critical, especially for a program that is sold or promoted for school adoption. Evaluation only by developers or anecdotal evidence can suggest a promising program--or, signal that the program or strategy has not been so successful when held to a scholarly standard.
• recency of documentation: whether the effectiveness of a program or strategy has been documented recently, with the struggling readers of today. The strongest evidence is for success over an extended period of time and recently.
• effectiveness with target population: whether programs or strategies have been successful with struggling secondary readers. For example, effectiveness with elementary readers should not be generalized to presume effectiveness with older readers.
• extent of implementation: the success of programs and strategies beyond a pilot implementation. The strongest evidence for effectiveness comes from implementations at multiple sites.

Sources Consulted for Definitions

• Harris, T. L. & Hodges, R. E. (Eds.). (1995). The Literacy Dictionary. Newark, DE: International Reading Association
• Southwest Educational Development Laboratory. (2000). The Reading Coherence Initiative. http://www.sedl.org/reading/.
• ERIC Clearinghouse on Assessment & Evaluation. (2000). ERIC Thesaurus. http://searcheric.org/.

Next page: Procedures for Compiling the Guide