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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

Principles of Effective Reading Instruction

The principles described here represent a synthesis of recent research and can serve to guide educators in selecting and implementing resources for struggling secondary readers.

Recognition and Honor of Cultural and Linguistic Diversity

Culture, dialect, and language contribute "funds of knowledge" (Moll et al., 1992) that are assets in the building of reading proficiency for all readers and particularly those who are CLD. Through assignments, activities, classroom discussion, and reading materials, teachers can provide ways for students to connect what they know with the academic literacy of school (Williams & Snipper, 1990). Teachers can help students make these connections by modeling emotional response to a reading (e.g., the aesthetic stance articulated by Rosenblatt, 1978) as well as the analytical or efferent stance. Acknowledging literacy histories in the classroom helps to create a climate of respect, which invites the participation of all students.

Assessment During Teaching

Following the diagnostic instruction principle (Gillet & Temple, 1990), the effective teacher begins instruction by assessing the reader to determine strengths and weaknesses, without the labels of disability deficits. To provide appropriate support, teachers should know the history of a student's reading difficulties, the interventions made, and the instruction missed. For example, the teacher can look for evidence of the development of reading proficiency such as phonemic knowledge at the primary grades, background knowledge at grades three and four, and strategy knowledge at the upper grades (Willson & Rupley, 1997). The teacher uses the reader's strengths to approach and build the areas of difficulty. Assessment follows the instruction and is both summative (Did the instruction work?) and formative (Where do we go from here?), beginning the instructional cycle anew. Teachers assess and scaffold students at three junctures: before, during, and after reading.

Scaffolds Before, During, and After Reading

Since the 1970s, a number of specific teacher strategies for building reader comprehension were identified and validated. These strategies center on the notion of providing struggling readers with support as they learn how to read. Strategies such as questioning, discussion, and writing serve as supports or scaffolds for struggling readers. Teachers should model and students should practice: relating prior knowledge to the text and making predictions about the content before reading, interpreting the meaning by constructing mental images and summaries during reading, and asking questions and seeking clarification after reading (Pressley, 1999).

The term scaffold is a Vygotskian metaphor for teacher support of a learner through dialog, questioning, conversation, and nonverbal modeling, in which the learner attempts literacy tasks that could not be done without that assistance. Roehler and Cantlon (1997) identified five types of scaffolding: (a) offering explanations, (b) inviting student participation, (c) verifying and clarifying student understandings, (d) modeling of desired behaviors, and (e) inviting students to contribute clues for reasoning through an issue or problem. Additional effective scaffolds, especially for struggling secondary readers, are to address the emotional aspects of learning and make learning benefits explicit (Brophy, 1999; Sanacore, 1997).

Repertoires of Strategies

Reading strategies are effective tools for comprehending (Pressley, 1999); they represent procedural rather than declarative knowledge, stressing "how" as much or more than "what." Strategies help readers to engage with the text, to monitor their comprehension, and to fix it when it has failed. Rather than a single strategy applied in a reading class, secondary students need to have a repertoire of strategies that they learn and apply in many reading contexts and not just in a reading class. As Pressley and Wharton-McDonald (1997) note, more social constructivist and transactional approaches have led to strategies that are less formulaic and more successfully internalized by students. Many studies have demonstrated the success of these approaches for struggling secondary readers (see Carr & Thompson, 1996).

Explicit Instruction of Strategies

To learn a strategic approach to reading, struggling readers typically must be taught how, why, and when to use it. An effective way to teach a reading strategy is to follow the Pearson and Gallagher "Gradual Release of Responsibility" model (1983). Teachers model through a think-aloud (Davey, 1983; Wade, 1990), sharing their self-talk about how they strategically approach reading, making their expert thinking visible to struggling readers. Guided practice in the strategy follows the modeling as students attempt the reading strategy within a context of support from peers with the teacher evaluating its effectiveness, adapting it as needed, and generating a consensus as to its effectiveness. Most important is sufficient independent practice of the strategy in different texts and contexts as students take ownership of these strategies, adapting them to these different reading situations. The shifting of responsibility for learning from the teacher to the learner allows the struggling reader to adapt and internalize strategic reading.

Reading Practice

As struggling readers are learning strategic reading, they need frequent, sustained periods of reading connected prose (Hansen, 1987), such as opportunities to read uninterruptedly from a book, newspaper, magazine, or other whole piece of text for at least 15 to 20 minutes. But independent silent reading, conducted without guidance or feedback, is not sufficient to build reading improvement (National Reading Panel, 2000). This suggests that students also need the opportunity to talk about ideas in texts, in order to move comprehension beyond the word level (Pressley & Wharton-McDonald, 1997), that is, guided practice in building consensus.

To build fluency, reading practice with active support and feedback, such as guided oral reading and repeated reading, was found to be effective across multiple grade levels (National Reading Panel, 2000). Not recommended for reading practice is the popular "round robin" reading, in which students read aloud in turn to the whole class from a common textbook. Not only do students find its purpose unclear, it can be an embarrassing experience for adolescent readers who lack fluency. It promotes a perception that reading is word pronunciation more than comprehension (Wood & Nichols, 2000).

Student Choice and Authentic Tasks

Students who choose reading for a personally relevant purpose likely will be more motivated to accomplish that task. For adolescents, that purpose likely addresses their fundamental questions, "Who am I?" "Where and how do I fit?" and "What can or should I do with my life?" Practically, students should be helped to articulate their personal learning and reading goals at the outset of any instructional session (Block, 1999). This goal- directed reading provides purpose and direction, which is inherently motivational and engaging.

Reading success may not be enough to build self-efficacy, but it can be helped by these approaches: (a) allowing a choice of tasks and materials that are personally meaningful (Alexander, 1997; Cope, 1993; Taylor, 1999; Worthy, 1996) and (b) changing student expectations or schema about what it means to engage in academic activities and use strategies to accomplish goals (Brophy, 1999).

Scaffolding Across the Classroom Curriculum

Reading strategies that are not supported beyond the reading classroom by content-area teachers have little chance of being transferred by struggling secondary readers. For struggling secondary readers to improve, their reading must be scaffolded and strategies must be reinforced across the curriculum, over a period of years (Gaskins, 1998). They need explicit instruction for the transfer of strategic reading to a variety of contexts and texts.

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