Helping Struggling Readers

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Helping Struggling Readers

• Myrna Hynes
• MELS Reading Workshops
• Autumn/Winter 2008-09

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Plan for the Day

• Welcome, apologies
• Recap of previous workshops
• Miscue Analysis
• Respond Aloud protocols
• Break
• Working with your samples
• Lunch
• Highlights of Workshop 2
• Date of Next Workshop - February 17

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What Helped Jeff and Jon?

• Understanding the reader
• Feeling safe, e.g. no reading aloud
• High expectations
• Feeling like a reader
• Personal choices in reading and writing
• Validation of strengths and preferences
• Regular reflection on reading
• Demonstrating learning in a variety of modes
  (print, image), activities, samples
• Talking rather than writing
• Success to build on

4
Detecting Growth in Literacy

• Reflections in individual interviews and
  conferences
• Linear development in their reading responses
  over time
• Validation of interests, needs, e.g. non-fiction
  for Jeff, drawing to get the picture in reading
  for Jon
• Making Jon aware of prior knowledge
• Increased participation in the classroom
  community of reading

5
Teaching and Evaluation Strategies

• Choice wherever possible
• Listening reading
• Assisted reading
• Talking writing
• Writing drawing
• Integrated ELA
• Social aspects of reading and writing

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Jeffs and Jons Growth as Readers

• Immersion in reading -- learning to read by
  reading
• e.g. keeping response logs on books read in
  class
• Breaking the decoding barrier by helping them
  across it
• e.g. assisted reading
• Talking about reading before writing
• e.g. participation in group discussions of
  reading
• Responding to texts by considering multiple
  interpretations
• e.g. using their responses to explore their
  ideas and to develop an interpretation

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• Drawing and writing about reading
• e.g. Jons drawings of his responses to poems
  and novels
• Returning to the text to check interpretations
• e.g. part of the class discussions
• Awareness of structures and features of texts,
  genres
• e.g. Jeffs fairy tale, A Wolf With A Cold
• Transfer of reading to writing
• e.g. Jons story, The Tattooed Man
• Developing a reading/writing identity
• e.g. Jons reflections on his reading Jeffs
  behaviour as a reader and writer

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Towards a definition of reading

• What is the role of prediction?
• What is the role of asking questions?
• What is the role of genre?
• What is the role of background knowledge?
• How do readers make meaning?
• How does learning to read by reading work?

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