Effective Reading Strategies : Teaching Children Who Find Reading Difficult

For Reading Assessment, Diagnosis, and Remediation courses. With its clear focus on intervention, this informal yet scholarly text offers prospective teachers tried-and-true instructional strategies and interesting activities to develop and strengthen the reading skills of children who find reading difficult, whatever the reason. The authors have grouped strategies around key reading instruction areas: phonemic awareness, decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. They show students how to generalize strategies for use in a variety of settings with diverse pupil populations, how to combine and modify strategies to fit specific needs and particular curriculums, and how to create entirely new instructional packages to meet desired goals.

We have been working together for 15 years, teaching and thinking; talking with children, teachers, and parents; conducting research; providing professional development; and discussing reading and instruction with each other and with others--sometimes heatedly. We have struggled with many questions: What are the best ways to provide instruction for children who struggle as readers? How should their instruction differ from instruction for children who progress more typically? What insights can we glean from research? What are the proper roles of teachers and parents in instructional efforts? And how can we best communicate our ideas about corrective instruction to teachers--those in training and those already working with children? This volume, like the two editions that preceded it, is our best current response to those questions and many others. It offers new instructional strategies for helping children in an informal, easy-to-read, yet scholarly approach. The ideas presented here have been tried and tested in studies of effective instruction and, more important, in our own classrooms and tutoring rooms and those of teachers we have known and worked with over the years. Our Framework for Helping You with Struggling Readers Many books offer ideas for helping struggling readers. Many espouse a highly analytic, diagnostic-prescriptive approach that results in a detailed recipe book of prescribed activities designed to remediate specific skills and subskills. These books include lists of skill activities aimed at remediating everything from medial vowel sounds to homonyms, to sequential comprehension difficulties. But such books pay little attention to the instructional context or how various activities might interact to form a coherent, logical, and effective whole. Our book breaks with this traditional model. The instructional strategies and activities are arranged around general areas of focus, such as phonemic awareness, decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Because we built the framework of this book around broad-based areas of concern, you now have a framework on which to organize your own understanding and approach to remedial and corrective reading instruction. The instructional strategies and activities nurture and develop proficiency within that broad area rather than remediate any specific skill or subskill. Generalized Strategies.The strategies can be generalized to many situations so that informed teachers can mold and modify them for their own teaching and learning contexts. As you work with these strategies, you will find they offer supported opportunities to experience reading success. We like to think of our descriptions of the instructional strategies as the raw material. Teachers use this raw material to meet their students' needs without lessening the effectiveness of the activities. Indeed, because our presentation assumes that informed, sensitive, and caring teachers will mold the strategies to fit their own instructional contexts, we expect the effectiveness of the strategies to be enhanced. Teacher Voices.Because instruction depends heavily upon the context in which it occurs, we wanted you to hear the voices of teachers who have tried out these strategies in their own rooms. You will see how they perceive and provide corrective instruction, how they modify the strategies for their own use, what they like about the strategies, and why they choose them. We believe that, by reading about these teachers, your understanding of and insight into the activities will be deepened and enhanced. Connecting Strategies to Make a Cohesive Whole.This book includes another unique feature--our attention to how different strategies might fit together in whole instructional packages or routines. We offer opportunities for wide and guided reading to help you form consistent and complete instructional routines that are pred