The Alabama Reading Initiative (ARI) encourages participants in summer institutes to begin an intensive intervention program using research-based intervention strategies as early as possible in the child’s educational program. These strategies should help to close the literacy deficit and should be consistently applied so that the intervention is short in duration (ARI, 1998). Successful literacy intervention programs are accelerated instead of decelerated (Allington, 2000; Davidson and Koppenhaver, 1993; Showers et al., 1998;
Morris, Ervin, and Conrad, 1996). Allington (2000, p. 142), citing a study completed by Showers et al. (1998), recommended the following key tenets for a high school literacy intervention program:
■ Reading appropriate books in school and at home
■ Listening to teachers read good literature
■ Instruction in active comprehension strategies
■ Building vocabulary through reading
■ Training in phonics and structural analysis
■ Building vocabulary through natural language use.
Greenleaf et al. (2001) indicate many educators want to place struggling readers in remediation classes because of the rising numbers of high school students who do not read and comprehend on grade level. Yet, there is evidence that content-area teachers
And Remember...
■ As you consider purchasing a specific program to improve literacy, remember that highly skilled teachers are the key to student success, not a canned program that often ends up on the shelf after a year or so. Yes, teachers need materials, but even more, they need to learn more effective literacy and classroom instructional strategies.
■ Do not rule out basic reading instruction in phonics. Secondary educators may question the use of phonemic awareness and phonics instruction, but there are generally some students in a school who need explicit instruction in this area.
Special education students and some of the most deficient readers can benefit from help with basic word identification instruction and phonics.
■ Keep your intervention balanced. Do not put all your eggs in one basket. Pull from a variety of sources to create an intervention plan that meets the needs of your students at your school. Very rarely does a program or plan work the same way in two different schools.
■ Think outside the box. When faced with budget, personnel, or scheduling issues that negatively impact your intervention program, don’t give up. Be creative, brain-storm with staff, talk with colleagues—something that someone else says may spark an idea that leads to a solution.
■ Evaluate “canned” programs to ensure that research exists to support their effectiveness. Administrators are bombarded with materials purporting to be the answer to the literacy deficits of every struggling reader within the walls of the school. Speak with independent references at other schools where the program has been implemented.
Intervention: Meeting the Needs of ALL Students
using explicit instructional strategies that focus on giving students effective comprehen-sion strategies may be a better answer. And while the role of an additional (not pull-out) intensive intervention reading class continues to have a major role, the content-area teachers’ value cannot be ignored.
There are several research reports or articles that stress successful strategies to build literacy in adolescent readers. Marlow Ediger (1997) believes students should have the opportunity to self-select their reading material because interest is a strong motivator and helps the reader to want to do more reading. The reading workshop model encouraged by Harvey and Goudvis (2000) also emphasizes self-selection of books. Vacca and Vacca (1999) encourage the use of questioning and brainstorming strategies, discussion, and other experientially based activities to help students focus on their own learning. Bryant et al. (1999) conclude that content reading instruction should be an important element of all secondary content curricula. The instructional plan should include opportunities for the student to learn strategies to identify new words and improve comprehension.
A successful intervention program will include ample opportunities for all students to be taught by highly skilled teachers using strategies that support learning. Effective strategies are multidimensional, utilizing multiple strategies, prior knowledge, and the students’ metacognitive skills (Showers et al., 1998). Several content-area interventions that support effective literacy learning have been identified as successfully helping all students, regardless of their reading level.
Metacognition
In an interview with Lynn Olson, Walter Gibson (cited in Olson, 2001) indicates most students arriving in high school can decode text, but many have difficulty compre-hending the text found in the textbooks. Abromitis (1994) indicates the most important goal of learning to read is comprehension, and she encourages the use of a strategy called metacognition, or thinking about thinking. Abromitis further stresses the importance of teachers assisting both proficient and struggling readers with thinking about the written text and processing the written word, which leads to comprehension. Lopez (1992) indi-cates metacognition involves students questioning themselves as they read the text and self-monitoring their understanding of the text. Students make sense of text when they are encouraged to think about what they read and how it relates to them personally (Greenleaf et al., 2001). Intervention strategies should involve training at-risk students to monitor their reading in order to become more metacognitively aware (Kamil et al., 2000). Campbell (1994) emphasizes the importance of teachers modeling metacognitive strategies. This instruction should include:
■ Helping students to make connections between new information and prior knowledge by using the written text as the foundation
■ Discussing the events in the story in order to make a connection with the student’s own experiences
■ Participating in discussions that include higher-order-thinking questions related to the text.
Activating Prior Knowledge
Another strategy that effective readers use to comprehend text is activating prior knowledge. Ausubel (1968) indicates that one of the most important criteria for a student to comprehend text involves stimulating what he or she already knows.
Schema experts theorize that learners use prior knowledge to better understand new
text. Prior knowledge is schema, or a pattern of knowledge that is formed from prior experiences. It is an important mental use of schemata to find meaning or comprehen-sion in text (Carey, Harste, and Smith, 1977; Pressley et al., 1990). Hennings (1994, as cited in Manzo, 2001) indicates that students better understand what they read when they make a connection between the text and their prior knowledge (p. 16).
Berger and Robinson (1982) stress that prior knowledge must be activated or reading comprehension cannot occur. Students learn to use or activate prior knowledge as the basis for all learning (Vacca and Vacca 1999). Harniss et al. (2001) stress the importance of teachers actively engaging the students’ background knowledge by first determining their specific learning needs and then teaching information they need in order to understand the material that will be contained in the text of the lesson.
Balanced Approach
Research dating back to 1967 indicates the best approach to teaching literacy is a balanced approach—a combination of whole language and phonics instruction (Bond and Dykstra, 1967). Adams (1990) says all children, particularly at-risk readers, should be exposed to a rich variety of reading and writing experiences as well as explicit, direct instruction. Although the phonics–whole language debate focuses on elementary students, literacy instruction should continue in middle school and high school, and current research indicates that effective secondary literacy instruction is multidimensional and should focus on more than one element of the literacy process (Showers et al., 1998).
An IRA (1999) position statement emphatically states, “Literacy development of adolescents is just as important and requires just as much attention as that of begin-ning readers” (p. 1).
The Reading/Writing Connection
Researchers have discovered a definite link between reading and writing, and during the past decade there has been a greater emphasis on helping secondary students use the reading/writing connection to learn more information and to use higher-order-thinking skills in the various content areas (Tierney and Pearson, 1992; Alvermann and Moore, 1991). Moje, Dillon, and O’Brien (2000, p. 165) found in their study that “learning in the secondary disciplines—or content areas—is shaped by the reading and writing that learners do in those disciplines.” Writing activities integrated into all subject areas help students make meaningful connections to the text read. Writing activities should include essays and reports, descriptions of events, journal entries, written explanations of science procedures, and written explanations for solving a math problem (Misulis, 2000).
Pre, During, and After Reading Strategies
Reading comprehension involves the act of thinking and making meaning before, during, and after reading by connecting the information being read with the reader’s prior knowledge (Snider, 1989). Effective readers use strategies to develop compre-hension that involve (a) knowing the reason or purpose for reading, (b) identifying the difference between significant and less important information within the text, (c) questioning oneself about the text as it is being read, and (d) identifying and correcting any comprehension problems as they occur during reading (Bryant et al., 1999, p. 297). Graphic organizers assist readers with organizing and comprehending difficult passages such as expository text (Brigham, Scruggs, and Mastropieri, 1995).
School Profile 5:
• 26 percent minority
• 10 percent free and reduced-price meals