Improving Low-Reading Ages in the Secondary School

Practical Strategies for Learning Support

Paul Blum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134332182
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This highly practical guide shows how learning support teachers and assistants can work effectively with secondary school pupils who are struggling with their reading. It relates directly to the working practices of teachers, steering them through issues such as:

• assessing the low-age reader
• working with reading withdrawal groups
• finding and creating resources for low-age readers
• constructing spelling strategies to support reading
• understanding the emotional dimension to being a poor reader
• how to effectively involve parents.

Paul Blum offers valuable advice on how to make challenging mainstream subject textbooks accessible to low-aged readers and help on where to find good free resources as well as commercial materials to suit them. Exploring the vital relationship between the mainstream and learning support function, he also outlines the ways in which the two can be harnessed to make a significant difference to reading improvement.

Chapter 1 Assessing the low-aged reader

DOI: 10.4324/9780203391228-2

Learning support teachers can work effectively with pupils only when they have a specific and detailed profile of their strengths and weaknesses as readers. This must include a look at their fluency for decoding text(mechanical reading of the words on the page), their level of understanding of what they read and their emotional attitude to the reading process itself. This information can come from a variety of sources:

• commercial reading tests
• home-made reading tests such as miscue analysis or phonological sound lists
• an emotional assessment of the pupil’s attitude towards learning in general and reading in particular.

We will look at the pros and cons of each type of testing in this chapter and discuss how they can best be used in combination to gain detailed knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of a struggling reader.

The profile of a good reader

The struggling reader needs to gain the skills that a good reader uses all the time. But what are these attributes?Good readers bring a number of skills together at the same time:

• the capacity to decode letter combinations they see and turn them into speech sounds
• the ability to access a whole store of remembered words and read them fluently,whenever they see them
• crucially, the talent to read words whilst simultaneously constructing meaning for them in their head.

Strong readers can also draw on a whole series of advanced skills to tackle difficult texts.They can build a meaningful narrative by making inferences and reading between the lines,sometimes re-reading sections they find hard or suspending judgement until the narrative progression of a passage is clearer.They bring their whole-life experience of language to make sense of the context they are reading about.

So what are the identifiable building blocks for this reading process? One of the simplest explanations, envisaging two pathways to effective reading, is usually called the dual route reading model. On the first pathway of the dual route, effective readers rely on sight vocabulary and are able to recognize, pronounce and know the meaning of a word at the instant of seeing it.This immediate whole-word recognition is called the lexical (whole-word) route to reading. But there are occasions when good readers cannot find a word in their instantaneous sight vocabulary because they don’t remember it or have never seen it before.

In this situation the capable reader is forced to break a word down into its sounds. This type of text decoding is called the ‘Sub-word’ or sub-lexical route. It is the second pathway of the dual route.The reader first splits the word into its sounds (segments the word) and then rolls the sounds back together tocreate a word (blends the word).

Lexical and sub-lexical strategies are employed frequently when reading in the English language. Some words in English follow regular sound-to-letter mapping patterns. Examples of such regular words include ‘bed’, ‘pump’, ‘brandy’,‘hand’, ‘mistaken’. They can be read either by instantaneous whole-word recognition, the sight vocabulary of the lexical route or by breaking the word down into its constituent sounds, the strategy of the sub-lexical route.But irregular words such as ‘sage’, ‘cough’, ‘island’, ‘garage’, ‘knock’, ‘meringue’ and ‘pint’ cannot be decoded by segmenting words into their sounds (the sub-lexical route). They have to be memorized as sight vocabulary (the lexical route).Good readers can switch effortlessly and automatically from lexical to sub-lexical strategies for reading whenever they need to.But they also use contextual clues to help them predict what is happening in the narrative.Capable readers bring their linguistic and overall life experience to reading any passage.This helps them see where the narrative is going in terms of meaning and grammatical structure.For example, consider this short passage of writing.

She was told to look out for a row of red buses. In the middle of the row was the number 45.

The word ‘row’ can have two meanings, but here the context in which it is set implies that it is a line of buses rather than a noisy argument.

When you analyse the reading skills of low-aged readers you sometimes find that they have a poor memory for sight vocabulary and/or poor sub-lexical skills for breaking words down. Some are able to compensate for this by using context to help them work out unfamiliar words in the text, but many are poor at this as well.

As you carry out a variety of reading tests, they will reveal the lexical, sub-lexical and context prediction strengths of your weak readers.

The tests you try out on your readers can be a mixture of paid-for assessments and ones that you have made up yourself. The commercial tests are often a good starting point to give you an initial guide to your students’ strengths and weaknesses,and you can explore these further in the home-made assessment you create.

Commercial reading tests

Commercial reading tests are the tests your school has to pay for. They are very carefully prepared to provide standardize information. They are piloted on a large sample of the population and take account of gender and socio-economic distribution.As a result of this sampling, the tests claim to be able to establish ‘average age’ capabilities for reading.They can be used at regular intervals and are a very useful way of measuring the progress of your low-aged reader,by giving you a base line score and then, through retesting, showing improvement over time.Each commercial test has strong selling points as well as individual limitations that we will discuss here.Information about where to get the materials can be found at the end of this chapter.

The Suffolk Reading Test

This test is published by NFER Nelson and is one of the most popular reading tests in British secondary schools.It is a group reading test: a learning support teacher can administer it to a group of pupils rather than to just one at a time.It is a multi-choice test that comes in several versions, so you can assess and reassess your pupils several times each year.

The Suffolk Reading Test has many good points. It’s very quick to set and mark. The pupils complete it silently, making it a relatively natural way of testing their ‘reading for meaning’ skills. One limitation is that, since the test is multi-choice,there is always a one in five probability of scoring the right answer by guesswork alone.

The New Reading Analysis

The New Reading Analysis is also published by NFER and popular in secondary schools. It is an individual reading test,which the support teacher administers one to one. It is more complicated than the Suffolk Test, and training time for staff is much longer. But this investment in time gives a strong payback as it enables the teacher to pick up a truly detailed profile of the reader’s strengths and weakness.

The New Reading Analysis has a series of six passages for the pupil to read, with comprehension questions.All the reading and questioning is done aloud.

Like the Suffolk Test, the New Reading Analysis has many good points. It allows you to spend some ‘quality’time listening to your pupils as individual readers and assessing their skills. If you have a lot of knowledge of the reading process,this is an excellent chance to make some important observations of your pupil’s personal strengths and weaknesses.This test gives you much more detailed information about the reading skills of your pupil than the general reading ages of the Suffolk Test. The results are broken down into both reading accuracy and reading comprehension.This is very useful, as pupils are often much better at one than the other. Knowing this is vital information in your assessment of them.

The personal approach of the New Reading Analysis make it a very good second and more thorough assessmen...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Assessing the low-aged reader
• 2 Working with reading withdrawal groups
• 3 Using phonic and non-phonic reinforcement strategies
• 4 Support in mainstream lessons
• 5 Finding resources
• 6 Creating new materials
• 7 Spelling and reading
• 8 Using Information Technology
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Index