Helping Struggling Readers

Effective curriculum and instruction for struggling readers has the same basis as effective curriculum and instruction for all students: it builds on diversity, emphasizes cohesiveness, promotes a high level of student engagement in higher order talk and writing, is aligned with assessment, and provides appropriate scaffolding for new and difficult tasks. Although these features apply to all students, the students having most difficulty in becoming fully literate are the most vulnerable to lapses in any of these areas, many of which are linked together, producing chains of unproductive interactions out of common situations. For example, when these students are expected to read the same material as other students in class as their exclusive or primary material, they are often unable to behave independently, to self-correct, or to take an active role in problem solving. Reading speed drops, and volume and interest along with it, meaning gets lost, and places for productive conversations are consequently reduced. At the same time, because of this position, the teacher’s attention is drawn most strongly to the many things that the child cannot do, a negative frame that is passed on to the child with further consequences, including unproductive classroom relationships. Consequently, the least competent students need to have these principles most carefully and thoughtfully applied.

There are numerous reasons why these principles are most likely to be compromised for the most vulnerable students. For example, in efforts to treat struggling students the same as other students, they are often given the same materials to read. However, this leads to a very different experienced curriculum, particularly with respect to task difficulty, as we have already noted. High stakes testing also potentially leads to the breakdown of these principles (Deci, Siegel, Ryan, Koestner, & Kauffman, 1982; Johnston et al., 1995; Johnston, 1998; Linn, 2000). Consistent with the breakdown of these principles, students at the lower end of the classroom, or school, are distinguished from their peers at the upper end of the classroom by a common set of characteristics. Although these characteristics are not universal, there are clear consistencies. They read and write less than their peers, do not choose to read and write (even actively avoiding doing so), are less metacognitively aware, less strategic, less persistent, less likely to connect learning to their own experience, less likely to generalize new learning, less likely to take control of their own learning, and more likely to construct and cling to simplistic interpretations (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993; Johnston & Winograd, 1985; Johnston & Allington, 1991; Meichenbaum & Biemiller, 1998; Paris & Oka, 1989). Much of this can be viewed as adopting a relatively passive stance to learning, or as lacking a sense of agency in literacy learning.

There are certainly some apparently successful interventions for middle school students experiencing difficulty with literacy. For example, the series of studies by Brown and her colleagues (Brown, 1997; Palincsar & Brown, 1984) on reciprocal teaching suggests that it is a productive approach to improving comprehension, particularly for those experiencing difficulty acquiring literacy. Brown (1997) argues that the success of reciprocal teaching is firmly grounded in dialogue and collaborative sense-making, but that there are other features that are also central, and which have been subsequently incorporated into the design of her "Fostering Communities of Learners" project. According to Bruner’s (1996) analysis, the central features of these classrooms are: agency, reflection, collaboration, and culture. These features map well onto the instructional emphases reviewed in previous sections and again suggest that the principles are the same for both more and less competent learners.

Interventions at other grade levels also reflect some of these points. For example, Pressley and his colleagues point out that their successful Transactional Strategies Instruction (TSI) program with second graders involved joint construction of meanings among teachers and students (Pressley & Woloshyn, 1995; Pressley, El-Dinary, Marks, Brown, & Stein, 1992). Others have also found joint construction – or "distributed authority" – to be important (Dyson, 1993; Wells & Chang-Wells, 1992; Johnston, 1999), reflecting that "each participant in the TSI group has some authority to contribute to the group’s product – understanding of a text" (Meichenbaum & Biemiller, 1998). This view also fits well with the results of other CELA research (cf. Applebee, 2000; Langer, 1995; Johnston, Layden, & Powers, 1999). In other words, there is some consensus that distributed authority, as occurs in dialogic classrooms, is very productive for literacy development (Dyson, 1993; Johnston, 1999; Nystrand, 1997). There is also evidence that it is rare, and particularly rare for struggling learners (Nystrand, 1997; Page, 1991).

These features of classroom design are particularly significant for struggling learners because in their absence there is a high probability that less competent students will attend most strongly to their relative performance and attach inappropriate trait-like significance to performance differences, losing any sense of agency about their learning (Nicholls, 1989). The less engaging and relevant the classroom literacy practices, the more likely it is that students will focus on their relative performance and standing. The more classroom discourse emphasizes the constructs of ability as capacity, literacy as individual performance, and knowledge as teacher delivered propositions, the more likely it is that students will construct handicapping identities and learning strategies. The "content" of successful instructional development to meet the needs of struggling readers, then, is first and foremost the development of classroom environments that sustain inquiry and reflection, agency (with all it entails about identity and strategic action), and authentic collaborative action.

Struggling students often build understandings about the nature of literacy, learning, and competence that constrain and distort their literate development (Clay, 1998; Johnston, Woodside-Jiron, & Day, 1998). Case and his colleagues (Case, 1996; Griffin, Case, & Capodilupo, 1995) argue that there are "central conceptual structures" that enable students to structure their learning productively. Activities and interactions in literacy instruction often leave struggling students with unproductive conceptual structures that draw their attention to non-central features, either reduce strategic action or direct it towards inappropriate goals, and produce fragmentary learning. For example, often students learn that literacy is monologic, non-social, primarily technical and hierarchical, and unrelated to their personal experiences (Jones, 1991; Johnston & Nicholls, 1995; Johnston, 1998). These students also are likely to find that learning to become literate feels effortful, and that effort is evaluated as negative. Wenger (1998) makes a similar argument about conceptual frames with an analogy to two stone masons cutting blocks. When asked what they are doing, one says that he is cutting a perfectly square block, the other says that he is building a cathedral. Wenger argues that even though they are apparently doing the same thing, the experience is very different, and the experiential difference has both short- and long-term consequences.

Structuring productive interventions requires changing the ways teachers respond to, and view, students and their literate practices. For example, a teacher must be able to notice exactly what a child is doing well and reflect that back to her along with constructive feedback as to what might be done to improve performance. Rather than one best approach, there are a variety of strategies that teachers can use to address specific issues in their classrooms. For example, research suggests that it is important to increase the volume and fluency of reading (Allington & Stayter, 1991), but there are numerous ways to accomplish this not only with all students, but also with particular students. Shany and Beimiller (1995) successfully used assisted reading for this purpose; others have also used repeated readings (Morris, Ervin, & Conrad, 1996; Samuels, 1979). Still others have relied on highly participatory activities such as readers’ theater and the visual arts not only to engage disengaged readers but also to move less proficient readers – those who "read in local, piecemeal ways" – toward more sophisticated comprehension and elaborated meanings (Wilhelm, 1997; see also Allen, 1995; Rief, 1992, 1998). In a similar vein, Ivey (1999) and Worthy (1998) have reported that volume of middle school students’ reading can be increased through more relevant and engaging texts and discussions around them.

Research also emphasizes the "unequivocal" relationship between word knowledge and comprehension (Davis, 1968), but again, there is no one path toward improved word knowledge and concept development. Instead, since words may be "known" on different levels (Beck, McCaslin, & McKeown, 1980; McKeown & Beck, 1988), multiple instructional strategies are in order. Just a sampling of the many productive vocabulary building strategies research suggests for use with a whole class, small group, or particular student includes keeping word journals and word walls, developing an author’s attention to and appreciation for words, holding discussions about interesting words, using riddles and games, and discussing nuanced differences in meanings from multiple references (Allen, 1999; Blachowicz & Fisher, 1996; Calhoun, 1997; Cooper, 1997; Baumann & Kameenui, 1991; Scott, Butler, Asseline, & Henry, 1996).

There are essentially three instructional problems to be solved for those students who are struggling in literacy. First, classroom instruction must be organized to enable the full active participation of these students in ways that expand their literate competence. Less successful students have historically encountered different treatment from more successful students, particularly in terms of the social interactions in which they are engaged (Allington, 1983; Cazden, 1988; Oakes, Gamoran, & Page, 1992; Page, 1991). Countering this means arranging for classroom literate activities that are sufficiently permeable to enable all students to participate, and understanding how to arrange for productive responses to their efforts (Dyson, 1993). Second, these students must get special focused instruction, not simply to raise their reading and writing competence, but to accelerate the rate of their acquisition of reading and writing (Clay, 1998; Vellutino, Scanlon, & Sipay, 1997). Third, secondary school teachers commonly have little background in reading and writing. It is necessary, then, to develop their understandings of the strengths and challenges struggling students bring with them, and to expand the teachers’ repertoire of strategies for working with these students – students who are the most easily confused and who are the most vulnerable.

Consequently, Partnership for Literacy instructional development activities focused on the problems of at risk students are directed toward expanding teachers’ understanding of the nature of students struggles in literacy, and of potential solutions.

A comprehensive reference list is available.