Bound Together by Literacy...

This was the title and the theme of the Michigan Reading Association's 52nd Annual Conference which I attended last weekend in Detroit. As a volunteer, I learned that roughly 3,000 participants attended this conference, and we began Friday evening with 17 large plastic bins full of orientation folders to distribute to our speakers! With such a diverse myriad of topics and high-quality speakers, I found it difficult to decide which sessions to attend. I decided to focus on issues concerning reading comprehension and addressing difficulties of comprehension and instructional strategies for struggling readers.

Nell Duke (MSU) spoke on several subjects, including Preventing, Understanding, and Addressing Comprehension Difficulties. She began with describing categories of causes of reading comprehension difficulties and how to gather evidence of persistent comprehension difficulties that are not caused by word recognition or decoding skills such as hyperlexia (Wahlberg 2001) which involves high word recognition but low comprehension and high oral and listening comprehension but poor reading comprehension. Many difficulties with fluency involve issues of working memory limitation. Difficulties with written language may be tied to specific genres and may include written language register and/or oral language register. One way to differentiate between the registers would be to ask a child to "read" a textless picture book after "picture walking" once through the pages for contextual meaning. If the child is then able to create the text orally, and discuss their interpretation of the story, then the written language register may be solely explored. Often lack of strategies or very poor use of reading strategies (such as making left-field connections that don't help with deciphering the meaning of the text) are the cause of comprehension difficulties. Some examples of these types of problems are the failure of accessing relevant prior knowledge, the failure to apply prior knowledge, or the application of irrelevant prior knowledge. Any of these problems can lead to inability to comprehend written text. Comprehension can be lacking due to a lack of engagement by the reader or by other factors such as eye movement problems or other self-regulating meta-cognitive issues. An exploratory factor analysis of fourth graders word identification skills and overall reading comprehension breaks areas of difficulty into these profiles: automatic word callers, struggling word callers, word stumblers (who comprehend a lot!), slow and steady comprehension (can't pass timed tests!), slow word callers, and "disabled" (about 9% of those 4th graders with problems) which scored low in all areas. Duke points out that there are multiple areas and causes of difficulty and often they are clumped together as one problem ("needs phonics", etc.). What can we do to address these issues of comprehension difficulty? Here are 7 points that educators need to address: (1) Appropriate attention to underlying or accompanying skills, (2) Extensive language exposure (written and oral) with explicit vocabulary teaching, (3) Language Intervention (much more than speech therapy!), (4) Explicitly teach reading comprehension strategies (questioning, inferring, mental imaging, attending to structure, summarizing and synthesizing, and self-monitoring skills) using the components of teaching strategies (such as modeling and talk-aloud), (5) Knowledge building through reading, hands-on experimentation, and discussion (make sure that about 1/3 of all texts are of informational genre), (6) Foster Engagement (CORI: Concept Oriented Reading Instruction), and lastly but most importantly (7) Assessment (let our continual assessment guide our teaching). There is a good reading comprehension assessment available free-of-charge at MSU's website (msularc.org) called COCA (Concepts of Comprehension Assessment) which you may use to help assess students with reading comprehension difficulty (takes about 15 min. per child).

Chryse Hutchins, co-author of 7 Keys to Comprehension: How to Help Your Kids Read It and Get It!, spoke on the subject of "Reading Mindfully: Cultivating Awareness as We Puzzle through Text." Hutchins emphasized the importance of knowing your students and what they know in order to know how to reach students who have no background knowledge and therefore lack understanding (including our ELL students). Readers who lack background knowledge fail to build meaning on their own and lack internal monitoring skills necessary to get themselves 'back on rack' when comprehension breaks down. We must teach strategies that will help students independently recognize when reading goes off-course and independently take steps to get back on the road to understanding. She talked about students' "inner voice" and "distracting voice" to describe these internal monitors. As an explicit teaching strategy, we should find books that students don't have a lot of background knowledge about. For instance, in a midwestern community, a book such as The Very Last First Time (which requires knowledge of ocean tides) would be something students may have very little or no prior knowledge to bring to the reading. Design lessons whereby students (1) write about the book and (2) write to the book. Writing about the book in the form of a letter to the teacher when they are approximately in the middle of their reading; they describe an interesting scene and end with "I wonder...". This provides the teacher with a comprehension check and focused mini-lessons on color-coding their reading (students make their own legend for coding scheme) to zoom in on great vocabulary, words describing feelings, noting figurative language, repeating words, etc. Writing to the book (after the reading) involves an exit question where students break into 4-way share groups with their own color-coded texts to compare and discuss interpretations and then the teacher announces, "Let's do a quick write". A series of creative mini-lessons focused on inferring by using a Gary Larson single-frame cartoon with all text blocked out. Most children had no prior knowledge of these scenarios, so then the teacher can "drop a hint" on the context as children are struggling to assign meaning to the cartoon, causing students to then consciously access their cued background knowledge to help them understand the cartoon drawing and write a caption. What a fun way to teach a strategy! Hutchins went on to describe productive uses of Book Clubs that help students' ability to monitoring their own comprehension. She teaches students to "Be a selfish reader" and think "What's in this for me?" When asking a reading comprehension synthesis question, often struggling readers will answer "I don't know!" A good response to this is "I know that you don't know, but if you did, what would you say?" This gives the student permission to go for it and take risks in interpreting texts. Encourage students generate their own questions as they read (perhaps in the margins of a photocopied text or in a journal) and then help students to sort them for quality and answer them. Some good fifth grade texts for doing this "questioning" strategy lesson are: Rose Blanche (Innocenti) and Charlie Anderson (Ambercrombie). A "Status as a class" assessment with sticky notes with written symbols can be used to monitor comprehension: stop and think (!); re-read (<--); ask a question (?). The genre of poetry can be well used to teach background-knowledge-accessing strategies: Take a poem like Gary Soto's "Black Hair" (or a riddle-type poem for younger readers) and block out the title before copying it for your readers. They can write their questions in the margins as they read along and then actually see the "synthesis" of their thinking processes throughout the reading of the poem.

Richard Allington (author of What Really Matters for Struggling Readers) spoke about fluency and what really matters for struggling readers and why. This was a research-based presentation that was well-grounded in the issues of concern to reading specialist, literacy coaches, interventionists, and teachers of all levels of reading. Allington stressed that the major problem that struggling readers are faced with boils down to two issues: (1) Texts that are too difficult and (2) lots of interruptions (by well-intentioned teachers and classmates!). These two issues undermine the development of the reader's internal monitor. An instructional level text should be at 95% accuracy beforehand (assuming readers "picture walk" through the text before they begin reading to give context and activate background knowledge) and 99% accuracy after the reading. Allington advocates using repeated reading (1 text, 3 times--after the 4th or 5th week of the new school year when routines are established). Repeated readings allow for many opportunities to practice accuracy, prosody, and inferring in a given text reading. Extensive reading works for fluency development. Independent reading works as well as repeated readings. In his multiple studies, Allington finds that wide reading ended up working better than repeated readings! He notes that repeated readings result in faster reading and DIEBLS assessments measure accuracy and rate, but not fluency! Oral language skills transfer to silent independent reading, but a level of accuracy in reading is necessary before this transfer can happen. Issues of working memory and attention are integral to fluency. If a reader's working memory is over-taxed, then there is a lack of ability to attend to the meaning. The most important thing that we can do to facilitate fluency in struggling readers is to allow adequate time for the modeling of good readers reading aloud which boils down to comprehensible input for struggling readers. Teachers must place processing monitoring responsibility back onto the readers. This can be accomplished through targeted comprehension checks at the end of sentences ("Does that make sense?" "Read that again." "Does that sound right?") But struggling readers are all too often frequently interupted and asked to "sound it out" by well-intentioned teachers. Constant interruptions and focus on orthographic processing teaches the struggling reader to wait for the teacher's interruption and then guess at a word until he/she gives the correct word, thus undermining the reader's development of internal monitoring skills. As teachers, we need to stop interrupting. If we must interrupt, it should be at the end of a sentence or a paragraph. Another word of advice from Allington is to rotate reading choices/materials. He suggested buying inexpensive plastic rain gutters (at a home improvement center) and mount them on the classroom walls as book displays to showcase books. The bottom line is that focused practice results in fluency. His data on fourth graders shows direct correlation between the number of hours spent reading each day and the child's reading level. For instance, a fourth grader who reads at fourth grade reading level spends about two hours a day reading, a fourth grader who spends 8 hours a day reading reads at the 8th grade level (95th percentile!) and the 4th grade struggling reader who reads at a 2nd grade level spends only 1/2 hour reading per day. Since only about 1.5 hours are spent reading in-class, this means that the good readers are spending the remainder of this time reading outside of the classroom. Think that 4-6 hours a day reading is something most 4th graders aren't capable of doing? Think again... this is the amount of time that many children this age spend watching television and playing computer games! Allington ended his presentation with a quick rule of thumb for estimating reading rates. Based upon 1,000-word books (Frog & Toad series, Stone Fox, Fox & His Friends, etc.), you can time a child reading one of these to determine their reading rate: Five minutes would equate to 200 words per minute, 10 minutes = 100 w.p.m., and 20 minutes = 50 w.p.m. What a quick way to assess reading rate!

One presentation that I found particularly useful to pre-service teachers was Pam Allyn (author, The Complete 4: How to Teach Reading and Writing Through Daily Lessons, Monthly Units and Yearlong Calendars) who spoke about "The Complete Year: Teaching Reading and Writing through Integrated Units of Study". This presentation focused upon each child being at a specific point in an ongoing continuum of their life, their development, and their interests. Allyn advises us to take a lesson that we love and justify why we can teach it as a unit and throughout a year-long continuum of study. Take the lesson that we are passionate about and contextualize it, breaking the subject into units of study that range from 1-6 weeks in length. Make sure that each unit has a beginning, middle and end and pre-assess students at the beginning and post-assess students at the end. How do we support all students? We base our units upon our state standards and GLCEs and make sure that every unit's needs must spiral up through the grade levels. We can do this by having a strategies and processes focus. These units need to understand the process of reading and writing, reading and writing in many different genres, needs to develop strategic readers and writers, and demonstrate command of the conventions of the English language. How do we cram all of these processes and strategies into a school year? By balancing our instruction and planning on a year-long continuum, and by spiraling majors and minors of strategies and processes, ensuring that each unit has a framing question and clearly defined goals. Allyn took process, genre, strategy, and conventions and showed us how to work these elements into narrative, non-fiction, and poetry genre over an academic year calendar. Her book and website (litlifeinfo.com) go into detail on how to make the most of this effective long-term standards-based planning. Her personal stories and humor made her presentation come alive!

This was the first state-wide reading conference that I attended and had the pleasure to work as a volunteer. I strongly recommend working at a MRA annual conference, as it allows a special "behind-the-scenes" glimpse at the daunting task of organizing and orchestrating one of the most invigorating methods of educating ourselves as teaching professionals and networking with colleagues who share our passion for high-quality literacy instruction. I can't wait to participate in next year's MRA conference in Grand Rapids!