Understanding The Reading Process

- Louis Justman

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Hello!

Thank you for checking out this parent resource. My goal here is to provide you with a basic overview into the instruction of students with reading disabilities. Hopefully the information helps turn you into a superhero on the subject matter!

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A little background...

• Of US Adults, about 14% or 32 million can not read
• Another 21% read below a fifth grade level
• There are 74 million kids under 18 in the US
• 20% or 14 million have trouble learning to read
• Between 2.2 and 3.7 million of these have a severe reading disability.
• These students have double the chance of their peers of�dropping out of high school.

(Johnson, 2015, p. 17)

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Understanding

The Reading Process

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Understanding The Reading Process

According to the neurocognitive model, Reading is creating meaning with print (p. 22).

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We have two perspectives to examine

• The Neurological Perspective
• The Cognitive Perspective

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Understanding The Reading Process

The Neurological Perspective

• Words are verified using three cueing systems, from best to worst:
• Symantic: Using context and background knowledge to identify words and figure out what comes next (p. 25).
• Ex. “The Monkey ate a ______.
• Syntactic: Deals with grammar, sentence structure, word order, tense, prefixes, parts of speech, and word functions (p. 26)
• Ex. What part of speech is missing in the other example?
• Grapho-phonetic: A Portmanteau… “Grapho” meaning symbols and “phono” meaning sounds. Uses letter sounds to predict what word comes next (p. 26).

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Understanding The Reading Process

Brain Stuff (p. 28-29)

• The eyes take in visual data, which moves to a relay point called the thalamus.
• The three cueing systems we just talked about make sense of that data.
• It is then shipped off to the cortex, which is the part of the brain that handles higher level thinking and memory.
• The cortex ships info back to the thalamus (a lot of it)
• In other words, we’re using what we know to help make sense of the data we are trying to process

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Understanding The Reading Process

Eye Stuff (p. 34-38)

• As people read, their eyes bounce around the page rather than move orderly across a page. Some words are skipped, some we spend more time on, and some we go back to for review
• Eyes skip about 40% of words on a page and brains fill in the blanks
• Our eyes need to move in order to maintain a clear, focused picture
• Think of them like scanners at a store trying to grab a barcode
• The point we focus on is called the foveal, the area around it the parafoveal, and the rest the peripheral
• When our brains process what we’re looking at, their very good at filling in the blanks outside the foveal.

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Understanding The Reading Process

Actually, a little more brain stuff (p. 38-41)

• The cerebral cortex is what’s responsible for things like thinking, reasoning, imagination, decision making, and problem solving.
• As you might know, there are different lobes, associated with various types of thinking.
• More importantly, the lobes in the cerebrum work holistically to process and create and strengthen neural pathways and webs.
• These “neural networks” handle the processing of new and related info. The more we learn, the easier it is to make these connections and learn more.

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Understanding The Reading Process

The Cognitive Perspective (p. 46-47)

• The mind is what makes us human. If the brain is the engine of the car, the mind is the person driving it down the road.
• The Information Processing Model is how we take in, analyze, organize, store, and retrieve information
• First, we perceive stimuli through our five senses.
• Then, we give attention to whichever stimuli we have decided to focus on. We make choices to block some stimuli to allow others.
• The chosen stimuli end up in our sensory memory, which holds unlimited information, but only for a few seconds while we decide what to do with it.

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Understanding The Reading Process

Short Term Memory (p. 47-49)

• People can hold between five and nine bits of information
• People can chunk pieces together to hold more bits (think phone numbers)
• With reading, focusing on individual letters can be hard because we can only keep seven at a time. People can’t create meaning from such few letters at a time.

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Understanding The Reading Process

Working Memory (p. 49-50)

• The workbench for the info held in our short term memories
• People add to it, analyze it, organize it, restructor it, or connect it to other things.
• We take information decide what is useful, irrelevant or doesn’t make sense and put it into the right “file cabinet” in our heads
• Metacognition, our thinking about our thinking happens here
• We check ourselves to make sure we feel we understand everything we need to about our reading

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Understanding The Reading Process

Long Term Memory (p. 51-)

• Unlimited capacity to store info basically forever
• Everything you have ever experienced is filed away somewhere in that head of yours- The trouble is, we can’t always access it.
• When we read, we grab schemata from our long term memory to recognize words, predict, and understand what we are reading

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INFORMATION MOVES IN A TWO WAY FLOW BETWEEN LTM AND STM!

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Diagnosing�Reading Problems

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Diagnosing Reading Problems

• A good assessment should inform instruction.
• Standardized tests don’t really do this… they just tell us how much someone can’t read compared to everyone else.
• Identifying causes of reading disability, finding strengths and problem areas, and providing info for planning and instruction is best done through a Diagnostic Reading Inventory (DRI).
• A DRI is made up of graded word lists, graded reading passages, and comprehension questions or a maze

(p. 57-58)

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Diagnosing Reading Problems

Graded Word Lists

- Give a very general estimate of a student’s reading grade level.

- Has students try to read words typical of a grade level out loud, moving up until they have problems doing so independently.

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(p. 58-72)

Graded Reading Passages

- Based on the student’s word list level, students attempt to reach a passage independently.

- Teachers track miscues, and students are independent at 98% success. Move up a level if this is the case. Repeat.

- Comprehension questions are usually also asked on the passage

Comprehension Questions / Maze

- Familiarity with a topic and words as well as type of text and style of writing has an influence

- Having students retell what they read, with probing questions, and putting their answers into a story retelling chart is one way to track this

- Another is a maze, which removes every fifth word, and has students pick which word from a selection should go there

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Three Deficit Areas

Fluency

- The ability to process text quickly and efficiently.

- Words per Minute scores and qualitative analysis from the teacher provide a sense of the student’s fluency.

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(p. 73-74)

Word Identification

- How students identify words they don’t know

- Six skills to do this�(a) word parts / families�(b) prefixes, suffixes, roots�(c) context clues�(d) grammar / word order�(e) sight words�(f) fonics

- Students have strengths and weaknesses here, and typically have patterns to miscues

Comprehension

- The ability to create meaning from text.

- It is sometimes hard to how much fluency and word identification affects comprehension.

- The DRI helps us do this.

- When focusing on just comprehension, read the student’s graded passage to them and then test for comprehension.

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Planning Instruction

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Planning Instruction

Students can not be frustrated or overwhelmed! (p. 74-76)

• Students need a short term plan, short/attainable goals, and praise when meeting those goals
• Instruction should be just a little ahead of independent level
• Students should focus on what they can do over what they struggle with. Usually, that means focusing on a two-cueing system of semantics and syntax and leaving out phonics.
• Reading instruction should be comprehensive (more on that in the next section)
• Assessment should be reliable (consistent) and valid (actually measure what it is supposed to

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Reading Lessons

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Reading Lessons

Scaffolded Reading Experience (SRE) Lessons (p. 79-85)

• The purpose statement is either to help students read and enjoy narrative texts or to read and understand expository texts
• Pre reading activities enable students to read the text independently
• Ex. Story preview, story map, story grammar, etc.
• During reading activities prepare the student to read in the real world, and should typically be silent individual reading (but can also be buddy or whisper reading)
• Post reading activities should have students manipulate, extend, apply, analyze or become engaged with some idea from their text

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Reading Lessons

Guided Reading Lessons (p. 85- 87)

• Provides direct and authentic reading instruction to small groups
• Groups have to be small and flexible and made up of students with similar reading levels.
• These lessons should teach specific skills, and focus on one or two
• Should use shorter texts at the instructional or independent level
• Students typically follow along as the teacher reads aloud, read silently to themselves, or whisper read
• Lesosns are most effective if they include a short activity at the end that enables students to practice the skills focused on during the lesson.

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Reading Lessons

Shared Reading Lessons (p. 87-89)

• Allows a multi level class to have discussions around a common text
• In elementary grades, this is often done with students sitting on a carpet listening to a teacher read a big or picture book
• In secondary grades, the same is done with snipets of a novel, textbook, article, or website, with the text photocopied, or projected on a screen where all can see it.
• During reading, students often do “Everyone Read To (ERT),” where they read aloud to a particular point and then have to identify something about that section.

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Reading Lessons

Shared Reading Lessons (p. 87-89) cont.

• Even if students can’t get through the whole reading section, they usually have enough information to participate in discussions
• A Pre reading activity, such as previewing questions should be done before the text is read.
• During reading questions should be the type that eventually students begin to ask themselves as they read independently
• After reading activities should have students interact with, extend, apply, analyze, or manipulate ideas or concepts in the text.

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Elements of�Reading Instruction

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Elements of Reading Instruction

• There is no magical standardized process to teach very non standardized humans to read.
• Instead, instruction should be multidimensional and recognize different ways of thinking and types of intelligence
• If the following ten things are attended to, any reader will be attended to: Concepts of print, phonemic awareness, emotion and motivation, literature, phonics, word identification strategies and skills, fluency, comprehension, vocabulary, and writing.
• All 10 elements work together holistically and need to be included in some capacity.

(p. 95-98)

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Elements of Reading Instruction

1. Concepts of Print - The very basics of language, words, sounds, and reading. Typically taught in preschool and kindergarten.
2. Phonemic Awareness - Hearing / manipulating sounds within words. Activities are usually done once the readers is at the 1st grade level.
3. Emotion and Motivation - Relates to the desire to read. Struggling readers have typically had a lot of failure, and associate reading with these negative experiences. Can be at any level.
4. Literature - Has to do with picking texts students want to read.
5. Phonics - The ability to associate sounds with letters/patterns
6. Word Identification strategies and skills - See slide 17 for details on these six skills. (p. 95-98)
7. ​

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Elements of Reading Instruction

7. Fluency - Processing text quickly and efficiently. Has a lot to do with comprehension and strategies involving this strengthen neural pathways to help students process text
8. Comprehension - Has to do with specific skills to understand expository and narrative text
9. Vocabulary - The number of words students know. Focuses on adding depth and dimension to student’s knowledge of words
10. Writing - Being a good writer helps students understand how to be good readers. This instruction focuses on the writing process, including prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing.

(p. 95-98)

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Emotions & Motivation

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Emotions

“We think learn and emote with the same brain. Thus, it would be silly to think emotions would not be a factor in students’ ability to learn” (p. 121).

• Attending to emotional elements is particularly important in working with struggling readers!
• Try to understand what it feels like to be someone who struggles with reading- think about how you react to failure and frustration.
• Think about that happening to you every day and very publicly.
• Think about being assigned things that reminded you of those failings
• Add to those feelings being too young to really understand and sort through those feelings of failing or being a high school student, hyper aware of what peers think. (p. 121-122)

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Emotions

Be honest in order to build trust and relationship. Directly tell students:

“You have trouble reading. It’s not a big deal. It doesn’t mean that you are dumb or can’t learn. IT just means that you have trouble reading. A lot of people have trouble reading. We’re going to see what we can do to make it better” (p. 123)

Don’t frustrate students by putting them in positons where they will fail

Don’t teach down to kids with aged down materials

Listen to what students are interested in and taylor readings around that

Share things about yourself!

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Motivation

The Value-Expectancy Theory says that “students’ motivation to engage in any behavior or activity is a result of how much they value the activity and their expectancy of success” (p. 124).

If students don’t value the skill or activity, they aren’t going to be motivated to engage in it.

They need to be able to see themselves using it every day, and find some element of value in it: either attainment, intrinsic, or utility.

(p. 125).

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Motivation

Attainment

The importance of having the skill or engaging in the activity at hand. Older students seem to understand they need reading to communicate with peers.

Intrinsic

How much enjoyment students find in the task/skill

It’s hard to value things that are boring, repetitive, or seen as meaningless.

The book being read also has to be enjoyable to read

Utility

Does the skill help achieve another goal?

Experiences with reading have to be authentic, so students see why they are reading and writing.

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(p. 125-126)

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Motivation

Some things to help with motivation (p. 127-130):

• Keep reading level near where the student’s is
• Have easy enjoyable books on hand to read
• Give students choice in what they are reading
• Set students up for success
• Set obtainable goals
• Give students chances to practice reading
• Incorporate writing
• Include social interaction about the readings

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Literature and Instructional Approaches

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Literature and Instructional Approaches

More than anything, students need to do more voluntary reading! (p. 132)

• When teaching reading, your job is to make students fall in love with books and make good books readily available.
• Students need 15 minutes or more of independent reading practice each day in primary grades, 20 minutes a day in middle school, and 30 minutes a day in high school
• Having an ongoing read aloud book with students is a great way to draw them in to books.
• Don’t ever make fun of light reading that is “too easy.”
• Give reading homework; read for 15 minutes and log it. (p. 134).

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Literature and Instructional Approaches

• Have students create movie posters or write critiques for the books they read.
• Give students choice in what they are reading and how they respond to books, and trust students to get their reading done without needing accountability measures every single time.
• If students don’t like a book, allow them to stop and find something else they like better.
• Create opportunities for students to talk about the books they are reading.

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Literature and Instructional Approaches

• Four Approaches to meeting the needs of multilevel students:
• The language experience
• Self-select or reading workshop
• Basal-reading workshop
• The Four blocks

I particularly liked the last one, as it seems to have a very rigid structure, and students tend to do well with structure. Aspects of four blocks are Guided Reading, Writing, Working with Words, and Self-Selected Reading. Key to this strategy is that each block is used each day. Also of note is that Four blocks works well for resource room settings! (p. 143-144).

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Source

Johnson, A. P. (2015). 10 essential instructional elements for students with reading difficulties: A brain-friendly approach (16th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

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THANKS!

Any questions?

Leave a comment or email me at ljustman@nmu.edu!

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