Score 4 Reading

CAN WE ELIMINATE READING PROBLEMS 
FOR STRUGGLING READERS BEYOND 2^nd GRADE? 

    Do you know Hannah? (Or someone like her?)  She is 12 years old.  She is charming and fun to be around.  Her peers think she is cool and funny and smart.  Hannah doesn’t usually cause a lot of problems, but when she is expected to read silently you start wondering why she is always off task.  The social butterfly and class clown persona takes over.  The child that you can count on during class discussions to have interesting insights and a willingness to share her thinking, never volunteers to read the science pages.  She will, however, happily discuss with you these pages if someone else reads them aloud in class.  Her homework looks good, but her test scores don’t.

    Many struggling readers have more than enough skills, strategies, and information to be competent readers, and yet they struggle.  These readers are not struggling because of missing vocabulary, or misunderstood language structure, or even lack of knowledge of the visual cues on the page.  Since they are not missing anything and the struggle continues, perhaps we need to consider the reading formula (instruction sheet or reading recipe, if you will).

    The inappropriate integration of information (good info, poor mix) that the reader already has available may, in fact, be the culprit.  For example, imagine that you have a new cookbook with a prize-winning cake recipe you can’t wait to try.  However, no matter how many times you try your recipe, it just doesn’t come out right.  Out of desperation you call the cookbook publisher and find that while the recipe did indeed give you the right amounts of each ingredient, the mixing directions were incorrect.  You’ve been mixing the dry and wet materials too soon.  You’ve been vigorously beating when you should have been gently folding and so on.  The subtleties of mixing a complex recipe are an essential part of success.

    Perhaps for a person with reading difficulties, reading is like trying to produce that prize-winning cake without the correct mix and without a publisher to call.  Having enough of the right ingredients isn’t sufficient.  The subtleties of mixing the complex reading process are an essential part of successful reading.  A cooking recipe can be made explicit; but reading is an implicit process.

    What if a reader could be compelled to use a correct mix of information so that the reader’s brain actually experiences (and for that moment generates) an appropriate integration?  We could then let the reader take responsibility for finding the strategies that he or she had just been seduced into using.  In other words, cause the experience of competent reading and then allow experimenting in order for the reader to cause his or her own experience.  This needs to happen over and over again.

    Since everyone’s prior knowledge and system of networking their prior knowledge is different, the reading mix will be different for each individual and can change at any moment in time.  This will depend both upon the genre of the text and the reader’s prior knowledge (which hopefully continues to change and grow because the individual continues to change and grow).  But even though the process is dynamic, complex, implicit, and different for different people; the purpose of the basic neural pathway for reading is universal. 

    Purpose: Reading Theory has taught us that the purpose of reading is to comfortably understand the author’s intended meaning (at least at the literal level).  In other words, it’s not good enough to struggle and understand, or to sound lovely and not understand.  And hasn’t Process Learning Theory taught us that experiencing and experimenting are central to how a brain learns a process?  If theory is to drive method, maybe we need to practically apply this thinking in order to help a struggling reader eliminate his or her reading problem.

    Classroom teachers deserve a “how to” (practical application) that is generated by a “what to do” (method) and a “why to do it” (theory).  I’m blogging on the Score 4 Reading Website, because I believe the answer is here!