Helping Struggling Readers: Strategies That Accelerate Success Kylene Beers
(author of “When Kids Can’t Read: What Teachers Can Do” and a new book to be
published in Nov 05, both by Heinemann)
Beers’ keynote focused on comprehension and motivation, to follow up on Wilehelm’s
ideas from the previous day, what do you do when FLOW is disrupted?
Beers works with students in 2 schools in Houston (middle and secondary) which have
about 2800 students each:
 90% are on free or reduced cost lunch due to extreme financial need
 40% black
 40% Latino
 20% Asian and white
 55% turnover rate in students each year
 Students must pass annual standardized tests in order to be promoted to the next
grade
 Teachers are fired if the failure rate of their students is 30-40% (although
superintendents get a bonus if schools do well)
In these schools, the pass rate increased from 10% to 88-90% over 5 years. The
strategies they used:
 Spend money on high interest low readability books
 Increased time in literacy classes to 90 minutes for students with a grade/reading
level discrepancy of more than 2 years; where possible this was 2- 45 min period
back to back with the same teacher
 Teachers spend 1.75 hr per week (one morning before classes each week) in a
staff meeting talking about reading and strategies
What studies show:
“Teacher preparation is the strongest correlation for student achievement in reading and
mathematics.” L. Darling-Hammond 2000
Teacher effectiveness is the single biggest factor affecting student success. D. Sanders
Students must have cognitive confidence, social and emotional confidence, and text
confidence in order to be successful readers.
How is it that students can pass courses without being strong readers? Consider the
following “assignment”:
Corandic is an emurient grof with many fribs; it granks from corite, an olg which cargs
like lange. Corite grinkles several other tarances, which garkers excarp by glarcking the
corite and starping it in tranker-clarped storbs. The tarances starp a chark which is
expaged with worters, branking a slorp. This slorp is garped through several other
corusces, finally frasting a pragety, blickant crankle: coranda. Coranda is a cargurt,
grinkling corandic and borigen. The corandic is nacerated from the borigen by means of
loracity. Thus garkers finally ghrap a glick, bracht, glupous grapant, corandic, which
granks in many starps.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
What is corandic?
What does corandic grank from?
How do garpers excarp the tarances from the corite?
What is coranda?
Would you like some corandic in your home?
All it takes to get 80% is perseverance. You don’t need to understand what you’re
reading. If you can match the words in the questions to the words in the passage, you get
an A. What percentage of the questions you ask in class are “corandic” questions? Our
struggling readers need our most engaging questions to keep them from zoning out.
Now try this one – read the following and decide what 3 words are the keys to
understanding the entire paragraph. (This demonstrates the need to be able to use content
cues, syntax and connections to phonics to decode a passage.) When can you just skip a
word and when is it important to making meaning in a text? (I’ll put the answer at the
very end of this document.)
The Blonke
The blonke was maily, like all the others. Unlike the other blonkes, however, it
had spiss crinet completely covering its fairney cloots and concealing, just below one of
them, a small wam. This particular blonke was quite drumly – lennow, in fact, and
almost samded. When yerden, it did not quetch like the other blonkes, or even blore.
The others blored very readily.
It was probably his bely timber that had made the one blonke so drumly. The
bellytimber was quite kexy, had a strong shawk, and was apparently venenated. There
was only one thing to do with the venenated bellytimber: grivel it in the flosh. This
would be much better than to sparple it in the wong, since the blonkes that were not
drumly could icchen in the wong, but not in the flosh.
Re-reading is the single best way to improve comprehension, but it is the last strategy a
struggling reader will try. To use the language we use when we teach writing, you can
suggest to struggling readers that the first time is the first draft of understanding and that
they re-read to revise their understanding. Did you re-read either of the above passages
to try to better understand? What did you do differently the 2nd time? E.g., read more
slowly, ask questions, visualize? When should you re-read?
Re-read
 If you can’t remember what you read
 If you don’t understand
 If you don’t know who said what
 If you come to a hard word
 To figure out diagrams
 If you come to an important theme or clue
 If there are questions needing answers
 If you really liked a passage
Are there texts worth re-reading entirely? E.g. novels? What would students learn the
second or third time that they didn’t the first time? What would they bring to the text the
subsequent time if reading is indeed a transaction between the text and the reader
(Rosenblatt)? (Aside Louise Rosenblatt recently passed away and the March 2005 issue
of Voices in the Middle will be focused on her writings about reading. It’s available
from NCTE.)
Components of an adolescent literacy program
 A wide range of engaging and motivating reading material – narrative and
expository – at instructional and independent reading levels.
 Time for students to practice fluency and automaticity, comprehension strategies,
and vocabulary strategies at instructional and independent reading levels.
 On-going models for comprehension and vocabulary strategies.
 Daily time for sustained silent reading at an independent reading level.
 On-going assessment that shows students their developing strengths and helps
teachers decide what to do next.
 Opportunities to participate in a community of readers so to develop social and
emotional confidence as a reader.
 Frontloading activities that make the student the active meaning maker.
 Instruction for effective notetaking.
 Insturction that attends to the developmental pathways to learning.
Demonstration of 3 strategies using a specific text:
Pre-reading: Probable Passage
Give students a list of about 5 words or phrases to place in the boxes on the worksheet
below (one word/phrase per box). Once students have decided where to put the words,
have them formulate a prediction or gist statement of what they think the text will be
about. Finally come up with some questions you would like to answer based on this
statement. Unknowns is for words they don’t know. E.g. put the following
words/phrases in the boxes: shouting their bad advice, you left, a new voice, you felt the
old tug, you didn’t stop
Probable Passage
Character
Setting
Problem
Outcomes
Unknowns
To discover:
1.
2.
3.
Gist statement: ___________________________________
Now read the text …
The Journey ~Mary Oliver
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices round you
kept shouting
their bad advice -though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do -determined to save
the only life you could save.
During reading: Pointed Reading:
1. teacher reads poem aloud and students listen
2. teacher reads poem aloud and students underline 5 words or phrases which they like or
are meaningful to them
3. teacher reads aloud a third time and students join in at the parts they have underlined
Students form connections to personal knowledge and experience. This helps uncover
the main idea or the theme. Less risky and more meaningful than round robin reading.
After reading: Somebody Wanted But So
To summarize or make sense of a text, complete the following chart:
Somebody
e.g. a woman
Wanted
To leave an abusive
relationship
But
She felt obligated to
the other person
So
Finally she was able
to just leave
As with probable passage there isn’t necessarily one right answer. What if you thought
the “somebody” was a soldier hurt in the field?
***
Answers to The Blonke exercise: The 3 words you have to have are blonke (the topic),
drumly (the thing that sets this particular blonke apart from all of the others) and
bellytimber (the cause of it being drumly). Suppose a blonke is a large powerful horse,
drumly means sick, and bellytimber is food. Make sense now?