Struggling readers and how to help them.

1. Helping Students With Their LiteracyHelping Students With Their Literacy
By: Meaghan Bussey (O’Toole)By: Meaghan Bussey (O’Toole)

2. 
 Why does literacy matter?
 What does it mean to struggle with literacy?
 Why do students struggle with literacy?
 What can be done?
What Will We Cover?

3. Why Does Literacy Matter?
The question is part of the problem…

4. Literacy is linked to EVERYTHING
WellnessWellness
MENTALMENTAL
SOCIALSOCIAL
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-Provides access to ideas not conceived by self
- Allows for personal decision making
- Increases self-efficacy
-Access to knowledge
-Communication
- Communication
- Ethnic Equality
- Gender Equality
-Leisure Time
-Political Participation
-Disposable Income
Life Span -
Infant Mortality -
Recovery Time -
Medical Attention -
Reproductive Behavior -
- Self-Esteem
- Personal Choice
- Empowerment

6. 
What does it mean to struggle with Literacy?
Essentially…
Students are reading below the standard set for them.
This can mean MANY things including:
-Reading/writing below grade level
-Not being able to read/write in a certain language
-Not being able to read/write at all (Illiteracy)
Negative consequences:
Grade retention, special education, or remedial services, and progressive
falling behind.

7. 
Who researches this issue?
1. Philip B. Gough is a seminal figure in Struggling Literacy
issues, his main ideas include:
1. The Simple View of Reading
-R=D x C (R=reading, D=decoding, C=comprehension)
2. The “Cipher” (Phonetic Awareness) and its importance.
-Gough brought phonemic awareness to light and the link
between the spoken word and written letters.
2. Connie Juel is another seminal figure in literacy issues, her
longitudinal studies investigated:
1. The skills struggling readers/writers lacked
2. The likelihood of struggling readers/writers to recover

8. 3. Joseph Torgesen’s research focuses on preventative measures vs.
remedial actions for struggling readers.
-He proposes using testing as a preventative measure to identify
students who show signs of becoming struggling readers and
using early intervention to try and prevent the need for
remediation.
4. Marilyn Jager Adams is the leading researcher on reading difficulties.
-She is a policy maker for the government designing
reading policy for schools.
-She chaired the publishing committee for the report,
Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children (1998).

9. 
Why do students struggle?
Two Broad Categories
1.Support
2.Skills

10. Parental SupportParental Support Teacher SupportTeacher Support
Self SupportSelf Support

11. Alphabet
Phonemes
Decoding

12. 4 Common Reasons Why Students Struggle
1) Reading role models and life experiences
2) The acquisition of reading skills, specifically phonics
and comprehension
3) Visual Processing
4) Learning Disabilities

13. 1 Role Models and Life Experiences
IMAGINE THIS IS YOU. “Mom, I’m hungry!”, I complain
walking into Mom’s room. “I’m sorry sweetie, I haven’t gotten my
pay yet for working at the diner and you know things have been
tight after I stopped working at the doctor’s office, you are going
to have to wait until breakfast tomorrow at school”, said Mom.
“But MOM!!”, I exclaim, “my stomach is so loud its all I can hear
and think about!”, “Well go outside and play or take a nap, do
something to get your mind off of it”, she replied in a sad,
defeated way that made me hate my stomach for daring to do
anything that would upset mom, after all she tried so hard to
provide for us.
Would you be able or willing to read in this instance?

14. Role Models and Life Experiences
1
IMAGINE THIS IS YOU. “Mom can I talk to you for a minute?” I
said peering into her dimly lit room. “Sure, sweetie, what is it?”
she said as she massaged her feet sore from being on her feet for
the three jobs she works to support us. “My teacher said today
that we should all want to be good readers like our parents- I
never see you read though so I wanted to ask if you are a good
reader?” “Well, honey, there’s not much time for reading when
you’re busy trying to get a bunch of rascals warm and fed,”
replied my mother looking slightly hurt.”“Reading is too boring
for me,” my older brother Alex said as he walked in and sat down
on the bed.
What conclusion would you make about reading if these were
your role models?

15. 1 Role Models and Life Experiences
Those scenarios are not just fiction but depict REAL
CHALLENGES that children face during their early literacy
stages.
The first five years of a child's life is when they learn the most
about the world and especially language.
These years are primarily spent with family not with teachers.
“When students get off to a
poor start in reading, they rarely
catch up,”
(Campbell, L. & Kelly, C., 2012).

16. CONCLUSION?
Literacy MUST be a shared endeavor between
parents, teachers, and their community!!
Research shows that parent support is MORE IMPORTANT to
school success than a students IQ, economic status, or school
setting.
Role Models and Life Experiences
1

17. 1 Role Models and Life Experiences
How can we remediate this???
Do:
1.Everything in your power to promote parent involvement
(Breakfast sessions, positive reinforcement for parents, recruit
parent volunteers to involve other parents)
2. Find your students a reading role model.
3.EXPOSE, EXPOSE, EXPOSE them to models of fluency through
books on tape, oral activities, read alouds.
4.Activate background knowledge (what are they interested in
learning about through reading?)
** 2 & 3 are especially important for ELL students as they usually
do not have such models in the household.

18. 1 Role Models and Life Experiences
CHALLENGE 1
What is one you can support parent involvement or
provide positive literacy experiences during the next
school year?

20. Phonics and Comprehension
2
What sound does S make?
Meg Wes
Who has their phonics down and who needs support?
Wes needs support in Sound/Letter association.
Do: Systematic phonics instruction, read aloud, use
manipulatives to make sounds, etc. ELL students usually
need support in this area of phonics learning.

21. Phonics and Comprehension
2
Identify (say) each of the
following words.
If you struggled with
any of these words for
more than 3 seconds you
cannot read the word by
‘sight’.
“Poor readers at all grade levels are
characterized by slower than
normal development of a
‘sight vocabulary’ of words
they can read fluently
and automatically,”
(Torgesen, J.K., 1998).
Sight Words Support

22. Phonics and Comprehension
2Comprehension
What can I do?
Answer: I can do math.
Early readers often struggle with comprehension because they
are too focused on trying to sound out words because of a lack
of fluency.
Do: Increase Fluency with modeling and scaffolded practice.
Listen to recording 1 and answer the question.
Now, listen to recording 2 and answer the same question.

23. Phonics and Comprehension
2 “All children need explicit, systematic instruction in
phonics and exposure to rich literature, both fiction
and non-fiction,” (The Learning Alliance).
THE GOAL OF READING=COMPREHENSION
By means of…
1. Phonics:
Developing Phonetic Awareness
Decoding
Fluency
Context Clues
2. Monitoring:
“Monitoring for understanding is a skill that struggling readers
need in order to strengthen their comprehension of the text,”
(Campbell, L. & Kelly, C., 2012).

24. Vision
3
I have a pet dragon. I call him Jag.
Jag is a cool dragon. He can fly up into the sky and shoot out fire.
He lives with me in my room. Mom only lets him shoot out fire
when he is outdoors. The neat thing about Jag is that he can read.
Go from a to z in the alphabet and mark the first time you
see each letter appear in the text.
This is called a vision alphabet timing test. This strengthens
visual perception.

25. Vision
3
Children who struggle with reading may be experiencing
difficulty with visual tracking, eye teaming, double vision,
and the ability to communicate what they see or don't see.
Do: Testing to identify students with potential vision issues,
exercises to strengthen visual perception including, the
activity on the previous slide or “students can be asked to
color in all sections of a drawing,” (Campbell, L. & Kelly, C.,
2012).

26. Learning Disabilities
4
Follow the directions below:
1. Say the word STOP
2. Delete the initial sound from that word
3. Say the new word (without the initial sound)
Explanation:
After step 1 you must hold in memory the four phonemes /s,/t,/o,/
and /p/ and then delete the /s/ phoneme while maintaining the other
three sounds in memory and then say the word TOP.
If you struggle to perform this task, the presence of a working memory
deficit may be indicated (Boudreau and Costanza-Smith 2011).
Phoneme Deletion Task

27. Learning Disabilities
4Working Memory Deficits are just one potential learning difference that may hinder
typical literacy development other common differences include:
1. Attention
-“In order to process information we must be attending to it and this is true
when learning PA during early literacy instruction,” (Torgesen et al. 1999).
2. Cognition
- “It is cognitive skill that enables a child to be able to reason well enough to
think about what is being asked of him or her and then respond appropriately
(McBride-Chang 1995).
3. Speech Production
- “These students might say, ‘‘tat’’ for ‘‘cat’’ and ‘‘doat’’ for ‘‘goat’’. These children
are able to perceive the differences in the sounds, but are unable to produce
the targeted sounds,” (Squires, Gillam, & Reutzel,2013).
4. Speech Comprehension
- “Some children have difficulty hearing, interpreting, and understanding the
difference between two similar sounds or sounds that are embedded within
words,” (Massaro 2001).

28. 
What else can be done?
Programs
1.Success For All
2.Reading Recovery
3.The Spalding Method
4.Early Intervention
Reading
5.The Boulder Project
6.The Winston-Salem
Project
Support Services
1.RTI Process
2.Special Education
3.Reading Specialist
4.Speech Pathologist
5.Tutoring

29. Essential Components of Effective Programs
1. Explicit Phonics Instruction
(#1 skill that readers struggle with according to teachers)
2. Listening Comprehension
(Teaching students to listen, modeling self-questioning, etc.)
3. Reading Comprehension
(Teaching reading behaviors, activating prior knowledge, etc.)
4. Tutoring Opportunities
(Tutoring for at risk students)
5. Extending Reading from the Classroom to the Home
(Read alouds with parents, 20 minutes of reading/night, etc.)

30. Preventative or Remedial
In Catch Them Before They Fall, Joseph Torgesen promotes using testing as a
preventative measure rather than a reactive one,
“We are moving to a “remedial” rather than a “preventive” model of intervention.
Once children fall behind in the growth of critical word reading skills, it may require
very intensive interventions to bring them back up to adequate levels of reading
accuracy (Allington & McGill-Franzen, 1994; Vaughn & Schumm, 1996), and reading
fluency may be even more difficult to restore because of the large amounts of reading
practice that is lost by children each month and year that they remain poor readers
(Rashotte,Torgesen, & Wagner, 1997),” (Torgesen, 1998).
Essentially…
“The goal is to describe procedures that will allow educators to identify children who
need extra help in reading before they experience serious failure and to monitor the early
development of reading skill,”(Torgesen, 1998).
CHALLENGE #2: Do you use more preventative or remedial action with your
students?

31. 
Final Thoughts
- Know your students holistically (academically, socially, physically,
family, hobbies, etc.).
- Use this knowledge to activate, acclimate, and achieve in your
classroom.
- At all times, developing children’s interest and pleasure in reading must
be as much a focus as developing their reading skills,” (Learning First
Alliance).
- Remember that according to Marilyn Jager Adams in regards to
school/government policies, “…the extent to which these policy
initiatives will have an actual impact on classroom instruction is a
separate issue—and it is only changes in the classroom that really

32. “Struggling readers can and will make progress in their
reading abilities when taught by informed and committed
educators,”
(Campbell, L. & Kelly, C., 2012).
Now go fight the good fight!
Always remember…

33. Burnett, N. (2005). Why Literacy Matters. In Education for all:
Literacy for life (Chapter 5). Retrieved from Academic Search
Complete Database.
In this chapter of Unesco’s book the effects of literacy development world wide
are presented and considered. The chapter provides both written and statistical
explanations of the impact that literacy has in political, social, and mental
arena’s of individuals.
Unesco’s report on the effects of literacy are extremely insightful and helpful as
they use real and accurate data points to draw their conclusions from. Thus we
can see the true impact that improved literacy has on health, equality, political
involvement, etc. as well as the positive effects it is having on the developing
world.
References

34. Campbell, L. & Kelly, C. (2012). Helping Struggling Readers. Retrieved
from http://education.jhu.edu/PD/newhorizons/strategies/
topics/literacy/articles/helping-struggling-readers/
Campbell and Kelly’s research article is a broad overview of the research done
on how to help struggling readers. It includes an explanation of the
consequences of struggling to read, as well as leading evidence as to why
students struggle with reading and how to help them using supports and
specially designed programs.
As an overview Campbell and Kelly’s article is an extremely helpful starting
point from which to learn about where to go and how to begin helping
students who struggle with reading. The article itself does not provide much in
depth explanations on how to enact such supports but does bring clarity and
understanding to the common causes of literacy struggles. Lastly it provides a
good explanation of the criterion to look for in a good support program for
struggling readers.

35. Gough, P. B. (1996). How Children Learn to Read and Why They Fail. Annals of
Dyslexia, 46(1), 1-20.
In this seminal article renowned researcher Philip Gough opposes the idea that
reading is a natural process and instead presents his idea of The Simple View
of Reading which he explains as reading is the product of decoding (an
unnatural process requiring teaching) and comprehension (a natural process).
Further he posits that phonics and sight words alone are sufficient to
effectively teach phonetic awareness as the cipher that can unlock both
decoding and comprehension leading to the ability to read.
This article is both a systematic critique of the idea that reading is a naturally
developing process and a reasoned introduction to a new, revised ideology that
reading is comprised of both the natural process of comprehension and the
unnatural, or learned process of decoding. Gough appropriately draws from
prior research to invalidate the reading as a natural process idea and to justify
his Simple View and explain why he believes it is important to develop
phonetic awareness not just drill phonics and sight words. This work is both
scholarly and ground breaking in the field of reading development.

36. Senechal M and Young L (2008) The effect of family literacy interventions on
children’s acquisition of reading from kindergarten to grade 3: A meta
analytic review. Review of Educational Research 78(4), 880–907
This article by Senechal and Young is a meta analysis of how family or at home
literacy interventions effect children’s early literacy development. In the
analysis they find that literacy development is greatly increased when family
literacy interventions are in place.
A clear and organized meta analysis drawing from 14 studies to conclude that
the effect of parent involvement in children's literacy development was
statistically significant with a large effect size (.68). A clearly defined focus
provided a clear analysis of parent involvement and its effects. Standard meta-
analytic procedures were employed to examine the results of each study.

37. Squires, K., Gillam, S., & Ray Reutzel, D. (2013). Characteristics of Children
Who Struggle with Reading: Teachers and Speech-Language Pathologists
Collaborate to Support Young Learners. Early Childhood Education
Journal, 41(6), 401-411.
This research article identifies the most common characteristics of children
who struggle with reading and provides an explanation for how this
characteristic effects reading as well as identifying possible supports and
strategies for students who exhibit each of the characteristics.
Although the researchers claim that the supports offered to children
demonstrating one of the described characteristics can be delivered by a
speech-language pathologist it becomes clear when each support is described
that both general and special education teachers can also provide many of the
suggested supports. The article is a methodical and helpful resource for all
educators looking for ways to identify and support struggling readers.

38. Pikluski, J. (1994). Preventing reading failure: A review of five effective
programs. The Reading Teacher, 48(1), 30-39.
This research article is a review of five effective programs that provide
support for at risk first-grade readers. The researchers argue for each of these
programs as cost-effective programs that prevent both students needing
remediation and the increased amount of money that would be spent on
these more extensive and long term remedial programs.
This review article is well done and presents a clear argument for the use of
preventative programs as opposed to remedial programs. Its arguments
within each review attend to both the fiscal side of the question of literacy
programs as well as the logic behind preventative programs over remedial
programs. It is a valuable article for any school or community to review prior
to deciding on a reading program.