Among the range of guidelines, which can be used by teachers for struggling readers, emphasis on reading for meaning and teaching students the strategies that good readers use seem to be the most effective. In fact, both guidelines insist on the necessity to improve one’s reading skills in order to get benefits and positive perspectives for the future.
The first guideline, emphasis on reading for meaning, makes reading not only “skill-and-drill activity” (139), but also a deeply important learning. This strategy implies that struggling readers should realize that reading is crucially important activity, which helps them to develop new concepts and grapple complicated syntactic structures. Moreover, this guideline involves students in choral reading together with the teacher and active listening. Collective practice of reading and listening appears to be far more effective, than traditional strategy of reading orally alone. Emphasis on meaning helps students to adopt fluent and expressive reading as the most efficient model. The desire to read is the most significant issue, which should be developed by the teacher in accordance with this guideline.
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"Teaching Struggling Readers".
The second guideline, teaching student the strategies that good readers use, is a good practical tool, used to inspire students to become successful readers. Importantly, this guideline includes several methods, such as a technique of thinking aloud, comprehending text, determining the main ideas of the text, its structure, point of view, purpose, and integrating materials from multiple sources (141). These techniques imply higher level of questioning, students’ interaction, and encouraging active involvement into the process of reading.
Obviously, both guidelines for struggling readers have positive effect, since they encourage students to be active in listening, thinking, and interpretation of the text. Both strategies make students realize reading as important benefit for their development, ability to form new concepts and learn syntactic structures.
- Jennings, Joyce Holt, Joanne Schudt Caldwell, and Janet W. Lerner. Reading Problems: Assessment and Teaching Strategies. New York: Pearson, 2013. Print.
