Delivering What Urban Readers Need
Taken from Educational Leadership/ October 2007 Shobana Musti-Rao and Gwendolyn Cartledge
The importance of identifying urban learners who are at risk for reading problems early cannot be overstated. Reading is a survival skill, and the failure to read during the elementary school years reduces a person’s chances of success in school and life.
We agree with Bursuck and Damer (2007) that specialized interventions should begin early and should include direct instruction in pre-reading skills. To prevent long-term reading failure among students who come to school already behind in basic skills and experiences, teachers should include these three characteristics in their classroom design:
- Early identification of children at risk of reading failure.
- Explicit, intensive and systematic instruction on core pre-reading and reading skills.
- Continued support beyond initial instruction.
In our research, we have seen that teachers who center their literacy teaching on these three elements bring about successful reading experiences for struggling urban children.
In observing teachers and urban learners, we have formed some opinions about what makes good reading instruction for most urban students. The debate over the right way to teach reading has been the source of intense battles; Proponents of phonics-centered programs emphasize the importance of explicit, systematic instruction in learning to read, whereas whole-language proponents believe that reading is a context-driven process. We agree with the findings from the National Reading Panel (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000) that teachers would adopt a “balanced” reading approach, with instruction in phonemic awareness, alphabetic understanding, and auotmaticity with the code forming the framework of beginning reading instruction.
Good reading instruction is explicit, intensive and systematic. Such instruction is beneficial for all learners, but it is nonnegotiable for students at risk for reading failure.
By explicit instruction we mean teaching specific reading skills that help students acquire the knowledge to decode print – skills that low-income urban learners don’t always acquire through incidental learning.
Intensive instruction gives students more learning opportunities through increased repetition of previously learned skills. Good intensive instruction techniques, such as active student responding (Heward, 2006), are not meaningless drills that “kill” learning, but carefully planned activities that elicit responding until a student master the skill.
By systematic instruction we mean the sequencing of instruction so that each skill builds on the one previously taught. Students need to become skilled in decoding, word knowledge, oral reading, and comprehension to become proficient readers, and these skills should be taught logically and systematically.
Encourage Active Student Responding
Research shows a positive relationship between students’ active engagement with learning tasks and their academic achievement. Active student response refers to any observable response students make during a lesson. A wide variety of instruction practices – for example, having students orally produce letter sounds after a teacher has modeled those sounds – can qualify as rich in active student responding. If designed well, active student responding can also be culturally responsive. A. Wade Boykin asserts that activities that incorporate movement and what he calls verve (the tendency to engage in more than one action simultaneously) create particularly effective learning environments for African American students (Boykin, Tyler, Watkins-Lewis, & Kizzie, 2006). Lambert, Carledge, Lo and Heward (2006) found high levels of academic responding and lower levels of disruptive behavior in urban learners when students held up response cards to display their answers. Peer tutoring is another focused teaching activity that is high in student response. Choral responding activities can be especially effective in learning letters, sounds, words, and reading connected text.
