Learning From Text

Learning from Text

by Dave L. Edyburn, Ph.D.

I thought that this was an amazingly clear article about the problems facing children when they move from Grade 3 to Grade 4 - my students - and go from Learning to Read to Reading to Learn.  For years now, I have dutifully noted the adaptations I am supposed to be making for the students who cannot read at Grade level.  Pair them up with a reading buddy. Extra time.  Preferential seating at the front of the class.  Pair reading with visuals.  They go off to intensive resource...and come back with marginally better decoding skills.  But still they cannot comfortable and fluently read the material in their math, social studies and science books, and independent reading time is a constant battle between them picking a big novel that they want to read, and me insisting that they read the "just right book" that doesn't interest them.

What this article made perfectly clear is that we need to address the "remediation" vs. "compensation" question much earlier and much more explicitly than we do now.  Presently, at least in my practice, it is a vague understanding that somewhere along the line, perhaps in middle school, these students will have access to some compensatory strategies.  In the meantime, we will force the child to read as much as possible in the classroom, because if she is not reading, then she's not practising her reading skills.

Edyburn suggests that we need to actually come up with a reasonable balance between remediation and compensation in Grade 4 or earlier.  On a systems level, school boards need to come up with guidelines for each grade for what percentage of our effort should be devoted to remediation, and what percentage on compensation.  On a school and personal level, there is no reason this question cannot be addressed at IPP and informal student meetings.  

The author then laid out a systemic approach to making text accessible.  He came up with a table of text modification strategies based on the student's actual functional difficulty which I have pasted here (and I printed it out) because I found it so useful:

Finally, he suggested low-tech and high-tech resources for each of five compensatory strategies: bypass reading, decrease reading, support reading, organize reading with graphic organizers or guide reading.

As I read this article I thought of the many, many students I have taught through the years who have these reading difficulties.  My own nephew is one of them, and will be entering Grade 4 next year.  Although teachers bemoan the fact that we don't have enough I-Pads, we do have computers, and this article lists many useful computer programs.  Also, many student have their own I-Pads, and many parents are willing to buy them.  I am thinking of a student I had last year, who begged me to let her use her I-Pad in class, but I never did because all I ever saw her do on it was play random games.  This student displayed classic signs of dyslexia, and we were waiting for her to be assessed.  Now I know that I can justify the careful, planned integration of the I-Pad into her school program.