The Interventions Necessary to Support the Difficulties - Essay Example

?A STUDY OF INTERVENTIONS TO SUPPORT READING AND COMPREHENSION DIFFICULTIES AMONGST SECONDARY SCHOOL LITERATURE REVIEW Background This paperexamines the literature review for a research about the interventions necessary to support the difficulties that come with reading and comprehension amongst secondary school students. It is a mock literature review that goes to look at the relevant matters that need to be defined in order to create a research hypothesis for further analysis and testing. Introduction Reading and Comprehension are two major elements of education that individuals carry forward in their academic and professional lives (Snowman et al, 2010). This therefore means that there is a big responsibility for teachers and instructors to impart the art and science of reading and comprehension to students and pupils at all stages of their academic lives. “Whereas reading is primarily concerned with the decoding the message of a given text, comprehension goes a step further to attempt to understand and apply the information written in the text appropriately” (Ganske & Fisher, 2010). Nation & Angell (2006) make a clear distinction between reading and comprehension. To them, reading seems to be a form of communication but comprehension requires further understanding and clarification. Comprehension involves inferring the intended effects of what is read and identifying and explaining the cases written in the discourse for producing the effects (Finder, 2003). This therefore indicates that the core idea behind reading, is to enable the reader to grasp a message, idea or information put together by the encoder and then take action on it. This is practically the aim of formal communication that most students will apply in the future, when they begin to work. It is therefore essential that these students get a good ability to understand the basics of decoding messages and understanding them fully in the wider sense. The central role and the formative nature of secondary education can never be ignored. Thus, it is essential that secondary education focuses on some important factors that can enable an individual to grasp and understand the concept of reading and comprehension. However, this effort of teachers to achieve this is sometimes frustrated by some challenges that makes it difficult to teach students how to read, analyse and understand texts. Challenges in Teaching Reading & Comprehension in Secondary Students In practice, there are several difficulties that stand in the way of teaching students to read and understand text. Snowman et al (2010) identify that inherent disabilities and challenges in students, like down syndrome, physical disabilities like hearing, sight and speech impairments as well as cultural differences and language barriers can stand in the way of a child who attempts to read and decode messages. This therefore makes it difficult for the teacher to impart the art and science of reading to children with such inherent challenges and problems. Also, poor comprehension can result from poor teaching methods used to team students about reading and comprehension at the primary and lower grades of education. “Comprehension difficulties often go unnoticed by teachers [in primary schools] and are discovered later by specialist professionals [at the secondary levels]” (Nation & Angell, 2006). This implies that some of the problems and challenges that the secondary school teacher faces in teaching students to comprehend what they read is carried forward from their primary education. This is linked to the fact that most primary curricula are focused on simply decoding and not comprehension (Ellis & McCartey, 2009). However, in spite of the focus of primary education being on decoding, Ricketts et al (2008) state that the problem with reading challenges carried forward from the primary school is in two folds: the decoding problem and the comprehension problem. Aside these issues that are brought into the secondary school classroom, there are some other challenges that are peculiar to the secondary level, that stands in the way of teaching students to read and comprehend. The main problem of this nature is the use of wrong and ineffective teaching strategies that fails to get students to think deeply about the texts they read (Sencibaugh, 2005). Thus for example a teacher attempts to use the same materials and methods used to teach local British secondary school students to teach African students from a francophone background how to read and understand what they read. This will definitely pose some challenges because of their fundamental differences and the inability of these students to identify closely with the new methods they will encounter. This way, the students are likely to learn very little about comprehension and reading and at worst, they would hate the whole idea and the entire teaching of such a subject. Methods of Overcoming the Inherent Problems Westwood (2008) concluded after empirical research that computer training in vocabulary, early grammar skills and social communication amongst toddlers with learning challenges help them to make positive gains in their bid to learn how to read and comprehend what they read. This therefore means that the use of good technology to improve the reading and comprehension abilities of children at a very early stage in their lives is a sure factor for the successful impartation of reading and comprehension amongst people. Also, universal elements for the teaching of students in lower levels to ensure that they get the best of reading and comprehension foundations include: 1. Providing multiple means of what should be learnt. 2. Providing multiple means of action and expression. 3. Providing multiple means of engagement 4. Providing a wide variety of learning outcomes (Snowman et al, 2010) The use of technology and the use of more innovative teaching methods in reading and comprehension is likely to ensure that the disabilities and inabilities of primary students are reduced. This will create a platform to prepare students even before they enter the secondary school classroom. In the case where a teacher is faced with students who carry such inherent problems, it is possible that applying these two recommendations can lead to some success in preparing students for the requirements of the secondary school classroom. A typical example is where a teacher gets a class of foreign students or students who did not get any prior education in reading and comprehension. Such a teacher can acquire the most modern technology and use it with the view of getting students to catch up and after this is achieved, the teacher can continue with the secondary school comprehension syllabus. Teaching Strategies for the Improvement of Reading & Comprehension In drawing up the strategy for the teaching of the improvement of students' reading and comprehension skills, it is necessary to ensure the development of 'schema' first. Schema is defined by Eilers & Pilchy (2006) as the knowledge brought forward by a reader as s/he reads a given text. Schema is very important because a reader needs to interpret all the contents of the text by applying what s/he knew from previous studies. Schema allows us to connect with new information and 90% of the knowledge a student uses to interpret and understand a material s/he reads is from schema (Eilers & Pilchy, 2006). A teacher or instructor for reading and comprehension in a secondary school should position himself or herself as a facilitator and the guide students on how to link their prior knowledge with the new information gathered in the reading (Hennings, 2005). Therefore a teacher of reading and comprehension should use understandable examples and texts to ensure that students apply their schema and then build a habit of doing so in the future. McFall & Fritzpark (2010) also argue that a secondary school teacher should identify the distinct individual needs of students in his comprehension class because the use of general methods for all students leads to problems. Thus, a secondary school teacher needs to find different strategies to ensure that students organise their reading well, retain information and link information to past experiences. A teacher in the secondary school can do this by improving the ability of students to decode information by improving their vocabulary it is only then that the focus can be shifted to comprehension (Ganske & Fisher, 2010). The use of text-structure instructions in the form of the use of analytical verbs like compare, contrast and evaluate, will give the secondary school student the impetus to retell a given story, visualise, use prior knowledge and also get to know more about how to deal with different cases (Ganske & Fisher, 2010). Wolley (2007) supports Ganske & Fisher's position by saying that children with poor comprehension fail to make inferences even when they can decode a given message. Wolley (2007) therefore recommends that teaching at the secondary level should be focused more on improving the visualisation of students through imagery strategies that enable cognitive analysis and integration of information presented. Also, the RIDER model gives a very practical strategy that can be used by teachers in secondary schools to improve their reading and comprehension skills and abilities (Smith, 2010). The model states that the students should be instructed to Read, Imagine, Describe, Evaluate and Read-on. This model suggests that the student reads through a paper quickly and grasp the main idea of the paper. From there, s/he can imagine by linking it to schema – knowledge already acquired in the past. From there, the student can imagine the matter being discussed in the text vividly, describe or retell the content and then evaluate it before going back to read it into detail. This way the student can truly connect what is written in the paper to what s/he actually knows from his personal point of view and get a clear picture of the whole situation at hand. Conclusion Reading and comprehension are very important aspects of secondary education. However, there are inherent challenges like student disabilities and lack of prior comprehension studies in the primary and lower levels of education of students. References Eliers, L. H. & Pinkhy, C. (2006) “Meta-Cognitive Strategies help Students to Comprehend all Text@ Reading Improvement, 43 (1) 13 – 29 Ellis, Sue & McCartney, Elspeth (2009) Applied Linguistics & Primary School Teaching: Developing & Language London: Routledge Finder, Morris (2003) “Teaching to Comprehend” Journal of Reading Vol 13 No 8 Ganske, Kathy & Fisher, Douglas (2010) Comprehension Across the Communication: Perspectives & Practices New York: Guilford Press Hennings, D. (2005) Reading with Meaning: Strategies for College Reading Upper Sadie River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. McFall, Lindsey & Fritzpark, Michael (2010) “Mainstream Literature for Full, Inclusive Secondary Classrooms” Intervention in School & Clinic Vol 45 263 – 270 Nation, K & Angell, P. (2006) “Learning to Read & Learning to Comprehend” London Review of Education 4(1) 77 – 87 Ricketts, Jessie; Cocksey, Joanne & Nation Kate (2008) Fundamentals of Primary Education & Comprehension London: Elsevier -Butterworth. Senicbaugh, Joseph, M (2005) “Meta-Analysis of Reading Comprehension Intervention for Students with Learning Disabilities Strategies & Implications” in Reading Improvement 44 pp6 – 22 Smith, Annette (2009) “Explicit Teaching of Visualisation Strategy RIDER to Year 2 Students will Improve their Reading and Comprehension of Narrative Texts” Working Paper Snowman, Jack; McCrown, Rick & Biehler, Robert (2010) Psychology Applied to Teaching Mason, OH; Cengage Westwood, Peter (2008) What Teachers Need to Know about Reading & Writing Difficulties Victoria: ACER Press Wolley, G. (2007) “A Comprehension Intervention for Children with Reading Comprehension Difficulties” Journal of Learning Disabilities 12 (1) 43 – 50 Read More