Effective Reading Strategies: Teaching Children Who Find Reading Difficult - Softcover

Rasinski, Timothy V.; Padak, Nancy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0131121863 ISBN 13: 9780131121867

Publisher: Prentice Hall, 2003

Synopsis

Effective Reading Strategies: Teaching Children Who Find Reading Difficult, Third Edition offers the teaching community a wealth of instructional strategies and activities. This text is aimed at strengthening and developing the reading skills of children who find the subject hard to grasp, including those for whom English is a second language. The broad-based remedial and corrective reading instruction focuses on several areas: phonemic awareness, decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Teachers can combine and modify the various reading strategies and activities to fit their current curricula.

About this title

About the Author:

Timothy Rasinksi and Nancy Padak are Professors of Curriculum and Instruction at Kent State University, where they teach courses in literacy education.  They also served as editors of The Reading Teacher, the most widely read professional journal in reading education, and currently edit the Journal of Literacy Research.

Previously a classroom and Title I teacher in Nebraska, Tim Rasinski received his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University and has taught at the University of Georgia.  He has written and edited several books on literacy education.  Tim has also conducted research and written many articles on reading and writing educatioin published in Reading Research Quarterly, Reading Psychology, and Education Forum.

Nancy Padak received her Ed.D. from Northern Illinois University, and has worked as a classroom teacher, Title I administrator, and a school district reading and language arts curriculum director in Illinois.  She is Director of the University Reading and Writing Center at Kent State and Principal Investigator at the Ohio Literacy Resource Center.  Nancy was recently named Distinguished Professor by Kent State University.

Tim and Nancy have worked extensively with children in public schools and in university reading clinics who have experienced difficulty in learning to read.  The reading clinical program that they direct won an Ohio's Best Award for its innovative practices in helping children learn to read. 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

We have been working together for 15 years, teaching and thinking; talking with children, teachers, and parents; conducting research; providing professional development; and discussing reading and instruction with each other and with others—sometimes heatedly. We have struggled with many questions: What are the best ways to provide instruction for children who struggle as readers? How should their instruction differ from instruction for children who progress more typically? What insights can we glean from research? What are the proper roles of teachers and parents in instructional efforts? And how can we best communicate our ideas about corrective instruction to teachers—those in training and those already working with children?

This volume, like the two editions that preceded it, is our best current response to those questions and many others. It offers new instructional strategies for helping children in an informal, easy-to-read, yet scholarly approach. The ideas presented here have been tried and tested in studies of effective instruction and, more important, in our own classrooms and tutoring rooms and those of teachers we have known and worked with over the years.

Our Framework for Helping You with Struggling Readers

Many books offer ideas for helping struggling readers. Many espouse a highly analytic, diagnostic-prescriptive approach that results in a detailed recipe book of prescribed activities designed to remediate specific skills and subskills. These books include lists of skill activities aimed at remediating everything from medial vowel sounds to homonyms, to sequential comprehension difficulties. But such books pay little attention to the instructional context or how various activities might interact to form a coherent, logical, and effective whole.

Our book breaks with this traditional model. The instructional strategies and activities are arranged around general areas of focus, such as phonemic awareness, decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Because we built the framework of this book around broad-based areas of concern, you now have a framework on which to organize your own understanding and approach to remedial and corrective reading instruction. The instructional strategies and activities nurture and develop proficiency within that broad area rather than remediate any specific skill or subskill.

Generalized Strategies. The strategies can be generalized to many situations so that informed teachers can mold and modify them for their own teaching and learning contexts. As you work with these strategies, you will find they offer supported opportunities to experience reading success. We like to think of our descriptions of the instructional strategies as the raw material. Teachers use this raw material to meet their students' needs without lessening the effectiveness of the activities. Indeed, because our presentation assumes that informed, sensitive, and caring teachers will mold the strategies to fit their own instructional contexts, we expect the effectiveness of the strategies to be enhanced.

Teacher Voices. Because instruction depends heavily upon the context in which it occurs, we wanted you to hear the voices of teachers who have tried out these strategies in their own rooms. You will see how they perceive and provide corrective instruction, how they modify the strategies for their own use, what they like about the strategies, and why they choose them. We believe that, by reading about these teachers, your understanding of and insight into the activities will be deepened and enhanced.

Connecting Strategies to Make a Cohesive Whole. This book includes another unique feature—our attention to how different strategies might fit together in whole instructional packages or routines. We offer opportunities for wide and guided reading to help you form consistent and complete instructional routines that are predictable, successful, and effective.

New to This Edition

In this third edition, we have updated all the chapters by incorporating new research findings and describing new instructional activities. We have continued to address technological supports for children's literacy learning and have addressed some basic issues surrounding teaching reading to children whose first language is not English. In addition, newly added Appendix O provides a list of common words for instructional focus.

Perhaps the most significant addition to this edition, however, is the focus on scientifically based research in reading and learning to read. Since the 2000 edition of this book, the National Reading Panel (NRP) report has provided the research foundation for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, commonly called "No Child Left Behind." In this edition, we summarize NRP findings and provide a clearer focus on the research base for instructional strategies and other aspects of reading program development. We have woven these findings into a research-based approach that reflects an integrated curriculum with authentic and engaging reading.

Whether you use this book as a course textbook or a handbook for working with children in a classroom or clinic, you will find that it contains ideas, suggestions, and discussions that will help you be the best teacher you can be. This book is for you and for the struggling readers with whom you interact.

About this edition

• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0131121863
• ISBN 13: 9780131121867
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 400