Comprehensive Exam: Question 1

I am currently a full-time graduate student seeking a teaching position in Title One Reading or as a classroom teacher in the lower grades. I don’t have any professional teaching experience; however, my internship and student teaching was in a first and second grade classroom at Mabel Elementary School. I have chosen to focus my response to teaching reading and language arts on the first grade level due to most of my classroom teaching experience being in this area. I will begin by explaining my classroom assessment plans, what tests I plan to use, and how these results will help me to solidify an effective teaching plan. I will also include the kinds of materials I will use in my classroom and how they will be sufficient in teaching reading to beginning readers. The types of reading instruction that I will use will also be very important in my classroom. I will focus on the best ways to enforce comprehension strategies as well as fluency, word study and spelling. Finally, I will address the best methods to teaching students with diverse instructional levels, meeting the needs of all students in my classroom.

In order to begin my academic year in a first grade classroom, I would begin giving the ERSI assessment to every student in my class. The ERSI (Early Reading Screening Inventory) is a test given to kindergarteners and first graders to measure alphabetic knowledge, production of letters, word recognition, and phonemic awareness. The test includes activities to find out if the student is a reader or non-reader. Some of the activities include: recognizing letters of the alphabet, sound knowledge, upper and lower case, and spelling. The students will be scored on each aspect of the test to get a better understanding of their placement in reading. Some will be able to pick out letters and sounds and write words such as mat, can and sit. They will be able to point to a given word and tell what it is. They will also be given two lists of words, word families, and sight words. Depending on their scores, I will then know where to begin in reading instruction. If the student does not pass the ERSI, they are considered non-readers.  At this point, I will be able to decide where the student(s) is in word study development and begin an appropriate word study sequence. For example, if the child recognizes beginning and ending sounds (consonants), then my instruction will start with word families. The child will sort words in the –at and     –an families. Students will then move through the process of short vowel families until they have successfully completed all vowels. The word study will follow a sequence of activities that moves through short vowel patterns, blends, CVCe, R-controlled, and CVVC. This word study is very efficient in a child’s beginning reading instruction because it forces them to learn the basics of word development. As a child’s learning of concepts move along the field, their placement will depend solely on his/her mastery of basic concepts like short vowels and word families (Morris,  ). They can begin to learn letter-sound knowledge, recognizing consonants and vowels. Phonic relationships are very important in recognition of alphabetic knowledge. Students will see words as individuals and as units in memorized text.

For the readers that are assessed, I will then issue an IRI (Informal Reading Inventory). The assessment covers word recognition, reading accuracy, comprehension, and spelling.  This particular test emphasizes learning about the skills, abilities, and needs of the individual in order to plan a program of reading instruction that will allow a maximum rate of progress. It will offer the opportunity for the evaluation of students’ actual reading performance as they deal with materials varying in difficulty (Johnson, 1987). From this assessment, I will be able to assign the student(s) to their frustrational, instructional, and independent reading levels. It is important for me to know the level of reading material the child can handle adequately when working alone. Unless materials are provided at the proper level, children cannot be expected to do an adequate job in independent work and establish for themselves high standards of performance. (Johnson,1987). The instructional level of reading should be provided at a level at which the student meets an attainable challenge to learn and be expected to be successful at any task given if proper instruction is given. By giving the IRI to my students, I will also be able to define their strengths and weaknesses. I will be able to design a suitable instructional program through a careful analysis of the skills and strategies of the child’s achievement. I will also be able to understand more fully why a child is experiencing difficulty in some aspects of reading, ie. fluency, comprehension, decoding words. Finally the IRI will be able to give me an ongoing evaluation of my students’ progress in reading. I will be able to determine changes in levels of reading achievement and the development of more specific skills and strategies. I will have a clearer measure of my students’ growth in reading. From this point on, I will now be able to choose appropriate materials for my students’ to use depending on their reading levels.

At the beginning of the school year, I would use Big Books and Language Experience stories to teach children basic print concepts like left-to-right directionality, the spoken word-written word match, use of beginning consonant cues, and an initial sight vocabulary. Big books and Language Experience dictations are important in reading instruction for beginning readers because they enforce echo reading of simple texts (Holdaway, 1979). This approach gives children a concrete, supportive, and meaningful entry into reading. Big books have oversized pictures and print that is accessible visually for large classes. They are also rhythmic and sometimes repetitive. This predictable text helps the children to remember sight words easily. When introducing big books, I will read it aloud and have the class read it as a whole using a pointer. The pointer ensures that the students can see when each word is read and where the sentences start and stop. As day two and three progresses, I will have the students choral read the book again, pointing to the words and having children find certain words or important aspects to the story such as punctuation. Other activities could include acting out the story or any kind of movement throughout the room. This will get the students involved in the story and want to read it even more. In Language Experience dictations, students are involved in reading and writing stories that involve real life experiences. For example, my class may read a story that involves making popcorn. I will then have my class make popcorn as the activity. Next, I will discuss the activity and why we did it, finishing with a writing activity.  I will ask the class questions to focus on certain aspects of reading. They will reread the selection and pick out consonants, specific words, capital letters, and punctuation. This experience will focus on phonemic awareness, concepts of print, and concepts of words. The class will also be very involved and interested in the stories when they are able to be active with the story. When basic understandings have been established, I will then be able to place children in carefully controlled text to help them build sight vocabulary and develop decoding skill. It is important that the texts chosen are carefully graded in difficulty with a sufficient number of selections at each difficulty level and that they engage the child’s interest (Morris, ??). I will have readily available leveled books for each student depending on their instructional needs as well as basal readers that are somewhat variable in readability and word control. Random House’s Step Into Reading series or Harper and Row’s I Can Read series are very effective to the first grade reading level.  My students that are on an instructional first grade reading level will be able to achieve a “self-improving system” that enables a child to decode new words and retain sight words with minimal repetition (Morris, ??). My struggling first graders will require some structure and control in their reading materials. Early Steps and Reading Recovery are both very effective reading approaches to use for beginning readers.

 Many children begin reading at a low level. Children can be subjected to deficiencies such as motivation, biological problems, or letter-sound relations. In this case, I would emphasize early literacy work such as Reading Recovery or Early Steps to help improve a child’s basic skills and growth in literature interest. It is very important to start early intervention with a child that is behind in reading in the first grade (Morris, ??). The farther that a reader gets behind, the more difficult it will be to help them due to cognitive and motivational consequences.  Long-term reading failure can lead to disastrous effects on employment and on opportunities in life. Failure in reading can also be an emotionally devastating experience (Off Track, ??).  The earlier a child starts into early intervention programs, the easier it is to catch them up to the appropriate level of reading. These strategies are research based and have show huge improvement for children that are having difficulty in reading. The Reading Recovery Program is an easy thirty-minute lesson plan that starts with re-reading three short, familiar books. This will then lead to self-control of the reading process as well as confidence in the reader.  The second step is sentence writing. The child will write a sentence each day that will aid the student on letter-sound relationships, sight words, and spelling. In the last step, I would introduce a new book.  I would preview the new book with the student, identifying vocabulary, and predicting the storyline. I would use this particular strategy on a 5 day/week basis. Reading Recovery helps me as a teacher to follow each child or group of children and support acceleration and development of strategies depending on each child’s reading level.  Early Steps in another program that is basically like Reading Recovery except that a word study is inserted as the second step. The word study is added to pace the individual child’s needs, internalizing patterns for complete mastery. Word study is an excellent strategy used to teach phonics skills. A child begins with letter-sound relationships and moves to more complicated blends and diagraphs. The picture sort strategy is a great way to introduce beginning consonants to a child. With a deck of picture cards, I would display a number of cards with pictures that all begin with a different consonant. I will then model choosing a picture card from the deck and placing it under the appropriate display card that begins with the same beginning consonant. This activity is designed to help students focus on the beginning consonant sounds in spoken words. When the child masters this activity, I will be able to change the display picture cards to an actual letter card. As the process goes on, I would exchange letters and sounds as the child achieves mastery on each level, ie. Moving to word families, vowel patterns, non-rhyming patterns, consonant blends, diagraphs, r-controlled vowel patterns, long vowel patterns and so on (Morris, 1992).  

The DRTA or Directed Reading Thinking Activity is an excellent strategy used in small group instruction. It is a guided group discussion activity that focuses on the formation and testing of pre-reading predictions. This beneficial teaching method helps students to improve comprehension of and interest in fiction and nonfiction text. Children will develop critical reading and thinking by predicting possible story events and outcomes. The DRTA helps a student form a set of purposes for reading, processing ideas, and testing answers by taking part in a predict-read-prove cycle. As the teacher, I would induce the thought process of a student when reading literature when asking questions that are open-ended. “What do you think?” and “Why do you think so?” are common questions that are asked of children during the reading of literature. The dialogue between teacher and student(s) should be conversational in nature, essentially unfolding the events of the story page by page. Direct questions should also be asked to check the ongoing comprehension and important story information. It is, however, the prediction questions serve as pivot points that facilitate discussion between child and teacher. The DRTA helps students to read more critically and with improved comprehension because it will engage them in the process of fluent reading in a structured fashion while creating concrete phases of the prediction process (DRTA ???).  Asking open-ended questions encourages divergent thinking and creates predictions and hypotheses that make the students want to test out each idea to find out if they were correct. The mysterious outlay of a DRTA helps students to stay interested in the story and set their own purposes for reading.

Fluency in reading is the ability to decode text smoothly, meaningfully, and effortlessly so that the reader can use his/her full mental resources to engage in the more important task of comprehending and responding to the text. It is characterized by an adequate reading rate depending on the grade level and appropriate intonation. Reading fluency has long been considered an important factor in reading development and achievement (Barr, 1992) . Some readers may read fluently, but with poor comprehension while others may read too rapidly for their own good, ignoring or reconstructing what is actually written on the page. The majority of low-level readers experience a slow, monotonous reading style that clearly calls for improvement in the area of fluency. Reading rate has always been considered an important aspect of reading skills. The development of fluency in reading as an absolutely essential aspect of reading development. Those children that require improvement in reading fluency race wildly and unproductively through the text or adopt a self-defeating, slow pace that turns reading into tedious word-calling. When looking at the fluency levels of these students that were considered low-level readers, they tended to read at less than half the level of proficiency in reading fluency as would be expected for their grade placement. It was obvious that the students could recognize words reasonably, however they struggled in recognizing words efficiently, smoothly, and expressively.

      There are many ways that fluency can be developed in readers such as echo reading, easy reading, and repeated readings. Echo readings involve reading a section of literature with appropriate phrasing, expression, and intonation and letting the student “echo” the exact excerpt of literature with the same expression. This activity can be quite effective because the child will not only read the exact section of literature, but also keep the momentum to finish the entire page of reading with this expression. As children move into more difficult reading, he/she will be confronted with longer sentences and some new grammatical constructions. As the teacher, I would go sentence-by-sentence at first to model the correct way of reading the text until the child gains control over the reading. Easy reading is also a very beneficial activity for students to improve in fluency. Having a student read stories that contain words and sentence patterns that are familiar to the child helps them to read with more ease. The instructional goal is to increase the fluency and speed in reading in comfortable and somewhat error-free, meaningful stories (Morris, ??). This easy reading will give the child the motivation and the confidence to read alone with ease. Finally, repeated readings help a child to become familiar with a passage of literature. I would take three, two-minute recordings of a child reading and graph the results. The passage of reading should always be on the child’s instructional level, meaningful and interesting (Samuels, 1979). The children will get instant gratification when they witness how they can improve on the number of words read per minute in one session. A child will want to continue to read and improve in every aspect when they are inspired and motivated with the right learning activities.  

            Imitation and modeling behavior is a very effective and efficient way for developing reading skills. When students imitate reading and writing, they are usually unaware of doing so. Children mimic what they see, hear, and read almost all the time. Students who hear their teachers telling or writing a story will unconsciously use a specific word, phrase, or sentence in their own work. Most students use this tactic think that this is their own invention. They begin to collect ideas about reading and writing that will eventually evolve into their own unique products. Imitation is especially important for a child to participate in because the more effective they are as a reader, the more effective their writing will be (Adams, 1990). They will automatically retain concepts that will reflect in their writing style. Many children will collect vocabulary, sentence structure, and imagery and will store these elements for later use in writing and speaking. This tactic that children will use as young readers and writers should be praised. To deny children from imitating other great writers and readers will deter them from evolving into their own style in the future.

Reading with children is essential to their learning because it provides models for writing, sparks imagination, enriches the storage of language for writing, helps develop concepts, knowledge, and thinking ability, and is enjoyable. Children who have good literary models are easy evolved into great readers and writers because they are given ideas and creations that can be changed into their own creations of literature. Children can profit from encouragement of imitation and modeling as a means of motivating and improving their reading and writing ability.

In order to meet the instructional needs of each of my students, I have two options for grouping in the classroom.  After I have assessed each child, I will be able to assign them to a reading group depending on their level. My first option for grouping would give me at least twenty-five minutes of instructional time with each ability group. My reading instruction would begin each day with a whole-class literature circle.  I would lead the children in choral reading of big books, poems, and in writing and reading dictated stories for a thirty minute period. This would be the time that is focused on building classroom community through sharing literature and experiences in reading. The next thirty minutes would be dedicated to a writing workshop. This is the time that I would let the students write on self-selected topics or planned prompts while I circulate the room, helping students when they need it. For the next hour, I will meet with each individual reading ability group. The groups will all be able to rotate to me while also working on other assignments. For example, one group of students will go to the reading circle with me for guided reading instruction while the second and third groups divide up to finish seatwork activities and/or center work in listening, word study, writing/drawing. Every twenty-five minutes the reading groups will rotate. I will have to make sure my students are trained to work in small groups in circulation, of course, it would be ideal to have an assistant or volunteers to help out even though it happens very rarely. Finally, my class will engage in self-selected reading. The students will be able to choose a book of their choice and read at their seats, either independently or with a partner. It is important for students to be able to have the opportunity to choose what they want to read during reading time. The students will enjoy reading and be more motivated to read if they are interested in participating in it on a regular basis.

Grouping across classrooms