Literacy Intervention

Gabriella Fecher

Final Reflection

Literacy Intervention

This semester has proven to be challenging and rewarding.  I was not aware of just how little I knew about literacy before taking this class.  As we were reading and looking into topics, I found that these topics were directly correlated in any subject matter. Literacy is crucial to every discipline.  Students are always going to need to have reading, writing, and communication skills.  This semester has really enlightened me to strategies that I can do to help build those translatable skills.

Literacy is a growing process.  Students learn at different rates, and struggle in different areas.  Some student readers rely mainly on visual clues, but ignore syntax and meaning clues (as in the case of Brittany, for whom we applied reading intervention this semester).  Others may ignore prosody, inflection, and punctuation.  These ultimately hurt their fluency, and, in turn, their comprehension.

Comprehension is the main goal of reading and writing.  Every skill that students practice in terms of literacy is serving to highlight comprehension.  Therefore, we should regularly be monitoring for comprehension.  Some students may require explicit strategy instruction and 1:1 interventions.  Others might benefit more from partner activities and think-alouds.  There can be combinations of multiple strategies to best ensure comprehension.  We can diversify those strategies, listen to students, and recognize what strategies they are or are not implementing in reading.

Fluency is far more complex a subject than just speed.  It is a vital component of comprehension. The goal for all reading is comprehension.  If a student reads a portion of text, and cannot understand the main points and supporting details of the text, there is little value.  “Automaticity” is pretty crucial for comprehension.  Students need to be able to read a word “without conscious effort”- typically within three seconds (McKenna, 2015, p.163).  Beyond that, they are putting more emphasis on decoding the word and less on the comprehension of the text.  Furthermore, “prosody” is crucial because it is also an indicator that the student in “understanding the meaning of a sentence” (McKenna, 2015, p. 164).  When a student is decoding words, they have to use automaticity (the ability to recognize words in three seconds or less) and prosody.  The combination of those skills result in better fluency.

This semester has also really inspired me to consider the role of student choice in the classroom.  In order to best ensure engagement, my students should be interested in what they are learning.  It is important for students to have a wide selection of reading materials to choose from.  This “communicates to students that reading is a worthwhile and valuable activity” and allows them to choose subjects and reading levels and types that best suits their characteristics (Gambrell, 2011).  Students should be able to pick activities and reading.  We should constantly be striving to have their attention and interest via engagement.

There are several literacy strategies and activities that can seamlessly be incorporated into any lesson or discipline.  These activities include dramas, singing, social activities and partner activities, games, read louds, and think alouds.  Any of these strategies are useful for students and can administer to individual needs.  The more students work with literacy strategies and skills, the more they can learn and apply their knowledge. 

All of these activities can serve as progress monitoring.  This also ensures that the interventions we implemented for particular students are, actually, benefiting them.  Progress monitoring is an important tool in identifying strengths and places for improvement in each student.  When teachers are regularly checking for understanding, they are in turn modeling the importance of checking for understanding for the students themselves.  Students become “increasingly aware of monitoring their own understanding.”  The result is typically a higher level of thinking, understanding, and processing (Ferlazzo, 2012).  Checking in entails more than generic, surface level questions.  Our questions should consistently be open-ended and thought-provoking, as well as targeted for each student.  Listening to the students allows for student voice.  We can shape individual learning goals around that voice—noting concerns and strength areas.  We can collect evidence of both progress and student confusion—both of which are valuable in determining where to progress as a class.  Furthermore, we need to really work to make sure our assessments are not subjective. Children are “mindful users and processors of language.”  It is no surprise, then, that each user and processor is different.  We cannot always generalize the needs of our students.  Each student is going to have their own struggle.  Even students who appear to read fluently both silently and orally can struggle with areas of comprehension.  It is comforting to know that we can analyze both oral and silent reading, and identify miscues therein.  We can create a “detailed portrait of the reader” and assess information about both “reading products” and “reading processes” (McKenna, 2015).  We provide measures of reading rates and fluency rather than relying on our own judgment alone.

It may be necessary to assess our individual students differently.  For example, while we were studying the potential needs of ELL students within our classrooms, we recognize that certain summative assessments, in particular, may put ELL students at an immediate disadvantage.  If a test, for example, is structured in a way in which students are required to write extensive essays in a specific time period, ELL students may struggle.  Therefore, we should constantly be providing other forms of assessments.  We need to be aware of all of our students’ individual strengths and weaknesses in order to ensure reliable assessments. Formative assessments and progress monitoring are vital guides to progress for students.  We can regularly be checking in with our students to establish areas of confusion. 

Assessments, collectively, are a “systematic approach for guiding student learning” (Larson and Keiper, 2013, p.74).  However, the systematic approach may be different for every student.  Tests may have to be administered orally.  We may have to use certain technologies or rework the way certain assessments are put together. In order to “make the assessment of student learning more valid and reliable,” it is important to use “different techniques for determining how well students have learned” (Larson and Keiper, 2013, p. 76).  Furthermore, we should be allowing for accommodations and modifications that help our students.  We use the information from our assessments to plan for future lessons and activities.

Ultimately, literacy is vital in and out of the classroom.  There are many things that we as teachers can do to help all of our students achieve success.  We have strategies to incorporate into every lesson plan.  Moreso, we should constantly be monitoring and assessing our students to evaluate areas for growth and areas of success.  Components like punctuation and inflection are not unimportant.  On the contrary, they are integral parts of fluency, and comprehension.  Reading, writing, and communication are huge parts of society.  My biggest takeaway from this semester was simply the realization of how easy it is to incorporate those skills into the classroom.  We can do it on a regular basis.  Our planning should be intentional.  Our vocabulary choices, text sets, and activities should be designed with our individual students in mind to ensure maximum success.

Works Cited

Ferlazzo, L. (2012). Do’s and Don’ts for Teaching English-Language Learners. Retrieved May 4, 2016. http://www.edutopia.org/blog/esl-ell-tips-ferlazzo-sypnieski.
Fuglei, M. (2013) How Reading for Pleasure Helps Students Develop Academically. Image. Web. 10 May 2016. http://education.cu-portland.edu/blog/news.how-reading-for-pleasure-helps-students-develop-academically.

Gambrell, L. (2011). Seven Rules of Engagement: What’s Most Important to Know about Motivation to Read. The Reading Teacher, 65.

Larson, B. and Keiper, T. (2013). Instructional Strategies for Middle and High School (2^nd ed.). New York: Routledge.

Mattes, L. (2013). How I Work with Students to Self-Monitor While Reading. Group Firsties. Image. Web. 10 May 2016. http://growingfirsties.blogspot.com/2014/07/how-i-work-with-students-to-self.html. 

McKenna, M.C., & Stahl, S. A. (2015). Assessment for Reading Instruction (3^rd Ed.) New York: Guilford Press.

Miss Alyssa's Classroom. (2011). Image. Web. 10 May 2016. http:// missalyssaclassroom.blogspot.com/2011/09/formative-assessment.html.

Tyson, Kimberly. (2013). Freddy Fluency: A Fluency Tool for Primary Students. Image. Web. 10 May 2016. http://www.learningunlimitedllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/fluency.png .