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On a rainy day, I curl up in an overstuffed armchair reading a good book while munching on a chocolate crunch bar. I travel through dark forests looking for a mysteriously lost key with Nancy Drew. I search unexplored territories in the land of Narnia with Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy. I learn to reason, to think, to ask questions, to disagree, to disarm, to have an opinion, to predict, and to live through the characters and places I visit in a book. I learn I’m okay being different than you. I uncross my legs, plant my feet on the carpeted floor, and ponder awhile—taking one last bite.

Flashback to the scenario above, and that’s where you would have found me on a rainy day. But is this the experience of most eleven year olds in the United States today?  What was a pleasurable experience for me as a fifth grader I think is not a mirror reflection for others of the same age now.  What has changed for students of today? Why is the reading experience an enjoyable journey for some while an insurmountable task for others?  

The Struggle

If an experience is not a pleasant one for us, we tend to avoid it. If attacking the printed word creates a consistent struggle, the decision to avoid presents an easy choice. Picture a page in a classic novel, for example, THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER, in which the words when read with ease create an image in the reader’s mind of a boy’s cleverness and sense of adventure and propels the reader onward to find out how Tom will get out of his next scrape. Yet, for those readers who find the words dancing around on the page, the act of reading becomes an insurmountable challenge and the content is lost in the struggle. This student can only glean meaning from others’ reading of the material and oral discussions in class and, in this sense, is robbed of the experience of comfort brought by settling down with a good book.

When examinations are given to assess the reason for the reading struggle, a student may be found to have dyslexia or a specific language learning disability. The question remains, what we can do for these struggling learners? Reading and learning become intertwined as the student grows and faces more reading in the content areas. Then the reading problem becomes a learning issue.

When empowered by an educational system which seeks to find out the root of the reading issue for this student, he/she can make gains in the reading endeavor through appropriate remediation measures, therapeutic in nature. However, we must be proactive at an early age. Studies have shown that intervention needs to take place before the fourth grade year.

The Criminal Act of Non-Intervention

If the student does not receive the appropriate measures of intervention, then we may have lost him/her as a learner and perhaps as a contributing citizen in the future. Extensive studies have taken place, which demonstrate with potency the correlation between reading delays and possible future jail time. For example, from the ARIZONA REPUBLIC, September of 2004,

“When the state of Arizona projects how many prison beds it will need, it factors in the number of kids who read well in fourth grade. Evidence shows that children who do not read by third grade often fail to catch up and are more likely to drop out of school, take drugs, or go to prison. So many nonreaders wind up in jail that Arizona officials have found they can use the rate of illiteracy to help calculate future prison needs.”

The evidence in this article shows us the immediacy of need for America’s children. By helping our children, we help ourselves and in another sense, protect the lives of our children and loved ones. We need to ask ourselves what we can do to eradicate this predictive cycle for struggling learners. We need to be actively committed to reading intervention in the early years.

Strategy Empowerment

What are some strategies we can use to help challenged readers? I think providing therapeutic reading intervention is the key. After my training through the Neuhaus Education Center in Houston and becoming a Certified Academic Language Therapist, I felt empowered to help learners who struggled daily in school with the printed word. Through a three to four day a week commitment and regular attention to activities tailored to aid in phonemic awareness and phonics instruction, students were able to make gains.

Repetition played a significant role in their success as they recognized familiar patterns in words and learned more about appropriate junctures for syllable breaks in multi-syllabic words as they progressed. Once automaticity had kicked in, I realized they had overcome a huge struggle in decoding the printed word and had at long last paved the way to becoming fluent readers.

Robert was one of the students I tutored for a period of three years. However, after only one year of therapy, I noticed a significant change in him as a reader. Robert first came to me as an end of the year third grader. His reading fluency was labored and he read at a stilted pace. His mother reported he was frustrated as a learner and falling behind. After ten months of intervention work, Robert’s reading began to become less labored, and he achieved a fluidity I had not heard before. His attitude improved toward school as we continued to work together and his self-esteem rose, according to his mother. Robert exemplifies a student who at first sees reading as an unachievable feat, yet then, with the proper intervention, metamorphoses into one who wants to read independently.

Then the question is posed, what do we do for that child who reads like the wind, yet comprehends absolutely nothing when questioned about what is understood from the text? Many times, this student can be directly taught to use strategies to aid in reading success.  This reader must slow down and tap into a meta-cognitive state, or thinking about thinking. This student needs direct instruction in what the strategies are and how to use them. This student may have the habit of running roughshod over multisyllabic words without thought to meaning within context, and needs to be specifically instructed to sound out word parts before moving on to the next word.

A United Stance

I cannot underestimate the power of a team effort in this endeavor to encourage students toward independence as readers. My hope is that parents and teachers will work together to foster the desire to read for pleasure at the first moment a glimmer of free time presents itself. We are the models students will seek to emulate.  They must first see us as readers and, in addition, know we truly care about them and are committed to their growth as readers before they will seek the pages of a book on their own.

As reading advocates, we must pull together in a united front to aid in this war against time for our children. We must stand together in our commitment to help students become readers before we have lost the window of opportunity for our children. After all, the future of our children in a symbiotic sense is that of our own.
So where are our children and where will they be when we look for them in ten, twenty, thirty years? I’d like to think we would find them curled up in an overstuffed armchair taking off for unchartered adventures, or better yet, taking part in achieving personal goals which benefit us all.

Lea G. Melville, M.Ed., earned her Reading Specialist certification in 2000, and serves third graders at Briargrove Elementary School in Houston, Texas welcoming her 25th year as a teacher.  A native Houstonian, Lea enjoys travelling and learning about other cultures.  She sees herself as a lifelong learner and hopes to inspire her students to acquire the same vision for themselves.