Reading and reading instruction for children

Lesaux, N. K. (2012). Reading and reading instruction for children from low-income and non-English-speaking households. The Future of Children, 22(2), 73-88.

Background

Young American children appeared to be able to read well in lower primary levels but many had problems reading in upper primary and at secondary levels.

Aims

The aim of the paper was to use research conducted with children from low-income and non-English-speaking homes to explain why many American middle school and high school students struggled with texts.

Sample

The author selected research on reading development and instruction with an emphasis on such research conducted with children from low-income and non-English-speaking homes.

Findings

The author distinguished between two types of reading competencies: skills-based and knowledge-based. Skills-based reading competencies require readers to sound out and recognize words while knowledge-based reading competencies involve having conceptual and vocabulary knowledge to understand the meaning of a text. Students need to have relevant prior knowledge about the text’s topic, vocabulary, and structure for reading comprehension. Elementary schools were found to have made progress in the teaching of skills-based reading competencies. However, middle and high schools had not made as much progress in teaching knowledge-based reading competencies for understanding texts. Children from low-income and non-English-speaking homes were able to master relatively quickly skills-based reading competencies taught in elementary schools. By contrast, struggling readers from both non-English-speaking and monolingual English-speaking homes had problems with vocabulary knowledge at middle and high school. Even though their growth in skills-based reading was faster, it was not fast enough to overcome the large gap they began school with, so children from non-English-speaking homes who had lower scores in English proficiency than their monolingual peers in kindergarten performed significantly worse than their peers in fifth grade.

Implications

The author recommended that schools conduct comprehensive reading assessments that allow teachers to understand students’ sources of reading difficulties. These assessments should include both skills-based and knowledge-based reading competencies in the early to later grades so that teachers can design systematic reading instruction for young and older readers who need support in developing knowledge-based reading competencies that are important for academic success. The author recommended that future instruction should include deep language- and content-based instruction with an emphasis on the teaching of specialized vocabulary and language structures in spoken and written academic language.

Original article retrieved from ERIC.