Instructional Recommendations to Support Struggling Readers in Disciplinary Classrooms

According to research, explicit instruction in five key areas can help struggling adolescent readers access content area curricula. Students need targeted instruction in word study, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and motivation.

Learn about the Characteristics of Successful and Struggling Readers.

The Center On Instruction created a Practice Brief that provides information and instructional recommendations to help struggling adolescent readers:

Word Study

Recommended instructional practices:

• Teach students to identify and break words into syllable types.
• Teach students when and how to read multisyllabic words by blending the parts together.
• Teach students to recognize irregular words that do not follow predictable patterns.
• Teach students the meanings of common prefixes, suffixes, inflectional endings, and roots. Instruction should include ways in which words relate to each other (e.g., trans: transfer, translate, transform, transition).
• Teach students how to break words into word parts and to combine word parts to create words based on their roots, bases, or other features.
• Teach students how and when to use structural analysis to decode unknown words.

Vocabulary

According to Boardman, et al., vocabulary instruction can be divided into three areas:

1. Additive vocabulary instruction focuses on teaching specific words.
2. Generative vocabulary instruction teaches word-learning strategies, which allow for independent word learning.
3. Academic vocabulary instruction addresses word learning and word-learning strategies in specific academic content areas.  

Recommended instructional practices for additive vocabulary instruction:

• Break words into three tiers, and balance instruction between Tier 2 and Tier 3 words.
  • Tier 1 words: students are likely to know
  • Tier 2 words appear frequently in many contexts
  • Tier 3 words: appear rarely in text or are content specific.
• Accommodate the pace at which vocabulary knowledge grows. Provide a variety of experiences with each word and provide 12 rich and varied exposures to the word.
• Teach multiple meanings to foster word consciousness.
• Actively engage students in vocabulary-learning tasks, such as creating definitions and non-definitions, drawing pictures, and play charades or other games that let them practice defining, using, and recognizing new vocabulary words.
• Ensure that students understand the task they are expected to accomplish during instruction.  

Recommended instructional practices for generative vocabulary instruction:

• Promote opportunities for students to engage in wide reading of texts at a variety of levels and for a variety of purposes.
• Provide opportunities for students to use target vocabulary words verbally in small-and large-group discussions about what they are reading and learning.
• Connect new words to oral language or other reading materials by using the new words in conversation and explicitly relating them to other uses and occurrences.
• Develop words consciousness through such activities such as talking about how authors use words, playing word games, and exploring playful uses of words such as idioms, palindromes, and oxymorons.
• Use key word strategies that provide phonetic or visual links to target words.
• Show students how to break words into parts and to use context clues, root words, prefixes, suffixes, and word families to identify their meaning.

Recommended instructional practices for building academic vocabulary:

• Use content-area materials to identify important vocabulary. These may be Tier 3 words but given their importance to understanding new or difficult concepts, they will have high utility. 
• Differences in depth of understanding are related to the number of times and the variety of contexts in which a word is encountered and used. 
• Use assessment procedures to identify target words students know and words students need to learn. 
• Provide explicit instruction of the vocabulary needed to understand a specific text or content area by offering simple definitions prior to reading, generating examples and non-examples, or creating semantic maps that contain word families or list multiple uses of a target word. Explicit instruction of key words increases both vocabulary and reading comprehension and is especially effective for students with disabilities.
• Use computer technology as one component of vocabulary development. For example, game-like formats engage students, online dictionaries and reference materials may help students extend their knowledge of a word, and hyperlinks (clickable words contained in online passages) allow students to access additional information quickly or to see words used in multiple contexts.

Comprehension

Recommended instructional practices: 

• Activate prior knowledge by previewing text before reading.
  • Use specific strategies to activate prior knowledge, such as previewing headings or key concepts, or making a prediction and confirmation chart. 
  • Prepare and guide previewing activities to support and focus the connections students make. 
  • Avoid soliciting guesses from students without guidance or feedback. 
  • Keep it short. Previewing should not take longer than five minutes, especially if a teacher has limited time with students. 
  • Revisit after reading to assist in reviewing, confirming or refuting predictions, summarizing, and making connections.

• Use graphic organizers.
  • Use graphic organizers before reading to introduce important information, to solicit prior knowledge from students, and to make predictions. 
  • Use graphic organizers during reading to represent and discuss connections, to confirm or refute predictions, and to record important information. 
  • Use graphic organizers after reading to write summaries, to review information, and to make connections. 
  • Adapt graphic organizers to text type. For example, while a compare-contrast format may work for certain social studies readings, a story plot diagram is better suited to a narrative text structure.

• Teach comprehension monitoring strategies.
  • Teach students strategies that enable them to identify when understanding breaks down, such as noting confusing or difficult words and concepts, creating images, stopping after each paragraph to summarize, and generating questions. 
  • Teach specific “fix-up” strategies to repair misunderstanding, such as re-reading, re-stating, and using context and decoding skills to figure out unknown words or ideas. 
  • Promote comprehension monitoring by:
    • Asking questions before and during reading to guide and focus how students read
    • Reminding students to confirm, disconfirm, or extend predictions made prior to reading
    • Encouraging students to actively engage in reading when they use reading comprehension strategies to grapple with the meaning of text.
  • Continue to teach and provide time to practice using comprehension strategies until students are proficient (Pressley, 2000).

• Teach summarization skills.
  • Teach students to summarize small amounts of text such as a short paragraph before summarizing longer sections.
  • Provide modeling, feedback, and many opportunities to practice summarization rules (NRP, 2000) such as:
    • Selecting a topic sentence or inventing a topic sentence if one is not explicitly stated
    • Using one word to replace a list of related items
    • Deleting trivial and redundant information
    • Re-reading to make sure your summary makes sense.
  • Teach students how to use graphic organizers to write summaries. 
  • Provide examples and non-examples of summaries to help students recognize and produce summaries that contain only key ideas.

• Teach students how to ask and answer questions.
  • Teach students to ask and answer specific types of questions, such as questions whose answers are explicitly stated in the text and those that require students to make inferences based on what they have read. 
  • Use question generation on its own or as part of multi-strategy instruction. 
  • Provide students with strategies to evaluate teacher-generated questions. For example, it is important to know if the answer will be found in the text or if it should be inferred.

• Utilize multi-component comprehension strategy instruction. (Multi-component strategies combine several comprehension strategies into an organizational system, or plan, for reading.)
  • Give students adequate instruction to become proficient in each strategy before combining strategies in a multi-component approach. 
  • Engage students actively in using multiple strategies through cooperative learning, group discussions, and other interactive modes. 
  • Support students in generalizing strategy use across contexts. The goal is for students to apply strategies independently and automatically whenever they are reading; they need support and practice to generalize skills. 
  • Teach students to self-regulate their use of strategies. They should know which strategy to use, when to use it, and why. To benefit from reading strategies, readers must be flexible so that they can shift their approach if one strategy or technique is not working.

Motivation

Recommended instructional practices: 

• Provide content goals for reading.
  • Facilitate the use of relevant background knowledge to increase interest in gaining content mastery.
  • Arrange hands-on experiences or other stimulating tasks that lead students to want to find out more by reading. 
  • Make content goals interesting and relevant by having students read a variety of materials to pursue a theme over a period of time, “publish” a brochure related to a historical event or geographical location, or learn about a topic in order to teach it to someone else. 
  • Model the behaviors of a curious reader who is rewarded with new knowledge about an interesting topic. 
  • Involve students in creating content goals and tracking their progress in meeting those goals. 
  • Give students feedback on their progress in meeting content goals.

• Support student autonomy.
  • Provide opportunities for students to choose which text they read by offering a list of appropriate readings. Students who can select their own reading material use more effective reading strategies and perform better on tests of comprehension.
  • Give students control over some aspects of the task such as where to work in the classroom, what type of product to produce (e.g., essay or poster), and which subjects to pursue. 
  • Allow students to select partners, join groups, or work alone.

• Use interesting texts.
  • Choose texts on topics about which students possess background knowledge. Knowing something about a text’s content makes it more interesting. Of course, school is about learning new things, and students will also have to read texts that present unfamiliar information. The recommendation is not to avoid introducing new material, but rather to be mindful of the importance of motivation and the effect that unfamiliar content can have on students’ engagement. This underscores the importance of giving students ample background knowledge before asking them to read texts that present new information. 
  • Texts that are visually pleasing and appear readable (that is, texts that students perceive they will be successful at reading) are more interesting and motivating. Pay attention to illustrations, layouts, graphics, and text sizes that are appealing and support text comprehension. As always, texts should be high quality, regardless of their appearance or reading level. 
  • A text’s relevance and interest is often an individual matter. While some texts are interesting to just about everyone, other texts are interesting only when they support a reader’s content goals. Recall the student who wants to understand the information in the computer manual so that he can set up his computer. This text is relevant and important to him, but may not interest a student who does not share the same content goals. 
  • To generate interest, provide stimulating tasks related to reading topics prior to reading.

• Increase opportunities for students to collaborate during reading.
  • Allow students to collaborate by reading together, sharing information, and explaining and presenting their knowledge to others during reading and reading-related tasks.
  • Teach collaborative group work skills such as appropriate group work behavior, how to provide feedback to group members, and maintaining individual accountability so that students benefit from working together. 
  • Use collaboration to foster a sense of belonging to the classroom community (Anderman, 1999).