Intensive reading instruction for learners with developmental disabilities

Schnorr, Roberta F. (2011). Intensive reading instruction for learners with developmental disabilities. The Reading Teacher, 65(1), 35-45.

Here is a lesson framework for helping developmentally disabled children learn to read and write as well as they possibly can. The framework is a scripted set of routines in four steps: 1) Re-read a familiar book, 2) Phonemic awareness, phonics, and word work, 3) Shared reading of a new text, and 4) Shared writing connection. The emphasis throughout is on providing scaffolding at appropriate levels, and on gradually removing scaffolds, guiding the child to become as independent as her or his abilities allow. The framework is designed for small group instruction; the case study we read about here describes instruction that is delivered to a group of only two students with the intermittent assistance of special educators, all taking place within the regular classroom and during regularly scheduled times for literacy instruction.

The various forms the scaffolding took in this lesson framework interested me. This scaffolding tended to be quite intense in this model, and occurred at every step. First, providing instruction in a regular routine, and explicitly making children aware of the steps in that routine, is one kind of scaffolding. In this case, the steps of the framework were presented to the children on a chart, and each was read as the step began and crossed off as the step ended. If we know what comes next, we are better able to predict what will happen and do not have to use mental space to anticipate that. Although the unexpected might also be a stimulus for learning, because of novelty and curiosity, with disabled students too much variety might actually become overwhelming, and the routines help release the child to attend to actually acquiring the skills being taught.

Another type of scaffolding occurred in the first step of the framework, with the re-rereading of familiar texts. If we already know a text, we are freed to look more closely at various details of the words, the pictures, and the author’s intended meanings. It is like when we rewatch beloved movies, or reread beloved books; we often see more in more in those texts each time we revisit them. In the second part of the framework, the teacher focused on words and sounds and how they work. The example provided here was a lesson on onset and rime, this time for the rime “-at.” Showing the children how if you know one word with this rime, you can also decode other words with –at in them is a form of scaffolding. Connecting something you know with something new is a powerful kind of learning. In this step, and all along the way, the teachers are shown doing a lot of modeling. Whenever one of the children got stuck on something, the teacher jumped in and modeled in some way. This is especially intense in the third step of the framework, when a new text is being read for the first time. This segment began with a “picture walk” in which the teacher and students “talked” through the book’s pictures without reading the text. Then, the teacher and students began the book again, “echo reading”, with the teacher modeling fluent reading and the children following by reading chorally immediately after. At all times, teacher and students pointed to the words they were reading. The students subsequently read the book a third time together, without stopping unless the children made an “error” in their oral reading (see my concern about this later in this post), in which case the teacher stopped and modeled accurate reading of the sentence.

After reading, simple discussion followed to get the children to respond to the text. Teacher scaffolding here included specific question prompts. These prompts did not seem particularly open-ended; in most cases they could be answered with one word (“Look back through the book and find an animal you have seen.”), although giving answers in complete sentences was encouraged and modeled by the teacher. I realize that here we are talking about an intervention for children who may not have much oral language skill, and providing a very structured prompt may allow them to participate. Even so, I wonder if some more open-ended prompts might sometimes allow for a higher level of response. Even developmentally disabled children might be capable of deeper discussion than what is shown here, especially if they are talking about connections to their own life experiences.

In the writing step, scaffolding appeared in the form of “sentence frames” for which the students basically filled in the blanks with words of their choosing. I don’t see any problem with providing this type of scaffolding, as long as children also have the option of crafting their own frames (which the teacher could assist them with). The writing segment to me is one of the most interesting parts of the framework, yet it is the one most briefly described in the article. Every other step of the framework is discussed in detail. Was this just an editing decision for the journal’s space requirements? Or was this segment actually less developed with the children, perhaps because it came last in the framework and time may have gotten away or perhaps because it seemed more challenging to teach writing than reading to these developmentally disabled students? The “writing” they did do here seems limited to filling in blanks in sentence frames (couldn’t even disabled students dictate their own short stories?), but that may just seem so because the description of this step is so brief.

I see much that is good and helpful in this framework, and I intend to share it with others and see what they think. However, I do have some reservations about it besides the ones I have already mentioned. Though routines can be good in that they free teachers and students to concentrate on the learning that is really important, they also can be limiting, and the order of things in a routine implies certain things about the relative importance of each step. Do we always have to start with reading? Wouldn’t it be good to start with some writing first, perhaps writing in which we reflect on what we know or what we wonder about something we are going to read about? And do we always have to reread a familiar book first? Wouldn’t it be good to read a new book first sometimes, or even more than one new book? Wouldn’t there be some days when it would be good to just concentrate on rereading familiar books? I could go on and on with possible variations. I see a place for each of the steps in the framework in literacy instruction for emergent readers, whether they are developmentally disabled learners or not, and WITHIN each step, it probably is helpful to maintain “scripts” and routines, especially for the target population here. I wonder, however, about the necessity or even advisability of presenting the four steps as an invariant order, each and every time.

I only really took serious exception with one element of the framework as it was exemplified here. That was in the third step, where children are reading a new text. On the third time through the new text, the children are rereading the new text “with less teacher support” (p. 42). They do not stop during this reading, UNLESS someone makes an oral reading “error”. The example of the “error” made by a child here is “Bears live in the big forest.” The text actually reads “Bears live in the forest.” The child’s insertion of the adjective “big” is treated as a mistake, and corrected! To my way of thinking, this child made a high-quality miscue, and , yes, I would stop the reading, but not to correct; I would explore why the child made that miscue and praise him for adding a word that made sense in the context both syntactically and semantically, and that actually added to the text in a good way! If the child had read something like, “Bears live in the fort,” that would be a problematic miscue, and there would be a reason to stop and “correct”, though in that case I’d say something like, “Wait a minute here. You read ‘Bears live in a fort.’ Fort starts the same way as forest, but does the word fort make sense here? Look at the letters in the word, and the pictures. What word would make sense there?”

I know there are differing theoretical orientations toward how we should respond to children’s miscues. Some people believe that accuracy is important and all miscues should be corrected, and others (like me) believe that only miscues that do not make sense, or that miscues that disrupt the meaning of a text warrant correction. I also know that the author might respond to my concerns by reminding me that the target population here is children who are developmentally disabled and whose reading development is substantially delayed, and the way I approach reading instruction might need to be different for those children than it might be for children who are not considered disabled. I do agree that probably a more intensive kind of scaffolding is needed for our disabled learners, and that maybe the pace has to be slower at times, with more support, more explicit teaching, and simply breaking things down into smaller steps at times. However, I do not believe we should present the process of reading differently to different children. Reading for everyone, regardless of reading ability, should ultimately be about engaging with and making sense of a text, not just about reading accurately or smoothly or rapidly. Those other skills are valuable only if they help us engage with and make sense of text, not in and of themselves. If a child makes a miscue that makes sense, I want to honor that miscue, no matter who that child is or what his developmental level is. Similarly, if a child is not making sense of text, I want to call his or her attention to that, no matter who that child is.

The framework presented here reminded me of other frameworks I am familiar with. Some of the elements are very like some of the Reading Recovery lesson elements. Other parts of the framework remind me of the various shared reading and writing models (Holdaway’s work comes immediately to mind), and I also see pieces of the language experience approach here. Individual elements of this framework do not present new ways of teaching reading to disabled learners (or any other emergent readers), though the way these elements are combined into a single framework may be a new way of looking at these familiar literacy techniques and putting them together.

The evidence presented here for the framework is primarily observational, and based on a limited data set. More formal research will be needed before conclusions can actually be drawn as to whether the framework as it is presented here actually “works” or not. In the meantime, as with any ways of teaching, it will be up to us as professionals to try some of the ideas here out and decide for ourselves if they work for us and our students, both theoretically and practically.