The trouble with “struggling readers”

Dudley-Marling, Curt. (2011). The trouble with “struggling readers”. Talking Points 23(1), 2-7.

Words DO matter. That is the main point I take away from Curt Dudley-Marling’s essay on the words, or rather, the labels, that we use to describe learners who don’t meet school expectations for literacy “success.” The words we use to describe students reveal the ways we think about students, about literacy, and about the whole process of literacy development. The term “struggling reader” has come into use recently, along with the term “striving reader.” These terms are certainly better than the older terms that explicitly described literacy differences as literacy deficits. Back in the early 1980s, the reading “clinic” where I did my graduate fieldwork used the terms “developmental reader”, “corrective reader”, and “remedial reader” to describe readers, depending on how far their performance on informal reading inventories differed from what was considered “normal.” Difficulties with reading were conceptualized similarly to illnesses that could be “diagnosed” and “treated” in our “clinic”, and maybe even “cured.” As Dudley-Marling points out, such words treat problems with reading as situated within the learner, when it is really more complicated than that. Although the learner plays a part in the problem, the problem is a function of that learner’s interactions within a complex social environment. All kinds of factors come into play in those interactions, including cultural factors and issues of power and the values espoused by those with power in that environment. Problems with reading are never so simple that we can just “fix” or “cure” the individual.

Even though the term “struggling reader” is an attempt to find better words than we have used in the past, Dudley-Marling believes this term still reflects the same deficit view of the reader as the more blatant terms of the past. As a literacy educator whose work includes thinking about ways to help the kinds of children who might be labeled as struggling readers, I found myself mentally begging Dudley-Marling to at least give me some new, alternative words to describe those learners better, so I wouldn’t have to mentally and verbally dance around the issue every time I had to write or talk about them. Dudley-Marling did not provide those alternative words for me. Instead, he suggested that we get rid of the adjectives entirely, and simply talk about “readers” rather than giving them an adjectival label of any kind. I’ve given that kind of advice myself, when asking my preservice education students to attempt nonjudgmental descriptions of the urban settings where they do field observations. I want them to try to get away from value judgments about neighborhoods, and people, that may be different from what they are familiar with. They usually run into trouble with adjectives. Adjectives tend to be subjective and judgmental. Adjectives can create rich, connected description and poetry in creative writing, but they can easily turn into labeling in professional writing. I know this, so I can accept Dudley-Marling’s suggestion and take it to heart. Still, that leaves me with dilemmas when communicating with other educators. For example, I am currently developing a conference on strategies to assist learners who have been labeled as struggling readers. How do I create materials for that conference that clearly communicate to educators what the conference will focus on, but still avoid the deficit-based labeling terms? As Dudley-Marling writes, our society is so infused with the individualist perspective that it is difficult to even begin to think in other terms. This article made me realize, though, that because words do matter, I have to try.