Reading Recovery Totally Explained

Everything about Reading Recovery totally explained

Reading Recovery is a supplementary education program that aims to offer the lowest-achieving first-grade children an effective method of English language reading and writing instruction. The program was developed in the 1970s by New Zealand educator Dr. Marie Clay. After lengthy observations of successful early readers Dr. Clay defined reading as a message-getting, problem-solving activity, and writing as a message-sending, problem-solving activity. Dr. Clay suggested that both activities involved linking invisible patterns of oral language with visible symbols. (Clay, 2005)
In 1984 Dr. Gay Su Pinnell and Dr. Charlotte Huck of Ohio State University introduced the method to the United States. "Reading Recovery" is a registered trademark of Ohio State University in the U.S. Reading Recovery sites operated in eight Canadian provinces and one territory, 48 U.S. States, and the District of Columbia. Approximately 60,000 North American children were served by Reading Recovery educators during the 1993-94 school year. In California alone, more than 500 school districts served approximately 5000 children. (Swartz & Klein, 1996) The program is also implemented in Australia, Canada, and England. According to its inventors and advocators, Reading Recovery combines extensive teacher education with an emphasis on the development of phonological awareness and the use of contextual information to assist reading. They claim it to be an educationally sound and cost-effective early intervention program for helping children who are at-risk of early reading failure.

Method

Reading Recovery offers daily half-hour one-on-one tutorial sessions for students who have trouble learning to read after one year of formal instruction. The program is supplementary and short-term, with most students needing from 12 to 16 weeks of instruction before they can be successfully discontinued from the program. A combination of teacher judgment and systematic evaluation procedures identify those lowest-achieving children for whom Reading Recovery was designed. The program's goal is to bring students up to the level of their peers and to give students the assistance they need to develop independent reading strategies. Once students are reading and writing at a level equivalent to that of their peers, they're discontinued from the program.
Reading Recovery is designed to provide the social interaction that supports the students' ability to work in their "zone of proximal development"—just beyond their level of actual development—with a supportive adult who helps them solve problems and to perform. Clay's theory of learning to read is based on the idea that children construct cognitive systems to understand the world and language. These cognitive systems develop as self-extending systems that generate further learning through the use of multiple sources of information.

A typical Reading Recovery lesson

Daily 30 minute lessons are individually designed and delivered by specially trained teachers. Drawing from a wide range of teaching procedures and an understanding of how children learn, Reading Recovery teachers make moment-to-moment decisions to support the child's learning. During each lesson, children read many little books. These include 2 to 3 familiar books, a rereading of the previous day's new book and the introduction and reading of a new story. Teachers take a running record of the previous day's new book to analyze the child's independence and reading behaviour. Children also compose, write and read their own messages or stories. In addition, children read slightly more challenging texts that they've not read before. Teachers provide detailed support for the children as they read these more difficult texts. Magnetic alphabet letters are used for sorting, to assist visual discrimination, and are used to analyze words. Reading skills are taught in the context of extended reading and writing by Reading Recovery teachers who have completed a year-long inservice education program that focuses on moment-to-moment responses to children's actions and behavior.
Reading Recovery is controversial because children who didn't benefit from it were exited from the program and it's expensive to implement, with intensive teacher training. Because children were withdrawn if they failed to respond, it i wasn't possble to judge its overall effectiveness. There was criticsim that it didn't break instuction into small enough units (phonemes) but relied on "word families" (dog,hog, log etc.) which wasn't helpful with some children. Additionally, running records show that a stduent has various diffilcutes reading, but some said it wasn't a fine tuned enough informal assessment to be useful.In many school districts, given these cristicims of Reading Recovery, and its lack of research showing its effectiveness, program such as Wilson Reading have been adapted. These more structured programs have some research demonstrating their effectiveness with various students.

Teacher's role

An essential component of the Reading Recovery program is the training of the teachers who provide the tutorial instruction. Reading Recovery teachers learn to observe, analyze, and interpret the reading and writing behaviors of individual students and to design and implement an individual program to meet each student's needs. Just as the Reading Recovery children engage in social interaction with the teacher, Reading Recovery teachers engage in social interaction with their colleagues and mentors to construct a view of learning and teaching that supports literacy learning.

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