The Response to a Daily, Structured Literacy Intervention and its Effect on Struggling Readers‟ Comprehension

This action research investigates how a daily, structured literacy intervention effects struggling readers‟ comprehension. Struggling readers lack the literacy foundations needed to be successful readers and make meaning from text. A variety of data was collected including the following: teacher interviews, student questionnaires, Running Reading Records and field observation notes. The data show three emerging themes: developing mastery in literacy learning, belonging to a community of learners and building positive self-esteem: the link between literacy learning and behavior. The results showed that struggling readers benefit from a daily, structured literacy intervention that focuses on the key literacy foundations needed for comprehension. 3 THE RESPONSE TO A DAILY, STRUCTURED LITERACY The Response to a Daily, Structured Literacy Intervention and its Effect on Struggling Readers’ Comprehension Literacy is essential to our daily life. Early childhood experiences at home and in school will shape how one will enter the literate world. Students who are struggling readers will often find difficulty learning how to read and comprehend text within a large classroom setting. Many schools have responded to this concern and adopted many new literacy interventions. Literacy interventions are taught by either the classroom teacher or a literacy specialist within the school. Interventions often break reading down into parts such as phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, writing, and ultimately comprehension. During a literacy intervention, a teacher can go in depth within these areas so the child can become a successful reader. Most of these literacy interventions are facilitated within a small group setting, giving children who are behind in reading the chance for one-on-one or small group instruction. The topic of this study is ―The Response to a Daily, Structured literacy intervention, and its Effects on Struggling Readers’ Comprehension. ‖ This topic is very important because as teachers, we must pull and use from every resource available and utilize every program schools have to offer in order to find the best way to teach children who are behind in their reading. Comprehension is making meaning. It includes making connections with text, self, and the world, utilizing both background knowledge and text-based knowledge. Comprehension is one of the five components that are needed for reading success. There are students who may know how to "read" words, but if they cannot make meaning from what they read, they are truly not reading. They are merely word calling; getting the words off the page. Nation, Frazier, and Norbury (2005) state, "To extract meaning 4 THE RESPONSE TO A DAILY, STRUCTURED LITERACY from text demands a number of cognitive processes, from recognizing letters and words to interpreting the message with respect to world knowledge" (p. 21). Building on student's vocabulary, helping students accurately decode what they read, and making connections from what they read to what they know will help students build comprehension. Helping struggling readers increase their comprehension will give them a better chance for success in the higher grades. Teachers need to make the time to observe their students within their classroom carefully and guide students learning based on the childs need (Applegate, Quinn, & A. Applegate, 2006). Struggling reader's need extra guidance or reading interventions to give them the chance to make the connections and develop their comprehension skills that they can use in the stories they read. Based on the Common Core State Standards for Reading Comprehension, and in the outside world, ―To build a foundation for college and career readiness, students must read widely and deeply from among a broad range of high-quality, increasingly challenging literary and informational texts‖ ("Common Core State Standards," 2012, p.16). Providing early interventions, when students are younger, and behind in reading, gives them more strategies for meaning making and leads them closer to grade-level work and independence. Exploring how interventions impact struggling readers and their reading comprehension will facilitate how schools accommodate those children that are behind in their reading. Many literacy interventions that are being used in school districts around the country are very expensive. With limited budgets in most districts, schools need to rely on research conducted by professionals to find the intervention that would best suit their students’ needs in the most economical way. If no research was conducted about strategic literacy interventions and struggling readers’ comprehension, it could result in another brick added to the wall that 5 THE RESPONSE TO A DAILY, STRUCTURED LITERACY prevents this child from learning how to read. Improving the reading success and giving struggling readers the opportunity to learn how to comprehend text will generalize into the other subject areas such as writing, math, science and social studies. Literacy is built into every subject area within school. Students who are struggling readers will ultimately find difficulty not just in reading class but in every subject area. Students' need fiction and non-fiction text that are at their reading level (Allington, 2007). When students' are made to read textbooks that are far above their reading level, they will simply become word callers and not grasp the information needed from the text. Comprehension is one of the keys to students’ success. Students learn best when there are predictable routines and lots of structure within the classroom. Interventions work best when they are consistently applied every day and with the same routine (McIntyre et. al., 2005). Struggling readers especially benefit from this structure because they are trying to grasp on to new and challenging concepts and unfamiliar strategies. This is all the more difficult after years of not ―breaking the code‖ and feeling like a failure. From my own experience, I have seen and been involved in many different literacy approaches for struggling readers. These different literacy interventions include RTI (Response to Intervention), Reading Recovery, Wilson, and leveled literacy intervention. From these interventions, I have witnessed both student success and struggle within particular programs and where and when comprehension growth was achieved. Heinemann, one of the leading publishing companies for professional development books and research, has initiated an intensive amount of research on one particular literacy intervention; ―The Fountas and Pinnell leveled literacy intervention. ‖ Fountas and Pinnell designed an intervention that was made for students reading below grade level. Fountas and Pinnell’s leveled literacy intervention is a supplementary, short-term program designed for students reading below grade level. It is an 186 THE RESPONSE TO A DAILY, STRUCTURED LITERACY 20 week program that involves direct reading instruction in a small group setting for 30 minutes a day (Fountas & Pinnell, 2008). During each reading group, students will begin by rereading books from the previous days, review high-frequency words, participate in word study and end the lesson with reading a new book at the student’s instructional level (Fountas & Pinnell, 2008). Leveled literacy intervention benchmarks student’s growth every 10 lessons and conducts a running record every other day. It examines student’s comprehension both during and at the end of each story and builds a variety of comprehension strategies for students to acquire and use throughout their day. This generalization into other content areas extends the efficacy of the program. The main question for my study was how the response to a daily, structured literacy intervention and its effect on struggling readers comprehension? Struggling readers have a difficult time comprehending text because they lack the literacy foundations needed to make meaning from text. The theoretical framework that guided my study focused on how culture has the ability to disable someone because they do not fit within societies norms. Students who fit outside society’s norms will not have the literacy experiences or events needed to develop the literacy skills other children have learned and will enter school with. Another theory that also guided this study is the socio-cultural historical theory. The socio-cultural historical theory provides a culturally focused examination of input from students in a variety of learning settings (Larson & Marsh, 2005). My findings and implications provide insight on the importance of a daily, structured literacy intervention on struggling readers comprehension. The Fountas and Pinnells leveled literacy intervention and its daily, structured lesson plans implemented the literacy skills needed to make a struggling reader make gains with their reading and comprehension of text. Giving students specific, guided direction in a small group setting, allows 7 THE RESPONSE TO A DAILY, STRUCTURED LITERACY students to well safer and can lead to more risk-taking. Students will begin to develop their metacognition and will generalize into other content areas. Theoretical Framework Literacy is multidimensional in nature (Kucer, 2009). It is dynamic, malleable, and a multifaceted social and cultural practice (Freebody & Luke, 1990; Gee, 2001; Kucer, 2009). Literacy encompasses the ability to speak, listen, read, write, and solve problems within text. Evolution in literacy will happen in response to cultural, social and economic changes in our society. Society embraces literacy and its social practices. These abilities are essential to actualizing a full, productive life. The path to a literate life begins with primary discourse. Gee (2001) defines discourse as, ―a socially accepted association among ways of using language, of thinking, and of acting that can be used to identify oneself as a