Ch. 6 Reading Instruction

Reading is one of my favorite things to do and to teach.  My goal each year if I do nothing else is to instill a love of reading in my students and to help them find some favorite authors.  As our community continues to become more diverse knowing how to help CLDE students will become even more important and necessary.

I have had several ESL students over the years, but all have been fluent in English.  I always try to have these students share part of their culture and if the parents are willing to have them share also.  Other students in the class always enjoy this.  Having a student that had a primary language other than English would definitely be a challenge, but if they also had a reading disability I'm afraid I would be lost on how to help.  This chapter had some good points and information.

One thing I found interesting was that the chapter said that most of the CLDE students with reading disabilities tended to focus on decoding rather than comprehension, but that it was actually the comprehension strategies that seemed to make the most difference in student success.  If I had been put in charge of helping one of these students before reading this chapter, I likely would have focused on the decoding also.  After reading this, however, and thinking about how quickly students often pick up a second language I could see how the comprehension strategies make a lot more sense as a place to focus.  I have noticed as my own students have their Spanish lessons each week how similar so many words are and the students pick up on this very quickly. 

Another interesting idea was that of culturally responsive reading instruction.  This involves the teacher learning how students learn in the CLDE student's culture, what is valued and how interactions take place.  I remember hearing about a student from Asia once who would not look his teacher in the eye.  The teacher took this as a lack of respect only to find out to look a teacher in the eye in this child's native country was considered disrespectful.  This shows that if we don't take the time to understand our student's culture and vlaues, we may be coming across in a way that is not at all conducive to learning in the world they know.

While the thought of have a CLDE student in my class is intimidating, it did help to read some of the strategies offered in this chapter.  The Read Naturally program and the modified guided reading were very similar to the guided reading I do each day in my class.  That was reassuring as I thought, "I can do that!"  Even the reciprocal and collaborative strategies were made up of strategies we already use, although I think these would be better used in the upper grades.

Having these strategies is and will continue to become more important in our constantly changing communities.  It is good to learn more about how to be most effective to these students.