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Terry Salinger Terry Salinger Senior Advisor to the National High School Center, Managing Director and Chief Scientist for Reading at the American Institutes for Research Dr. Terry Salinger is a Managing Director and Chief Scientist for Reading Research at the American Institutes for Research. Her specific areas of focus are reading and literacy research and assessment. She is currently the project director for the Enhanced Reading Opportunities study, an IES-funded randomized control trial of the effectiveness of supplemental reading interventions for adolescent struggling readers. Additionally, Dr. Salinger provides content expertise on studies investigating pre-service teachers' preparation to teach beginning reading, use of an explicit curriculum for adult ESL learners, and monitoring the implementation of the Reading First program. She headed a study of the secondary component of the Alabama Reading Initiative, a state-wide effort to enhance reading instruction; led the project to develop the framework and specifications for the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress in reading; and was senior advisor to the development of the National Assessment of Adult Literacy. Dr. Salinger has a doctorate in reading, with dual emphases on statistics and curriculum design, has done extensive research on the instruction and assessment of reading and writing; she has published widely, especially in the fields of literacy acquisition and standards-based assessment. Two chapters written by Dr. Salinger appear in the 2007 book Adolescent Literacy Instruction: Policies and Promising Practices, which is edited by Jill Lewis and Gary Moorman and published by the International Reading Association.

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High School Literacy

• Some may stumble over words when they read orally but actually comprehend very well when reading silently.  Some who cannot read orally with fluency are demonstrating very real problems with basic skills like decoding or attending to punctuation in texts they read.  Their reading may then be so slow and labored that it takes all their cognitive energy and they have none left to comprehend.
• Some students experience difficulties comprehending because they have limited vocabularies and have few strategies for figuring out the meaning of unfamiliar words.  This can be especially problematic in content area classes with high levels of technical vocabulary.
• Some students don’t know that they should draw on their background knowledge to help them comprehend new material and ideas – making links to what they know helps them comprehend better.  At the same time, some students may encounter comprehension problems when they simply don’t have the background knowledge they need – they lack concepts or experiences that can help them make the links they need to make.
• Some poor comprehenders read so slowly, even silently, that they can’t remember what they read at the beginning of a text but the time they get to the end.
• Some other poor comprehenders don’t have good “fix-up strategies” so that they don’t know what to do when a text doesn’t make sense.

These are just examples of the range of problems adolescents encounter, but they show that addressing their needs requires diverse approaches.

State reading tests at the high school level rarely provide information at specific enough levels to help teachers and reading specialists plan appropriate intervention for students who struggle with reading.  The best diagnostic tests are administered one-on-one and include both silent and oral reading tasks.  They are labor-intensive to administer and score; so except for students with the most severe problems, they are often not practical.

Fortunately some reading interventions include forms of initial diagnostic or placement test that helps teachers find the appropriate starting point for students.  So the presence of some formal mechanism for placing students in a program is one criterion schools should use in selecting interventions for their struggling readers.  Programs should also have formal measures for determining when students should “exit” a program, that is, criteria for determining that students have improved their reading skills sufficiently that they no longer need the extra help an intervention can provide.  Research seems to suggest that one year of extra help may not be enough to make the difference for students who have serious problems.

Teachers in content area classes can also help to prepare students learn to read well enough to compete globally.  Content area teachers do not have to become “reading teachers” per se, but they can definitely change their instruction so that more students benefit from reading assignments.  Content areas have specialized, technical vocabulary, that may include “regular” words used in content-specific ways.  Teaching them as such is essential.  Content area texts often have distinct structural patterns that need to be taught, for example, chronological presentation in history, pro/con in government, procedural or cause and effect in science.  Helping students recognize and use these patterns is also essential.  And teachers also need to be sure that all their students have the appropriate background knowledge to understand new information – the conceptual, experiential prerequisites of each new course.  Teachers can save everyone, including themselves, a lot of frustration by assessing background knowledge and filling it in when it’s missing.

And then there are issues of engagement and practice.  Students in high school need practice reading all sorts of different texts, both in print and non-print formats, on paper and on-screen, if they are going to compete globally.  And students won’t practice unless they find what they read engaging.  Making available many different kinds of texts at a variety of reading levels is essential, and these should be available in libraries and as part of class assignments.  Even sources as common as news magazines and newspapers (on line or in print) may turn nonreaders into readers.

Finally, if students are going to be able to compete globally, they need to be able to think about what they read and express their thoughts purposefully and convincingly. Competing globally is more than reading well enough to get a particular score on a state reading test.  It’s vital that schools encourage students – all students – to talk and write about what they read; to state opinions and defend them with evidence; to debate with their teacher and fellow students.  The key is “evidence,” that is information that can be found in text.  Engaging in these kinds of evidence provides real motivation for reading and shows students why the hard work of improving their skills will benefit them.

References:

Bates, L., Breslow, N., and Hupert, N. (2009). Five states’ efforts to improve adolescent literacy (Issues & Answers Report, REL 2009 – No. 067). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Evaluations and Regional Assistance, Regional Educational Laboratory Northeast and Islands. Retrievable from http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/ed/edlabs.

Kamil, M.L., Borman, G.D., Dole, J., Kral, C.C., Salinger, T., and Torgesen, J. (2008). Improving adolescent literacy: Effective classroom and intervention practices: A practice guide. (NCEE # 2008-4027). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Retrievable from http://ies.d.gov/ncee/wwc.

Scammacca, N., Roberts, G., Vaughn, S., Edmonds, M., Wexler, J., Reutenbuch, C.K., &Torgesen, J.K. (2007). Interventions for adolescents struggling readers: A meta-analysis with implications for practice. Portsmouth, NH: RMC Research Corporation, Center on Instruction.

Literacy Instruction in the Content Areas: Getting to the Core of Middle and High School Improvement

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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