DEFINITION OF READING

Reading is something many, who are literate, take for granted. But if you think about it and try to define it, you may have difficulty verbalizing your thoughts. Reading experts have done the defining job for you.

What is reading? Reading is an active process (not a product, like history) in which readers shift between sources of information (what they know and what the text says), elaborate meaning and strategies, check their interpretation (revising when appropriate), and use the social context to focus their response. (Walker, p.4)

Other authors define reading as the act of simultaneously reading the lines, reading between the lines, and reading beyond the lines (Manzo and Manzo, p. 5). The first part of their definition, reading the lines refers to the act of decoding the words in order to construct the author's basic message. The next part, reading between the lines, refers to the act of making inferences and understanding the author's implied message. And finally, reading beyond the lines involves the judging of the significance of the author's message and applying it to other areas of background and knowledge.

You should note that neither of these definitions focuses on the sounding out of words. Sounding out words is an important skill but it is very secondary to the act of comprehending and thinking. Comprehension and thinking is what reading is really all about.

Vacca and Vacca (1996) offer the following pictorial definition of reading

Getting information explicitly from the text		Reading the lines
Putting together information, perceiving relationships, and making inferences		Reading between the lines
Using information to express opinions and form new ideas		Reading beyond the lines

CUEING SYSTEMS

Being able to say the words does not equal reading. Phonics and the ability to apply decoding principles is a part of reading. It is one cueing system that good readers use in order to make sense of print. There are really four cueing systems that good readers use:

• They use graphophonic cues which are obtained from spelling patterns and the sounds that they represent. This is phonics.

• They also use syntactic cues -- the order and type of words expected next.

• And readers use semantic cues which are the surrounding words that provide context and meaning to unfamiliar words and ideas.

• The fourth cueing system that good readers use is based on background experience cues with things, people, and oral language. When children have vocabulary deficiencies, they are lacking in this fourth cueing system.

STAGES OF READING

Jeanne Chall identified stages of reading. Knowing these stages could help you understand readers and reading.

• Stage 0 is the prereading stage when children gain control over language, pretend to read. Their experiences develop this stage which lasts until about age six.

• Stage 1 is the initial reading or decoding stage which occurs in grades 1 and 2. During this stage the child begins to associate sounds and symbols. The reader brings more to the print than he takes from it. In other words, he is learning to read, learning to decode and to make sense of writing. This stage is sometimes called barking at print or grunting and groaning. Reading is not smooth and may not even be easy to listen to.

• After this period of learning to read comes stage 2 (grades 2 and 3) when the child gains fluency, learns to use decoding skills, and needs predictable books. During this and the prior stage, children are learning to relate print to speech, not print to ideas. Adult illiterates are often stalled at this stage of reading.

• In stage 3, which occurs during the fourth through eighth grades, the readers read to learn. Before this stage, they learn to read. The task for them is to master ideas in this stage. Ideas are usually presented from just one point of view in this stage.

• The next stage (stage 4) occurs during high school at about ages 14-18. The primary characteristic of this stage is that it involves more than one viewpoint. Readers develop the ability to deal with layers of facts and concepts which are added onto those acquired in earlier stages.

• The final stage (stage 5) happens in college when readers are 18 years old and older. In this stage the reader knows he needs a purpose for his reading. Because his purposes may vary, he may start at the beginning, middle, or end of a chapter or book. The reader who has reached the final stage knows what not to read as well as what to read. The reader understands the qualitativeness of knowledge at this stage, that things are not all black or white, that there are grays and uncertainties.

It is important for you to have some understanding of these stages because children do not move through a stage until they have passed through the prior stages. The implication for you, as a tutor, is that children's reading may be difficult to listen to in stages 1 and 2. In these stages, the child is more concerned with saying the words than he is with what the words mean. Then as the child moves through the next stage of reading, he gains fluency with lots of practice reading predictable books, and he can apply decoding skills.

Knowing about these stages of reading should help you understand what to expect of children as they learn to read. At first, he is learning to read and then he reads to learn. Saying the words is the first concern and gaining understanding of the message is secondary to the beginning reader. This does not mean that you should not discuss the content of books with first and early second graders. It does mean that their focus will be on the print. They have just so much attention to devote to the act of reading and so, after struggling to identify words, there is little attention left for understanding what they read in the early stages of reading.

WILL WHAT YOU LEARNED IN C & I 312 HELP YOU WITH TUTORING?

You may have taken the Curriculum and Instruction course 312, Teaching Reading in the Elementary School. Will information from this course help you with your work in tutoring students in reading? Of course it will. You have a good understanding of what reading is and how one goes about teaching a person to read from the 312 methods course. However, there are differences between methods used with entire classrooms of children (as discussed in 312) and those used with a single student as you will be doing.

With tutoring, your approach is much more specific to the child's needs than it is in a classroom situation. In a classroom setting, you do things that are beneficial to the group as a whole. In a tutoring situation, you work on the specific things that your individual student needs. For example, if your student has good listening comprehension, knows what a story is about when you read it to him, and can retell a story he has heard, you probably do not need to spend time on questioning strategies. If your student has difficulty recognizing words, for example, that is where your focus should be.

Some activities are good in a classroom and in tutoring. Reading to children is always a good activity. Having the children write is another activity that can nearly always be helpful to a class of students. But it may or may not be ideal for a particular student. In other words, in the tutoring situation you use strategies that address specific difficulties. You cannot do this in the classroom because the children vary so much.

In the tutoring situation, the child should be engaged every minute, doing something that is potentially helpful to him. Ideally, the same would be true in the classroom setting, but it is much more difficult to accomplish in the classroom.

Some teachers say they are forced to use the shotgun approach in the classroom, hoping to hit the needs of some of the students with some of the activities. In the tutoring situation, you use the bull's eye approach. You aim for exactly what your child needs and do that. Your methods in the classroom are general. In the tutoring situation the strategies you teach should be specific to the individual needs of the student.

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO IN A TUTORING SESSION?

There is no prescribed agenda for what you do in a tutoring session. However, until you feel confident, and maybe even after that, you might use the order of events prescribed by Marie Clay (1993) in Reading Recovery: A Guidebook for Teachers in Training. Since the Reading Recovery program is for first graders, adjustments must be made for older children. This is the plan that Clay suggests:

• Reread two or more familiar books. Have the child read something that is not difficult for him. Keep a pile of books that each of your children can read and keep track of whose pile is whose.

• Reread yesterday's new book and keep track of words missed. As the child reads, you write down the words with which he has difficulty. And you work with the child and these words later.

• Work with letters (for the beginning readers) or making and breaking words (for the more capable readers). Use the words that were missed in reading new books (in the items above). Focus on letters or words.

• Write a story. This can be a sentence. The child writes as much as he can with you helping by drawing lines for missing letters and aiding the child in hearing and writing what those missing letters are.

• Cut up the story between the words. Have the child rearrange the story in the correct order. With older students, you can do the writing but you probably would not cut apart the words. Work with the story.

• Introduce a new book. Give a little book talk, an introduction to the book. Of course this means that you will have to have read the book beforehand. You talk about what the book and the story are about. Involve the student. Have him predict what might happen on a page or in the book as a whole.

• Read the book to the child with the child following with his eyes or finger as you read. Talk about the book and what is happening in it as you read.

• Have the child attempt to read the book. If possible, give the book to the child so he can practice reading it before the next time he sees you. When he reads it better the next time you see him, be sincere but extravagant in your recognition of this improvement.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

As you work with students, you should keep in mind several things. Remember what reading is and the various stages of reading. Determine in your own mind what stage of reading your students are in. Although you may have worked with students before, it is unlikely that you have had exactly this type of one-on-one tutoring situation before. Working with your student will vary from the things that you would do in a classroom setting. Do not discard the prior information that you have about reading and the teaching of it, but recognize that the tutoring situation is unique. Know what you intend to do daily. Have a written plan of activities. Be task oriented and accomplish what you set out to do daily.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the

body.

--Joseph Addison