Advanced Reading Skills are Essential
Advanced Reading Skills
Reading is the gateway to knowledge. Without refined reading skills, personal independence and options are severely limited. Poor readers can only know what others choose to tell them. Poor readers have limited socio-economic opportunities. This ramifications of an increasingly illiterate society are compounding as knowledge compounds at an exponentially rapid rate. Here’s why teaching and learning advanced reading skills are essential.
The ability to read well increases the freedom and self-determination of the individual. Nineteenth Century American slaveholders understood this concept well. By 1850, each of the fifteen slaveholding states had enacted laws that criminalized reading instruction to slaves. Slaveholders found out through experience that the ability to read opened up the world of knowledge, individual choice, and aspiration to a better life—all dangerous challenges to authoritarian control. In the Twentieth Century, the Nazis came to power, burning books and harassing those who thought differently then their party. Once their power solidified, concentrated efforts were made to control and manipulate the reading of school children and the masses. The communists in the Soviet Union altered textbooks to reflect their view of history and sent authors to Siberia for re-education. In the Twenty-First Century, economic problems have provided the pretext for closing public or school libraries, considering limits to the freedom of thought via Internet censorship or taxation, and limiting the capital acquisition of small publishing companies which has forced many into bankruptcy—thus solidifying the conglomerate power of the largest publishing houses, whose agenda consists of money-making and preserving the status quo.
In this information age, the ability to read well is an increasingly essential skill. The negative consequences of limited reading ability are numerous. For example, identifying a phishing email requires higher order critical reading skills to read between the lines and recognize non-sequiturs, unsupported generalizations, and questionable authority errors in reasoning. Reading and applying the Schedule A instructions for allowable deductions on the 1040 form requires content-specific vocabulary. Reading how to program a new flat screen television requires advanced technical reading ability. A limited reader could wind up with a bank account depleted, an audit, or a large paperweight.
Researchers have cited “a serious gap between many high school seniors’ reading ability and the reading requirements they will face after graduation. Furthermore, students in college are expected to read complex texts with substantially greater independence (i.e., much less scaffolding) than are students in typical K–12 programs. College students are held more accountable for what they read on their own than are most students in high school (Erickson & Strommer, 1991; Pritchard, Wilson, & Yamnitz, 2007).
College instructors assign readings, not necessarily explicated in class, for which students might be held accountable through exams, papers, presentations, or class discussions. Students in high school, by contrast, are rarely held accountable for what they are able to read independently (Heller & Greenleaf, 2007). This discrepancy in task demand, coupled with what we see below is a vast gap in text complexity, may help explain why only about half of the students taking the ACT Test in the 2004–2005 academic year could meet the benchmark score in reading (which also was the case in 2008–2009, the most recent year for which data are available) and why so few students in general are prepared for postsecondary reading (ACT, Inc., 2006, 2009).”
The Achievement Gap
Today, we need to see advanced reading instruction as a bulwark against an increasingly illiterate society. What was an adequate reading skill level thirty years ago is inadequate today. More higher level high school and college reading courses are needed to appropriately prepare students for the information age. Our achievement gap is real, but is better defined as a literacy gap.
FREE DOWNLOAD TO ASSESS THE QUALITY OF PENNINGTON PUBLISHING RESOURCES: The SCRIP (Summarize, Connect, Re-think, Interpret, and Predict) Comprehension Strategies includes class posters, five lessons to introduce the strategies, and the SCRIP Comprehension Bookmarks.
Get the SCRIP Comprehension Strategies FREE Resource:
The Science of Reading Intervention Program
The Science of Reading Intervention Program: Word Recognition includes explicit, scripted instruction and practice with the 5 Daily Google Slide Activities every reading intervention student needs: 1. Phonemic Awareness and Morphology 2. Blending, Segmenting, and Spelling 3. Sounds and Spellings (including handwriting) 4. Heart Words Practice 5. Sam and Friends Phonics Books (decodables). Plus, digital and printable sound wall cards and speech articulation songs. Print versions are available for all activities. First Half of the Year Program (55 minutes-per-day, 18 weeks)
The Science of Reading Intervention Program: Language Comprehension resources are designed for students who have completed the word recognition program or have demonstrated basic mastery of the alphabetic code and can read with some degree of fluency. The program features the 5 Weekly Language Comprehension Activities: 1. Background Knowledge Mentor Texts 2. Academic Language, Greek and Latin Morphology, Figures of Speech, Connotations, Multiple Meaning Words 3. Syntax in Reading 4. Reading Comprehension Strategies 5. Literacy Knowledge (Narrative and Expository). Second Half of the Year Program (30 minutes-per-day, 18 weeks)
The Science of Reading Intervention Program: Assessment-based Instruction provides diagnostically-based “second chance” instructional resources. The program includes 13 comprehensive assessments and matching instructional resources to fill in the yet-to-be-mastered gaps in phonemic awareness, alphabetic awareness, phonics, fluency (with YouTube modeled readings), Heart Words and Phonics Games, spelling patterns, grammar, usage, and mechanics, syllabication and morphology, executive function shills. Second Half of the Year Program (25 minutes-per-day, 18 weeks)
The Science of Reading Intervention Program BUNDLE includes all 3 program components for the comprehensive, state-of-the-art (and science) grades 4-adult full-year program. Scripted, easy-to-teach, no prep, no need for time-consuming (albeit valuable) LETRS training or O-G certification… Learn as you teach and get results NOW for your students. Print to speech with plenty of speech to print instructional components.
SCIENCE OF READING INTERVENTION PROGRAM RESOURCES HERE for detailed product description and sample lessons.