Teaching Developmental Reading

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 Teaching Developmental Reading
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Developmental readers usually lack critical college reading skills such as identifying the main idea, recognizing the supporting details, making inferences, determining the author's purpose and tone, and distinguishing between facts and opinion. What follows are specific recommendations for improving the teaching of developmental reading at educational institutions offering remedial courses in academic reading to native and non-native speakers of English:
  •  Teach critical thinking including observation, evaluation, and response skills to developmental readers
  • Use literature in all remedial reading sequences
  • Integrate reading and writing skills at all levels of reading sequences
  • Provide Learning Community courses linked with History or Speech courses
  • Integrate Service Learning projects into reading curriculum
  • Teach information literacy to students, including the ability to access, comprehend, analyze, organize, and present information at the college level. All remedial reading courses should integrate variations of information literacy such as using journalism as a teaching tool, service learning, learning communities, peer-teaching, writing projects, research projects and other collaborations. This can be done by using tools like newspapers, novels, discussions, cooperative work, self-directed learning, PowerPoint, word-processing, hundreds of Internet tools, journals, textbooks, pencils and poems. It is my belief that we can foster reading and writing skills under the high-impact umbrella of preparing students for college through critical thinking and information literacy.
  • Incorporate technology to enhance varied approaches to teaching reading and to elicit student participation.
  • Offer some credit-bearing courses to developmental readers.
  • More consistent access to supplemental instructional staff (in-class and/or out-of-class), more contact hours, more levels and aural diagnostics for English Language Learners (ELL), more piloting of I-Best teaching model in reading-writing courses to bolster instructional capability.

Reading assessment plays a crucial role in determining students' reading proficiency. The characteristics of an ideal placement and an exit test from remediation are as follows:

  • The reading test must have a diagnostic component to it with a prescription form for students to take to their reading professors.
  • Reading assessment should be both summative (a reliable, standardized, normed, multiple choice instrument is fine) as well as formative (a written summary with norm-referenced grading).
  • Reading assessment needs to be more reliable. Although the ACT is a valid assessment because it matches current learning objectives, it is not as reliable as it needs to be (this has now been proven with research). Here's why: the ACT COMPASS ranges from 15 to 30 questions in length and takes most students less than an hour to complete. With a student's college career on the line, an assessment instrument should never be this flimsy. The reading assessment needs to be far superior in both validity and reliability, including a formative tool (summary) and an itemized, diagnostic breakdown.
  • Make the new reading assessment culturally more accessible to English as a Second Language (ESL) students.
  • Avoid literary questions (imagery, tone, etc.), as they are not always familiar to entering students, especially ESL. 
The philosophy of teaching developmental reading must emphasize a content-based approach, contextualized skills, high impact learning strategies, using literature, integration of oral/aural skills, providing multiple modalities for the primary linguistic data in classroom settings, and integrating reading and writing.

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