The Reading Teacher's Sourcebook - The Meadows Center for ...

Figure 10. Categories of Secondary Struggling Readers.Student needsAdequate skills (good decoding ability,average vocabulary knowledge, can decodefluently) but poor text comprehensionLow fluency level and poor textcomprehension, but adequate wordrecognitionWeak decoding ability; slow, dysfluentreading; poor text comprehensionSeverely impaired decoding ability, verylow fluency, poor text comprehensionFocus on …Comprehension strategies + vocabularyComprehension strategies + vocabulary + fluency practicewith connected textComprehension strategies + vocabulary + word recognitionpractice and fluency practice with connected textExplicit, systematic instruction in decoding and wordrecognition + fluency + vocabulary + comprehension (Atthis level, each daily lesson includes instruction in wordreading as well as opportunities to practice and to applycomprehension strategies reading instructional-level text.)Determining the Instructional FocusNext, Miss Lopez determines her instructional focus based on the results of her assessments. One way toapproach this task is to organize all of a class’ assessment data in a table to identify students with similarneeds. Figure 11 shows sample eighth-grade data. Miss Lopez gave an ORF measure to her students andthen determined who was reading below 100 WCPM. For those students, she gave additional measures todetermine why they were not reading fluently. On the table, the letters MB stand for meets benchmark andthe letters SD stand for still developing, indicating dimensions of reading for which students have attainedgrade-level competence or are not yet developed to that level, respectively.34The Reading Teacher’s Sourcebook