Help for Older Students
A teacher recently wrote to me, asking if the techniques in Phonics Plus Five could be adapted for older students--ages 12-17--who have poor reading skills.
The answer happily is YES. The issues involve a host of complex factors and it's best if they are dissected into manageable pieces. So for now, I'll cover some of the issues in comprehension.
As parents and teachers know well, many students find it extremely difficult to comprehend or understand the written message. Even though they might read all the words accurately, they get little or no sense of the ideas that the words are designed to express. One of the clearest signs that a student is having trouble is an inability to come up with a good answer when he or she is asked to "tell the main idea."
The Gleaning Meaning technique in Phonics Plus Five has been specifically designed to help students master this critical aspect of reading. The technique, which relies extensively on modeling, can be adapted for use at all ages.
The technique specifically avoids the usual method of asking the student to come up with the main idea. Instead, the first step is for the adult to create a targeted, clearly formulated summary about material the student has read. In other words, the student is being presented with a model of an effective summary.
The adult then reads the complete summary to the student. Following this, the adult repeats the summary, but this time with pauses at critical points so that the student fills in key ideas. This is repeated as often as necessary until the student completes all the key points effectively. Then as the final step, the adult asks the student to retell the complete summary independently.
Additional details about the technique can be found The Reading Remedy.
