(Another great post from our reading specialist, Dr. Diana Sharp)
Dear Dr. Sharp
When my son started first grade, he was reading words just as well as the other kids. But his reading never took off, and he ended the year reading below grade level. Other kids with the same teacher did fine. What made my son different?
It’s possible that your son’s difficulties have less to do with his basic reading skills than with something researchers call reading temperament.
Reading temperament is the way that children naturally react to the challenges they face in learning to read. Some children are natural risk-takers: they seek out “harder” books on their own and love to read aloud with expression. Other children avoid risks and become easily frustrated. They may mumble when reading aloud because they don’t want to take the chance of reading a word incorrectly.
When it comes to predicting a child’s success with early reading, most teachers these days are very knowledgeable about the importance of basic word-reading skills like phonemic awareness and alphabetic knowledge, as well as oral language skills like vocabulary. But a recent article in The Reading Teacher
http://www.reading.org/Publish.aspx?page=/publications/journals/rt/v62/i5/index.html&mode=redirect
stresses that personality traits like reading temperament are also important. By themselves, skills and test scores don’t tell the whole story about which children are successful in beginning reading and which ones aren’t.
Anxiety and risk aversion aren’t the only kind of reading temperaments that can cause problems for early readers. Children with impulsive temperaments can also find it difficult to exert the kind of self-control it takes to master the English code. Keep in mind that reading is likely the most difficult mental challenge your child has ever faced up to this point!
The good news is that researchers and teachers are becoming more aware that it’s important to help children develop the social and emotional skills they need for learning to read as well as phonics and language skills. And here’s where new technologies like ItzaBitza might also play an important role.
How? By providing a way for children who are risk-averse or impulsive to spend successful time with print while they gain confidence in their ability to read. ItzaBitza text is carefully leveled, so that the length and difficulty of the sentences starts out short and gradually increases. And the universal word help means that children never have to struggle with a word. Children can also have a fun and meaningful reading experience by skipping around in the game and reading the different sections in any order they choose. You can also do that with some information books, but don’t try it with a story!
The important thing when using something like ItzaBitza to help a struggling reader is to make sure that you know why you’re using it. It’s not meant to provide a way that this child can read and live without books. It’s to help the child overcome some obstacles that can keep him from having fun first experiences with books and can promote a negative attitude toward reading. If a child’s obstacles include a reading temperament that makes it difficult to face the hard work of reading sentences, then I’m all for trying something besides books just until the child has the reading confidence he needs to be successful.
Don’t forget that what every child needs to become a skilled reader is lots of time spent reading, and so even if you don’t start with books, you’ve got to entice every child into books. There simply isn’t enough child-appropriate print in any other form to supply the amount of reading every child needs.
With all this mind, please talk to your son’s teacher when school starts to find out more about what held him back last year and what might help him overcome those obstacles this year. Check out that article I mentioned from The Reading Teacher – it’s got lots of ideas for teachers on how to deal with children who have different reading personalities, and it uses some great examples from an effective second grade classroom. Here’s the full reference:
McTigue, E. M., Washburn, E. K., & Liew, J. (2009). Academic resilience and reading: Building successful readers. The Reading Teacher, 62(5), 422-432.
http://www.reading.org/Publish.aspx?page=/publications/journals/rt/v62/i5/index.html&mode=redirect
