Diagnostic procedures to determine reading problems among year five pupils includes reading evaluation with the help of teachers with a major focus on assessing whether reading difficulties entailed fluency or comprehension. With the help of teachers, signals on the way the children spoke, the way they listened and how they responded were observed with the aim of assessing the nature of the reading difficulties. Among the factors considered at the diagnostic phase included: pupils approach to reading with emphasis on how pupils sounded out words, the way they spelled out words that were not memorized and the word type errors they made in the course of reading the chosen paragraph.
Discussion with teachers also played a key role in identifying in identifying reading problems among year five pupils sampled out for the study. Discussions with teachers revealed that listening comprehension is at a higher level than reading hence the need for interventions to ensure children develop competence in their reading. Furthermore, teachers stress the fact that children with limited reading comprehension have a slower rate of reading, misuse function words and have poor timing in reading tasks. Since such difficulties by the pupils puts a lot of work pressure on teachers, it is imperative that implementation strategies be designed to improve the situation.
Implementation process incorporated various strategies including the need for teacher demonstration modeling, following up on independent practice while also encouraging pupils to engage themselves in discussions as a way of improving their reading skills. Directed reading activities during class sessions are critical since they enhance ways through which the pupils improve their skills. However, the major intervention sought was the need to rely on reading cues as the best ways of understanding difficulties and trying to improve the situation. Children were exposed to techniques that focused on assessing how they made meaning from texts and how they relayed connections with the words. Such strategy was basically focused on improving ways through which the pupils made sense from texts.
Additionally, the structure of the text was also considered to trigger pupils to identify whether actual words in their sentences made sense. Together with teachers, we assessed pupils’ ability to put together languages into sentences, phrases, and paragraphs. Lastly, the focus was also placed on visual analysis by breaking words into letters, syllables, and sounds with the aim of making the pupils have a knowledge of how letters are formed. The visual cues, therefore, involved pupils sounding out of words as a way of improving reading comprehension.
Reading cues strategies, therefore, focused on assessing rhyme production, the way children segment sounds, the way they blend their words, and how they operate on the spoken words. However, to successfully intervene on reading difficulties, pupils also need to be exposed to reading guides where they encounter printed words and go through a process of sequentially decoding the words and then trying to make letter sound conversions. Use of reading guides as an implementation option is also important since they make it possible for children to recognize and remember letters and also to differentiate spelling patterns of words.
References
Joseph, L. (2015). Best practices in planning interventions for students with reading problems. New York: WETA.
