• The use of leveled literature.
• A basic knowledge of the speech sound system of English, which includes:

o        Direct decoding instruction;

o        Application of decoding to the reading of connected text;

o        Integration of reading and language arts activities through discussion, writing, and practice in reading simple, engaging stories.

• The alphabetic writing system of English
• The historical layers of English vocabulary:

o        Speech sounds (phonemes);

o        Syllables;

o        Meaningful parts of words (morphemes).

• Furthermore you will be implementing a five step sequence of phonetic instruction:

o        Step one: The five short vowels and all consonants spelled by single letters;

o        Step two: Consonants and consonant combinations spelled with two or three letters (bl-, cr-, -ng, -ld, etc.);

o        Step three: Vowels and vowel combinations spelled with two or three letters (ee, ar, oo, etc.);

o        Step four: the five long vowels;

o        Step five: Irregular spellings (-sion/-tion, ought/caught, etc.).

• You will also gain experience implementing comprehension instruction, which includes:

o        Developing reading fluency which involves assisting beginning readers as they move through word lists and controlled texts to simple literature and expository texts and matching readers' interests to reading materials by possessing reading materials that vary in subject and genre;

o        Providing guided oral reading with leveled literature;

o        Providing direct instruction in advanced decoding strategies (compound words, affixes, root words, contractions, and syllabic patterns);

o        Writing activities.

Ultimately, you will be implementing a "Sound" approach to teaching reading:
The Objective Route: "Visual" to "Sound" to "Meaning" - Two stops to "Meaning."

1. Clockwise perceptual path: “Sound” approach to teaching reading. The Objective Route: “Visual” to “Sound” to “Meaning.” Two stops to “Meaning.”

2. Counter clockwise perceptual path: “Whole-word, sight-word, meaning” approach to teaching reading. The Subjective Route: “Visual” to “Meaning,” sound appearing as an afterthought. One stop to “Meaning.” Early American Psychologist wrongly concluded that only one stop on such perceptual routes could be performed automatically, but that secondary stops had to be performed consciously. A form of this chart was published by Henry Suzzallo in 1913 in The Cyclopedia of Education, Volume 3.

This is a conflict diagram because a student trying to read from the “Meaning” and from the “Sound” at the same time will experience a conflict.

Note: The path between the “Visual” and “Sound” is shorter, but the path from “Visual” to “Sound” to “Meaning” requires two stops. The “Visual” to “Meaning” path only requires one stop, but students reading “from meaning” can not get to the “sound” until they first get the “Meaning.” To go directly (one stop) from the “Visual” to the “Meaning” always requires an element of guessing. Guessing is built into the “Meaning” method of teaching reading. The perceptual routes are established by initial reading instruction: “from the Sounds” or “from the Meaning.” They are difficult to change once established.

Please click here to view a powerpoint with more information on "The Reading Triangle."

Potter, D. (2003). Reading Triangle. Retrieved November 29, 2006, from www.donpotter.net/ed.htm.

Potter, D. (2005).  Reading Triangle Power Point.  Retrieved November 29, 2006, from www.donpotter.net/ed.htm.

In addition, you will be learning how to administer informal assessment as well as learning how to read the results and use them to guide your instruction.  Using informal assessment tools in a one-to-one situation will prepare you to use the tools successfully as a classroom teacher where you will administer these assessments to all of the students in your classroom.

You will also gain the experience of successfully using educational software with children.  This experience will prepare you to implement the use of technology in your classroom after becoming a teacher.

Finally, keep in mind that this supervised clinical experience that occurs in a reading clinic on the university campus can only be obtained here at Northern State University.  No other state university in South Dakota has a clinical experience of this magnitude as a part of their elementary education course work.  Thus, by choosing to obtain your Bachelor of Science in Education from Northern State University you are choosing to have an experience that no other Bachelor of Science major, in any other state institution in South Dakota, can claim they had while obtaining their degree.

5. What will I typically be doing during the tutoring session?

For one hour you will be doing a variety of instructional activities. The length of these activities will depend on the age of the child you tutor. Four of these specific components need to be implemented in order to assure that effective literacy instruction is being delivered to children.  Three of these components stem from evidence-based practices that most recently Sousa (2005) defined as two major processes—decoding and comprehension.  According to Sousa, phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency are elements of decoding whereas comprehension demands a development of vocabulary, interaction with text, and a superiorly trained teacher who has the skills to advance a child’s aptitude for understanding the text.

Fluency
The type of fluency instruction or practice implemented depends on the age of the child.  For example, a child who is reading short simplistic literature books should simply be asked to reread the book two times in order to provide them practice reading text with speed and accuracy as well as with proper expression.  This practice follows the National Institute for Literacy’s (2001) recommendation for maintaining and advancing children’s wording recognition, speed, accuracy, and fluency in addition to improving comprehension.  However, for the child who is reading lengthier textbooks a variation of the process of repeated reading (Samuals, 1979) should be implemented.  This entails having a teacher ask the child to reread a particular number of words (depending on their age and grade level the number of words are more or less).  For example, a fifth grade child should be required to read approximately 160 words per minute (wpm).  In order to obtain this level of fluency the teacher records the amount of time that is needed for a child to read a predetermined passage of words.  This process is completed three times.  If the child does not reach the wpm goal the process should be repeated at the beginning of the next instructional session with another passage.

Vocabulary Instruction
Approximately 15 to 20 minutes of each tutoring session is devoted to vocabulary instruction. This instruction is designed to increase students’ spelling abilities and to advance their reading skills and entails instructing in a speech-to-print format as described by Moats (2001).

Children do not automatically acquire the practice of sounding a word out if they are not taught how and provided with adequate practice.  Consequently they learn to depend on pictures or context to decode unfamiliar words.  Therefore it is pertinent that we teach the association between sound and letter(s) and provide children with plenty of practice constructing words with letters they know.

Our program begins with a restricted set of sound-symbol correlations (5 or 6 consonants such as b, f, h, j, k, m, p, t) and one or two short vowels such as a and i with the intention of having children build words very early in their reading instruction.  Throughout the semester more consonants and vowels are included with those that the child already knows.  Exercises that have children divide words into phonemes and blending them back to wholes are meant to reinforce the habit of sounding out a word. For example, children are frequently asked to change one sound in a word to make a new word (rat, mat, fit, hit, hid, had, mad).  Thus, maintaining a systematic, explicit decoding instructional environment that encourages blending single sounds into words.

During the next stage of reading instruction children are asked to decode simple words and predictable syllables inside of longer words.  Phonograms such as  ack, ake, uck, ell and word endings such as –ing, -ed, -est, began to be read as a single units rather than individual sounds.

When working with advanced students, the vocabulary instruction, to a large extent, involves teaching them the six types of syllables and how to use their knowledge of syllables to break words apart while reading and writing. This polysyllabic word study is designed and modeled after Greene’s (2004) research validated program LANGUAGE! and Archer, Gleason, and Vachon’s (2000) research validated program Rewards. Because the brain learns through patterns and numerous examples (Sousa, 2005), tutors are instructed to provide instruction on a syllable type, have the students accurately spell (and, in some cases read) monosyllabic words that contain this syllable structure, and then advance to using polysyllabic words that contain the same syllable type.

Very little time is spent teaching syllabication rules; instead, tutors provide an exposure to the orthographic patterns in our English language where flexibility is strongly stressed (Archer, Gleason, & Vachon, 2003; Cunningham, 1998; Shefelbine, 1990).   In other words, the students are taught to see the syllables in the words as they attempt to make correct pronunciations. If initial attempts at pronouncing a polysyllabic word do not match any word in their oral language, they are encouraged to change their division of the word so as to establish an alternate pronunciation that matches their oral vocabulary or, instead, a pronunciation that appears to make the most sense to them. 

In addition, as a means to reinforce syllabication, instruction may include morphemic analysis. During this time tutors should instruct using a “word family approach” when introducing a particular morpheme (Gunning, 2006). For example, the root aud means “hearing” and -ible is the Latin suffix meaning “capable of”; therefore, audible means “capable of being heard.” Following this study of the word audible, students begin to understand that the meaning of the root aud involves hearing; therefore, they become better at predicting the meanings of related words such as audience, auditorium, audition, audiology/audiologist, and audiometer.

Immediately following vocabulary instruction students are asked to write two sentences dictated to them containing words they have just studied.  For example for those students in the initial stage of learning to read the tutor may dictate /The rat hit a mad cat./ or for our older students the sentence may be /The child was audible for the audition in front of the audience in front of the auditorium./.  Each sentence should be read to the child two times before the child is allowed to begin writing.  If the child needs the sentence repeated after they begin writing the teacher may repeat the whole sentence but should not provide a particular word.  All of the dictation must be spoken at a normal speed. 

The purpose of this activity is to take a phonetic skill such as short vowel /a/ or the morpheme /aud/ that was taught out of context and put it back into context.  Furthermore, it reinforces spelling, punctuation, capitalization, grammar and handwriting as well as providing training in listening to, writing, and then reading useful vocabulary in complete sentences.  And, finally, this dictation opportunity allows the children to proofread since they will be asked to reread the sentence after they have completed the writing to check for errors. 

Guided Reading
In order to enhance comprehension with authentic text, instruction in the form of guided reading is completed. During this instructional practice (generally lasting 15 to 20 minutes), tutors use questions about the literature selection to guide and monitor their tutee’s progress. This question-and-answer instruction is designed to enhance students’ ability to respond to questions in a more advanced fashion and, consequently, improve their ability to learn as they read. For example, during guided reading, students are asked to look in the text to find answers to questions they could not answer after an initial reading. This process is designed to help students determine a purpose for their reading, focus their attention on what they want to learn, monitor their comprehension, evaluate content, and relate what they learned to what they already know.

This type of direct, explicit comprehension instruction is a form of scaffolding that provides some structure and supports students in their efforts to comprehend text (Biancarosa & Snow, 2004). The added instruction in the form of implicit and explicit text questions brings students to a level at which they are challenged, without being frustrated, by exposure to this new level of comprehension; Vygotsky (1978) referred to this as the zone of proximal development.

Writing
In order to maintain an ongoing record of the child’s knowledge of the English language as well as their spelling knowledge as applied in real context, time needs to be set aside to allow the child to write.  These writing samples should then be analyzed to determine the child’s spelling strengths and weaknesses and provide profiles of what they are doing well in their writing and what areas need to be addressed during vocabulary instruction.  Every child from the emergent to advance speller should be asked to write, which will be edited so as to not allow the child to continue misspelling particular words.  This writing time should be uncontrolled and unstructured or the teacher may ask the child to respond to the guided reading book or the read aloud book in whatever way they wish.  However, depending on the child, it may be entirely teacher-directed and teacher-structured, as in an assignment to summarize a particular reading selection.

Reading Aloud
A fifth component of literacy instruction consist of reading aloud from a book that is too hard for the child to read and understand but easy enough for them to listen to and comprehend.  Listening to and talking about books on a regular basis provides a child with demonstrations of the benefits and pleasures of reading. Story reading introduces a child to new words, new sentences, new places, and new ideas. Reading aloud to a child every day, and talking about books and stories, supports and extends oral language development and helps the child connect oral to written language.  Furthermore, discussions regarding characters or events, predicting events, creating a connection between events or characters in the story and events and people in the child’s life, as well as talking about words and their meanings, summarizing sections of the story, and evaluating the story is meant to develop an understanding and love of reading.

References

Bear, D., Invernizzi, M., Templeton, S., & Johnston, F. (2003). Words their way (3^rd Ed.). Washington D.C. :  Prentice Hall.

Brody, S. (2001). Teaching Reading Language, Letters & Thought (2^nd Ed.). Milford , New Hampshire : LARC Publishing.

Cunningham, P. (2000). Phonics They Use: Words for Reading and Writing (3^rd Ed.). Boston ; Allyn and Bacon.

Flynt, S., Cooter, R. (2004). Reading inventory for the classroom (5^th Ed.). Upper Saddle River , New Jersey : Pearson Prentice Hall.

Fry, E.B., Kress., J. E., Fountoukidis, D.L. (2000). The reading teacher’s book of lists (4^th Ed.). San Francisco , California : Jossy-Bass.

Ganske, K. (2000). Word journeys. New York , New York : The Gulliford Press.

Moats, L. (2000).  Speech to print. Baltimore , Maryland : Paul H. Brooks Publishing.

Samuels, J. (1979). The method of repeated readings. The Reading teacher, (403-408)

Shaywitz, S. (2003). Overcoming dyslexia. New York , New York : Alfred A. Knopf.

Sousa, D. (2005). How the brain learns to read. Thousand Oaks , California : Corwin Press.

Archer, A. L., Gleason, M. M., & Vachon, V. L. (2000). REWARDS Reading excellence: Word attack and rate development strategies.   Longmont , CO : Sopris West.

Archer, A. L., Gleason, M. M., & Vachon, V. L. (2003). Decoding and fluency: Foundation skills for struggling older readers. Learning Disability Quarterly, 26, 89-101.

Biancarosa, G., & Snow, C. (2004). Reading next: A vision for action and research in middle and high school literacy -- A report to  Carnegie Corporation of New York . Washington , DC : Alliance for Excellent Education.

Greene, J. F. (2004). Language! A literacy intervention curriculum. Longmont , CO : Sopris West.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind and society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge , MA : MIT.