Elaine, Thanks for your in-depth post! I actually think there are several things going on with this child. First, I do believe he's been taught that reading is an accuracy game, rather than a meaning game, based on what I know of the school system he attends. His accuracy is actually fairly good, though he struggles some with typical multi-syllable words. He self-corrects very little, which means he's not reading for meaning. That's also where I felt the monotone reading came in, in that he's not "making sense" of what he's reading, but jsut covering the words. 2) He doesn't necessarily talk in the same tone that he reads in, but he is obviuosly discouraged and defeated about reading, so there's very little enthusiasm involved in reading for him. 3) I've only worked with him 4 times and have not focused on his writing b/c I was asked to work specifically on reading comprehension. The interesting thing I've found is 4) that he does not appear to visualize when reading at all. It has been a real struggle for him to try visualizing b/c he's so convinced that there's a "right" answer, he's been unwilling to "create" a movie in his head to an unillustrated text. Jsut this past (4th) time did he begin to willingly create the movie in his head. We had to begin very slowly, based on Nanci Bell's work in "Visualizing and Verbalizing": start at the word level, then go to the phrase, then sentence level, gradually expanding what he was asked to visualize.
My main question was about his monotone expression and whether that could have any effect on his comprehension in and of itself. Obviously, that's hard to separate from his other difficulties. We have done some echo reading of dialogue (I wanted him to hear a model of expressive reading) and we've also played "trash basketball", with a basket earned for every time he reads a sentence or two with expression. That has greatly helped, but only during trash basketball! He needs multiple repetitions, I believe (we are working at his independent level at this point). Again, thanks for your insightful response. Any other suggesionts would be greatly appreciated! Heather Wall/ 3rd grade/ Georgia NBCT 2005 Literacy: Reading - Language Arts >>What do the rest of you think? I believe to really come up with possible suggestions, we need to know 1) how he speaks-- if he's flat and expressionless in oral language, 2) how he writes (if he uses punctuation in his writing-- if he does, good. You can then use that as a wedge/entree into using it in his reading. If not, then we need to get him to understand why punctuation is more than just something there to complain about when it's skipped, perhaps by using his own writing to demonstrate the importance of punctuation 3) does he understand that reading is about meaning? If not, you need to start there, perhaps by using his own writing. _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive.
