All throughout high school I was a struggling reader. I absolutely hated reading, especially aloud. I had—and still have—trouble decoding (sounding out) text. The more I read, however, the better I became at reading—but not necessarily decoding. To this day, when I come across an unfamiliar word, I can’t sound it out. So I go to an online dictionary where I can hear a pronunciation of the word, listen to it about ten times, say it about twenty, and hope it sticks. I see words chunks that I’ve memorized, not individual letters that comprise a word. But it’s taken me years of practice until I became a proficient reader. I didn’t really start reading until I was 21, after all.
Beers offers what good readers do:
• They recognize that reading is done for a purpose, to get meaning, and that this involves the reader actively participating.
• They use a variety of comprehension strategies such as predicting, summarizing, questioning and visualizing the text.
• They make inferences about the text.
• They use prior knowledge about their lives and their world to inform their understanding of a text.
• They monitor their understanding of a text, identify what is challenging, and have strategies to improve their understanding.
• They evaluate their enjoyment of a text and why it did or did not appeal to them.
• They know many vocabulary words and how to use the context, word parts, and roots to help understand new words.
• They recognize most words automatically, read fluently, vary their reading rate, and “hear” the text as they read.
I was never able to engage in these reading strategies until I developed that latter skill: recognizing words automatically. I hope that as a teacher, I hope I can recognize why my students are having difficulty reading as opposed to just saying, “That kid can’t read.” I think if someone helped me realized that I had trouble decoding words before I graduated high school, I think I would have become a reader long ago.
Wow. What a blessing to have had this experience, Blake. Sometimes I think that we look at these experiences as somehow being deficits, but I am convinced that they are what make us more conscious of our students and more able to recognize their struggles. My husband was the same type of student and now he does crosswords, word games on his phone and more to improve his vocabulary. He still has difficulty sounding words out when they are unfamiliar--which is common in many male struggling readers, interestingly enough. I wonder if it something in the way the brain attends to the words, rather than just a lack of a phonics background?
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