Chapter 2

EDU572
Diagnostic Teaching of Reading by Barbara J Walker
Chapter 2-The Reading Event
This chapter is divided into five different sections, the task, the text, the reader, the technique and the context.
The task is what the student needs to complete during reading. Sometimes the student will need to read aloud and other times they will read silently. Usually they will then have to answer questions, sometimes in writing and other times orally. The questions can be direct questions that require an answer directly from the text or questions that are open-ended or higher level questions that require the student to have a deeper processing of the text. Other reading times can be for retelling the story according to what they think is important in the events. Most importantly we need to have the students make connections with what they are reading to get a more through meaning out of it with their own interpretations. I have had experience with questions that follow the logical sequence of the story, but questions can also be random with no relationship between responses. I feel that this kind of questioning would not be helpful to students especially ones that are struggling. They need to have connections to help understand the reading.
The text is an important variable in reading. If the content is more difficult, the example given is physics, more readers will struggle because they don’t have the background knowledge that is needed to understand. In readings at the student’s instructional level, this is where discussing vocabulary words in the text help them. Letting the student scan the reading ahead of time to look for unfamiliar words before starting can help them also. The different types of text like narrative readings or factual works can affect the success of the reader. Narratives have problems and solutions, or real life situations making them easier to read, where the expository readings need a different kind of reading strategy. Teaching the students to stop and ask questions during the reading help them to understand the text. At the lower level a repetitive reading book is helpful because the words can be predicted throughout the entire book with pictures clues for the changing word.
The reader themselves is another variable. Every chance should be taken to expand every student’s vocabulary. The bigger their vocabulary is, the more the student is going to understand. Even the younger students can advance just by hearing and learning about more words. The reader needs to be engaged in the reading. They have to be interested in what they are reading, but more importantly they have to see themselves as a reader and value the experience. Having the student seeing people read and enjoying it as well as encouraging reading in their home is very helpful. Helping the students keep a positive attitude about reading is the key to helping struggling readers. We need to keep them from becoming negative about reading.
In addition to the techniques discussed about the reader, we can also use K-W-L and O-W-L (observe, want to know, and learned) with expository texts and story mapping with narratives. Predicting, and monitoring the text for making more predictions is a good strategy to teach. All of these techniques will help the struggling reader to be successful. I did not understand the value of simultaneous focus in reading.
The place where instruction takes place is the situational context. In this section the most valuable piece of knowledge that I got from this was the waiting time. The author says that it is better to let the reader finish the sentence with mistakes and try to figure out that mistake at the end then to give them a prompt to sound out the word, or simply give them the word they are struggling over. I am going to try to not interrupt at the point of error now. I realize that I usually do in some manner. I will also make sure that encourage lot of students discussion with open ended questions and less literal.