This Message Center is organized and operated by David Vitale What is the goal of reading instruction? Raising reading comprehension levels and reading enjoyment, says Marie Carbo, Executive Director of the National Reading Styles Institute. How should this be assessed? By students’ ability to understand increasingly difficult, high-interest material; by the number of books students take out of the library voluntarily; by the amount of time children voluntarily discuss, recommend, and exchange books with classmates; and by the amount of voluntary reading done by children in their classrooms, the library, and at home. Skills should be taught, says Carbo, but “the focus should be on reading comprehension and enjoyment.”

I think that reading enjoyment should be embedded into the goal of building lovers of learning. As the article suggests, not everyone will read for the same purpose and learning style will often determine how to measure a reader's achievement.

Carbo believes that these key strategies produce the greatest gains in students’ reading achievement:

• Identify students’ reading-style strengths. She’s referring to analytic (part to whole) or global (whole to part)

• Match reading methods, materials, and strategies with those strengths.

• Provide sufficient modeling of reading methods and continually stretch students into higher-level reading materials using well-written, high-interest texts.

• Maximize the amount of time students read for pleasure, deeply engaged in what they are reading.

Carbo also identifies four ineffective reading practices; these “make reading “unnecessarily difficult for students and reduce reading for pleasure,” she says:

• Too many worksheets and skill sheets; there is little to no research supporting their use, she says.

• Too many reading materials in which students have no interest. Sixth graders, for example, love reading scary books and stories; comics; cartoons; magazines about popular culture; books and magazines about sports, cars, and trucks; series books; funny books, and books about animals.

• Too much emphasis on end-of-year reading tests with daily testing on minuscule, usually unnecessary reading skills. “This endless testing and test practice, the continual fear of failure, and the resulting high levels of stress all have a negative effect on learning,” says Carbo. “While small amounts of stress may motivate some people, brain research tells us that large doses of stress cause fear, decrease motivation, make learning difficult, and perhaps worst of all, reduce the ability to think and perform at high levels.”

• Too much emphasis on skills teaching. “Few of the hundreds of skills and sub-skills have been validated as being necessary for children to become good readers,” says Carbo. “In fact, at-risk readers who have made great leaps in reading ability have spent most of their time reading books and short stories they enjoy with the aid of modeling methods, with small amounts of time spent on a few important reading skills.”

Citation:“Match the Style of Instruction to the Style of Reading” by Marie Carbo in Phi Delta Kappan, January 2009 (Vol. 90, #5, p. 373-378)

posted February 3, 2009 « back to Message Center home

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