The Effective Teacher of Reading: Considering the “What” and “How” of Instruction (original) (raw)
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Teachers� Role in Fostering Reading Skill: Effective and Successful Reading
i-manager’s Journal on English Language Teaching, 2011
Reading bestows enjoyment and enlightenment. It unlocks the unknown. It is a complex cognitive activity that is indispensable for the kind of knowledge society. So the students of today's world must know how to learn from reading and to enter the present literate society. One who reads can lead others to light. People who read can be free because reading banishes ignorance and superstition. Reading has the power to revolutionize everyone's ways of thinking and living. It makes everyone think critically and creatively. Teachers must emphasize all kinds of reading, especially critical reading which is not just reading on the lines but it deals with reading between and beyond the lines. A critical reader challenges the author's assumptions, inferences, and conclusions, and judges the accuracy, reliability, quality and value of what he reads on the basis of sound criteria or standards developed through previous experiences. This kind of reading paves clear path for students to acquire better comprehensive ability through SQ3R techniques, computer multimedia and other activities such as skimming and scanning. Although there are ways and means to acquire reading skill, there are a few factors which affect it severely. Teachers must be careful in avoiding these hindrances and make their wards' reading easy, effective and successful. Teachers are the prime source for students in cultivating their reading habit. Their advice and encouragement will help the students move a step further in developing their attitude towards reading. Teachers can teach phonetics to readers of initial stage and help them pronounce the sounds of letters and words properly. They should also emphasize writing task in the primary grade as it is directly associated with reading programme. They can teach them syllabication to recognize new words. Special assistance may be given to students with regard to the selection of materials for reading based on their age, time and capacity and determine their reading levels. They must realize that they have to play major role in encouraging and engaging the students to become voracious readers.
* 2000.Hoffman.Pearson RRQ-35-1-.ReadingTeacherEducation.pdf
THE PREPARATIONof teachers in the area of reading education is a primary concern of those who seek to improve reading achievement in schools. The challenges of the next millennium will make teacher preparation even more of an issue. Changes in the nature of literacy itself, changes in the diversity of our student population, and changes in the occupational characteristics of teaching are part of the near future. Research in the area of teacher preparation has been limited. We summarize the research in teacher preparation and argue that a great deal is known about the training of teachers but much less about the teaching of teachers. It is the latter that must occupy our attention if we are to prepare future teachers for the changing landscape of reading education. We review research in the areas of training and teaching of teachers and point toward promising practices in the area of teaching teachers. These promising practices emphasize such features as inquiry and reflection and we argue that there are political forces that privilege a training model for the preparation of teachers and that the emphasis on teaching teachers will be difficult. We conclude with recommendations for a research agenda in reading teacher education that is based on our analysis of the status quo.
Method and Achievement in Early Reading
1974
This paper discusses the results of a literature study concerning the investigation of models of reading and theories of learning to read, method comparison research, and research on teacher effectiveness. It relates the findings of these studies to a study of teaching behavior in the process of teaching children to read. This latter study included 31 teachers and 671 first grade pupils, selected according to age, school career, reading ability, and completeness of research data. From each teacher 35 lessons were observed during the first six months of reading instruction in the first grade. The observation scale used for studying the task behavior resulting from the task demands of the method consisted of 44 categories (32 tasks, of which six had three forms-auditory, visual, and auditory and visual). The results indicated that teachers can be separated into groups on the basis of their task setting behaviors, that a relationship exists between teaching styles and the achievement of pupils, and that such relationship generally Lo:; not appear to be different among groups of pupils with different initial characteristics. Seven tables involved in the study are included.
Reading and Writing, 2009
Recent studies of elementary teachers' knowledge about reading have been built on the premise that teachers need thorough knowledge about language and reading processes, but these studies have provided only limited evidence that teachers' performance on tests of such knowledge contributes to their students' reading achievement. The present study was designed to examine the contribution of first-through third-grade teachers' knowledge about early reading to their students' improvement on tests of word analysis and reading comprehension, controlling for socio-demographic characteristics of students, their prior reading achievement, and teachers' educational attainment, professional experiences, and socio-demographic characteristics. Preliminary analyses indicated that the test of teachers' knowledge had adequate psychometric characteristics. However, performance on this measure of teachers' knowledge did not significantly explain students' improvement on the two reading subtests. The complexity of the factors that influence teachers' knowledge acquisition and the context in which the study was carried out offer possible explanations for these results. In addition, teachers' content knowledge about reading might not be closely associated with the practices they use in reading instruction, and therefore might not be significantly related to their students' improvement in reading over a year.