Most children who rely on schooling to learn to read and who receive good reading instruction do, in fact, become successful, lifelong readers. However, there are some children for whom good instruction is necessary--but not enough.

There are three stumbling blocks that are most likely to throw children off course on the journey to skilled reading:

These three can combine to decrease children's motivation for learning how to read.

All over the United States, countless interventions strive to help children who are doing poorly in reading. In tutoring sessions, special education classes, free book programs, family literacy projects, and remedial instruction, there are educators, paraprofessionals, and volunteers who are trying to help struggling children to catch up.

Provided that they are designed to help children learn what they need to learn, programs with vastly different approaches show positive results. For this reason, a wide array of interventions are featured in this chapter, including tutoring, "pull-out" remediation programs, and dramatic school restructuring. Reading is an accomplishment that depends not just on discrete skills, but on a wide range of developmental supports and cognitive achievements. Mending an early language link is not by itself likely to have any effect on word reading if other connections in the net are frayed. Because reading is such a complex activity, children need an environment offering rich support and varied learning opportunities for every successive stage of their literacy development.

Some children are far more likely than others to have difficulties in learning to read. This may seem a simple and obvious fact. Yet it is a fact that is overlooked far too often.

If our goal is to ensure that all children in America can read, then we must target prevention efforts to the children who we know will need them the most. We must do this as early as possible--before children fail in school, before they are labeled, and before costly remediation is necessary.

In a school that produces large numbers of children who cannot read at grade level, year after year, it is not necessary to assess children individually. We already know that children who attend this school are being placed at risk for reading difficulties. In these cases, teachers and principals should probably consider addressing the problem with system-wide restructuring and change, rather than invest in a costly child-by-child remediation process. Good teaching and a good classroom reading program can bring most students up to or near grade level during the primary grades. But sustaining this accomplishment is difficult when a large percentage of a school's students are failing.

Central to this restructuring is the need for effective reading instruction. A large number of students, who should be capable of reading ably given adequate instruction, are not doing so, suggesting that the instruction available is not appropriate. If the instruction provided by the school is ineffective or insufficient, many children will have difficulty learning to read (unless additional instruction is provided in the home or elsewhere). Children whose reading difficulties arise when the design of regular classroom curriculum, or its delivery, is flawed are sometimes termed curriculum casualties.

Hispanic students in the United States are at especially high risk. Despite progress over the past 15 to 20 years, they are about twice as likely as non-Hispanic whites to read well below average for their age. Many of these children also have parents who are poorly educated, come from low-income families, live in low-income communities, and attend low-achieving schools. With multiple risk factors in place, we can predict that, without excellent instruction, large numbers of these children will be at risk for reading difficulties.

Despite various controversies, considerable evidence suggests that limited or non-English-speaking language learners are generally more likely to become betters readers of English when they receive initial instruction in their native language.

Spoken language must come before written language; it is extremely hard to read a language that still is incomprehensible to the ear. Some language-minority children arrive at school with no proficiency in English, but speaking a different language for which there are instructional guides, learning materials, and locally available proficient teachers. These children should be taught the basics of reading in their native language while acquiring oral proficiency in English, and they should be subsequently taught to extend their first language literary skills to reading in English.

Other language-minority children will arrive at school with no proficiency in English and speak a language for which the above conditions cannot be met--and for which there are insufficient numbers of children to justify the development of the local capacity to meet such conditions. In this case, the initial instructional priority should be developing the children's oral proficiency in English. Print materials may be used to support the development of English language skills. But formal reading instructions in English should be postponed until an adequate level of oral proficiency in English has been achieved. Ensuring this proficiency will require extremely rich and well-adapted oral language environments. In general, non-English speakers in the United States are highly motivated to learn English, but they still require an adequate amount of time and exposure to well-structured input from native speakers to do so.

Differences between the dialect children speak at home and the dialect taught at school may contribute to difficulties in learning to read. In the United States, some teachers, administrators, and policy makers view dialect differences not as regional variations, but as incorrect English. Some teachers develop low expectations for these students. Under these conditions, children are being placed at risk because of their unfamiliarity with standard English dialect.

As discussed in the previous two chapters, developing children's awareness of the sounds of words--their phonemic awareness--is a critical step toward helping them learn to read. However, what they need more specifically is an appreciation of the phonemes or sounds of words that are presumed in how the words are spelled. This is especially hard for dialect-speaking children. A teacher pointing out the "d" sound in the words "sold" or "find" can befuddle the African American child who pronounces these words "sol" and "fine." A child who pronounces the words "deaf" and "death" in the same way is likely to be confused if the teacher uses these words in a lesson on contrasting final consonants. However, these kinds of confusions in phonemic awareness and reading instruction can largely be avoided by making teachers more aware of dialect differences. A teacher who is sufficiently knowledgeable and sensitive about dialect will prepare materials and lessons that are consistent with the phonology, syntax, and vocabulary of the children's dialect.

Poverty undeniably poses numerous threats to children's educational prospects. Children in low-income families tend to have uneducated parents, lack adequate nutrition, live in poor communities, and attend substandard schools. All of these factors can be detrimental to reading.

However, all else being equal, coming from a low-income family, in and of itself, does not greatly increase a child's risk for learning to read, provided they are given the instruction and support they need. Therefore, poverty in individual families should not be used exclusively as an identifier for children at risk. It is more effective to identify children who come from families with low income status and attend a school with large numbers of poor students.

Schools with kindergartners who are poorly prepared in language and literacy skills must have programs that are better than or at least equivalent to the programs found in schools with well-prepared kindergartners. In order to provide such reading programs, schools with underprepared students need extra funding. To be effective, the extra funding should be used for methods with previously established success, and should be coupled with smaller student-

teacher ratios, capable, experienced teachers and specialists, and a sufficient quantity of high-quality books and other materials.

Because of their regular contact with children during early childhood, pediatricians, and other health care and human service professionals have a responsibility to screen children for risk factors that could lead to reading difficulties. As early in the child's life as possible, health care professionals should identify problems, such as mental retardation, hearing impairment, early language impairment, and delays in expressive and receptive language milestones, as well as family histories of reading problems that could be passed on to children. In cases of hearing impairment, early identification and intervention is especially important and can make all the difference in whether or not a child becomes a successful reader.

Beyond routine screening, health care professionals have a wonderful opportunity to promote reading. At routine visits, they can help guide parents and encourage children's literacy development. In one program, volunteers in doctors' waiting rooms demonstrate for parents book-sharing and book-reading techniques, doctors prescribe parents to read books to their children, and books are given to parents with low incomes. Parents also receive information on the importance of reading and having books in the home. 0i

Because they are one of the few professionals in contact with very young children, pediatricians, nurses, and other health care practitioners are in the best position to detect problems at routine checkups from infancy through preschool years. Day care and preschool settings also offer an important opportunity for early identification of the following kinds of risk:

Within the normal range, IQ is moderately associated with future reading ability. But severe cognitive deficits are usually associated with very low, if any, reading achievement.

It has been well documented that children with hearing impairments are at risk of future reading difficulties. Although hard-of-hearing children tend to do better than deaf children, they are still at risk, even if they have good speaking abilities.

Children acquire language at tremendously variable rates during the first four years of life. Yet some children are clearly behind by age two or three. This is an important signal. Delayed language development can be the first warning of a pervasive developmental disability, hearing impairment, or neurological problem. Any of these conditions puts a child at risk of future reading difficulties.

Often an evaluation by a speech-language professional reveals that these children have early language impairment. About 40 to 75 percent of preschoolers with such an impairment develop reading difficulties later--often along with other academic problems.

Children's development of language during preschool years is strongly related to how well they will later learn to read. An infant's achievement of "expressive" language milestones appears to have a particularly strong link to later reading achievement. Assessment of these milestones is part of regular well-baby visits and can be used to identify children at risk.

A child whose parents had trouble learning to read is not destined to failure. But such children face a substantially greater risk of reading problems. Once a child is having reading difficulties in school, pediatricians or educators often discover that someone else in the family has reading difficulties. It is wise for pediatricians to ask the parents of young children whether they had difficulty learning to read and, if so, to encourage them to lend extra enthusiasm to books and reading from the start--and to pay extra attention to signs of difficulty.

Most studies that examine the quality of preschools use broad-gauged tools that include language and literacy as only one small portion of the assessment. Such studies have found that it is precisely on measures of the language environment that preschool programs serving poor children scored in the inadequate range.

Strong language and literacy environments are especially effective for very young children who need an extra boost to promote their later success in reading. It is especially important for children who live in low-income communities and are slated to attend elementary schools with a poor track record in reading. Well-designed programs are also needed for individuals with specific difficulties, whether they are general cognitive ones, hearing impairments, or early language impairments. Children whose parents have a history of reading problems will also profit from well-designed language and literacy environments.

Time and again, research has confirmed that

Because of the enormous influence of family on a child's school success, many family literacy interventions have arisen in recent years. These programs range vastly in intensity and type. But what most of them have in common is an effort to reach out to parents and caregivers with home visits from a parent educator, information on child development, and guidance on how to get children ready for kindergarten. In many family literacy programs, screening is available to determine if children have developmental delays.

Some family literacy programs reach out to parents even before their children are born, during the pregnancy. Other programs merely provide books to preschoolers, along with parent guidance on how to read effectively to children. Still other programs try to give parents themselves literacy training, as well as their children. Research on family literacy programs suggests that they have small but positive effects on school readiness, including small positive improvements in the reading materials available in children's homes, as well as improved parent expectations for their children's academic success.

It is important to note that, for children at risk of reading difficulties, high-quality experiences during preschool years cannot be seen as a way to prevent all reading difficulties. If a child has an enriched early childhood environment but attends a low-achieving elementary school with ineffective teaching, the child remains at risk. Indeed, the positive experiences of the early years will be muted if not followed by good instruction. Quality preschool followed up with high-quality primary education will reduce the number of cases of reading failure. There is, however, a small percentage of children who will have reading failure and for whom known interventions have not been successful.

To the extent that a child falls behind his or her peers in reading, that child is at risk of never reaching adequate literacy levels. 0i Any child who is falling behind should be able to get immediate and appropriate assistance. No assumptions about or labeling of the cause of the problem should be necessary. Unfortunately, under current funding systems, millions of children can get help only if they are classified as learning disabled or impaired in various ways.

If children are having difficulty in first grade reading achievement, their classrooms should be examined to see if they need improvement. If their classroom instruction is appropriate but they are having difficulty in reading achievement, they should immediately receive supplementary reading assistance with one-on-one tutoring by a well-qualified reading instructor. In order to be effective, tutoring sessions should be integrated with what the child is learning and doing in class.

Schools that lack or have abandoned reading specialist positions must
reexamine their needs for specialists and provide the functional equivalent of such well-trained staff members. Reading specialists and other specialist roles need to be defined so that there is two-way communication between specialists and classroom teachers about the needs of all children at risk of and experiencing reading difficulties. Coordination is needed at the instructional level, so that children are taught with methodologies that are not fragmented. Schools that have reading specialists as well as special educators need to coordinate these roles. Schools need to ensure that all the specialists engaged in child study or individualized educational program (IEP) meetings for special education placement, early childhood intervention, out-of-classroom interventions, and classroom support are well informed about research in reading development and the prevention of reading difficulties.

Much of this book has been devoted to parents, teachers, day care workers, tutors, and other professionals who work with children every day. Yet enormous power is also in the hands of school superintendents, managers, elected officials, and other policy makers--from the grassroots level to the national stage--who decide how our children are educated, where resources go, and which programs receive funding. If we are to succeed in ensuring that all children can read, then all parts of society must support and create the necessary conditions.

How effective is volunteer tutoring?

How can it be used most effectively?

Good volunteer programs must include comprehensive screening procedures for selecting volunteers, professional training of tutors, and excellent supervision of their ongoing work with children. Volunteers are particularly helpful when they spend their time reading to children, giving children supported practice in oral reading, and allowing opportunities for enriching conversation. However, volunteers should not be used to provide primary or remedial instruction to children. Nor should they be expected to deal effectively with children who have serious reading problems. Volunteer tutors can provide very valuable practice and motivational support for children learning to read.

Children who do well in reading from the beginning rarely stumble later on. Those who have difficulty in the primary grades tend to remain behind their classmates as the years go by--even though they receive remediation. This fact, reconfirmed again and again, is a painful testimony to the importance of addressing reading difficulties as early as possible in a child's life. As important as it is to hold out hope for every struggling reader in our middle and high schools, there is no substitute for an all-out effort to ensure that all of our children start out right, so that they never have to experience the consequences of failure and frustration that are so prevalent in our schools.