"The core issue is the effectiveness of instruction and its design."

Teaching the Reluctant Reader (Page 1)

Copyright of Michael Maloney,M.A.
Teach Your Children Well Inc.
michael.maloney2@sympatico.ca
www.teachyourchildrenwell.ca

In families with several children, parents often find that some children learn to read without much instruction or effort while others struggle and seem almost unteachable. Despite numerous attempts and after several different programs, these children still do not have adequate reading skills. These children are often considered to be reluctant readers.
What are the differences between these students and their voraciously reading peers or siblings? More importantly, as the parent responsible to teach such a child, what can be done to eliminate the problem?
The major difference is that the reluctant reader needs more and better instruction and more carefully monitored practice to attain the same level of skill as the faster learning reader. The core issue is the effectiveness of instruction and its design.
The first set of tasks to be learned by any beginning reader is to learn to quickly and accurately decode the script on the written page. There is a second and equally important set of tasks to then make sense of what has been read. The issue of reading comprehension is beyond the scope of this article. Until the child can break the code fluently, decoding has to be the primary concern when teaching children to read. Most reluctant readers suffer from an inability to decode quickly and easily.

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