Case Study: Elizabeth, Year 7, Reading difficulty Elizabeth was in year 7 when I first met her, and had been receiving support for a reading difficulty for all her school life. She was overweight, had an un-kept appearance, bad BO, and was shunned by her peers. In her peers eyes she was so 'special' she was almost an 'untouchable'. She was socially isolated, shy and introverted. She presented with a reading problem. She couldn't read very well. Her test scores put her three years behind her age peers. She couldn't read aloud without making a huge number of false predictions (sensible miscues mainly) which she would try to correct, butpoorly. This made her reading quite appalling to listen to. Adding to, or causing her problem was her parents' anxiety about her reading and their continuance of daily reading aloud at home. Elizabeth was, of course, very anxious about her reading too, and desperately wanted to improve. She was reading 'special' books which were 'high interest and low reading age'. They were not the cause of the oral difficulty as the language in them was quite natural. I quickly realised that her poor performance as an oral reader had to change or stop because it was damaging her self concept and her progress. However, her habits were so entrenched that she found it impossible to change. I explored her understanding about what she was expecting of herself as a reader, and was able to debunk some of her beliefs. The major problem was her embarrassment at making mistakes when she read orally. I tried to convince her that it was normal to make 'mistakes', that everyone did it but found ways to avoid showing others. I began to devise ways to get her reading silently, and taught her how to solve any problems she came across by using the context and 'guessing', or reading past unknown words, leaving them out or returning to 'guess' them when she had more information. We did short silent readings and followed with retellings, we tried reading instructions for various tasks, and I soon began to realise that she was understanding far more during silent reading than anyone suspected. Considering her age (12 years) and facing High School in 12 months time I decided that she had to somehow begin reading more suitable literature, and she had to do it silently. I advised her parents to stop hearing her read daily but to facilitate her silent novel reading by putting a lamp in her room and encouraging her to go there to read. I stopped her going to special classes for Reading (which was really tuition in phonics and spelling). Her classroom teacher cooperated in a plan to 'normalise' her which meant that she received no special assistance and was treated like every other student. The librarian offered to keep an eye on her book selection and to guide her into suitable books for a girl of her age. I worked on her first novel with her, reading to her at first, and then getting her to finish the page silently. Then we read chapters in turn, discussing what was happening in the stories and setting up predictions about what might be going to happen next. Within a few weeks she had finished two novels and was visibly brighter. A month later she was consuming novels at a rapid rate on her own, and her teacher had highlighted her progress to the class. Within six months she had read more novels than anyone else in her class that year, and amazed everyone by reading the most challenging books and discussing them at length. Her BO has vanished (her mother had seen to this), and her peers were no longer actively shunning her. Elizabeth had come out of her shell, so to speak, was a library monitor, and had begun to interact more normally with her peers. The next year she enrolled at a High School in a different district which allowed her to get a completely new start away from her old peers, without any stigma from her 'special' past. At this point I lost contact
with the family but I was happy with her progress up to that point and I'm confident that she would continue to improve.
Case study: Susan, Year 2, Reading My seven year old daughter was proud of the new novel she had brought home from school and wanted to read it to me. When I saw that it was "Charlotte's Web" I thought that it was too hard for her but she was so motivated to show it off, so I listened and watched. I was a Uni student at the time and remember being horrified at what was happening. It seemed that what she was saying had little to do with what was written on the page. It was vaguely similar, but full of miscues. She took each sentence and rearranged it in her own words, swapping whole phrases around and sometimes running one sentence into another with a suitable joining word inserted for convenience. It sounded great! But it was frightening to watch! Because she was so proud of her ability to 'read' this book (which her teacher had just read to the class) I didn't want to let her know of my concerns so I just accepted it and told her how I was pleased that she was reading such an interesting book (or something like that). I then checked on her understanding of the story and of course she knew the whole book in every detail. The next day I asked my university lecturer what to do about my daughter's reading 'problem'. He suggested that I continue to monitor her understanding of the story and this is what I did. Thankfully I didn't intervene and soon she was reading another less challenging novel quite accurately. Her reading just developed so well during this period that I have thanked my lucky stars ever since that I didn't put her off or dent her confidence by intervening in any way. Doing nothing was best! Susan was in control of her own learning!
