Children who experience early reading difficulties in school tend to remain poor readers throughout their school years. By fourth grade children with reading difficulties may be working more than two years behind their classmates and the gap widening. Intervention at the very beginning of literacy acquisition holds promise for helping large numbers of children to avoid this pattern of failure. It is crucial, therefore, to learn as much as possible about how classrooms teachers and reading teachers can best help high-risk students early on, before the pattern of failure is firmly established. The major purpose of this study has been to learn more about how and when children receiving an early intervention transfer their new knowledge to use in their regular classrooms. Do they utilize the skills they are learning in the one-to-one tutoring situation when they return to the classroom? Does participation in the intervention give students increased access to classroom literacy? An additional purpose has been to probe promising practices for supporting high-risk beginning readers in the transition from intervention back to the classroom. The study employs qualitative research methods. It monitors the progress of four children involved in an early intervention program, both in the intervention and in the first grade classroom. Data collected over an eight-month period are drawn from participant observation, audio and video taping of representative portions of the classroom reading program, teacher and student interviews, notes and reflections, and student assessments. The study concludes that significant progress in nurturing new strategies for reading appears to be closely linked to the number and variety of opportunities in the classroom to practice and reinforce strategies learned during the intervention. The classroom teacher's encouragement to explore new strategies, the teacher's view of reading as a meaningful and strategic problem solving process, the teacher's clear expectations and thorough instruction in the care and use of the abundant resources at the students' disposal, and the teacher's encouragement of risk taking by students also played a significant role in reinforcing what the children were learning in the intervention.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-8922 |
| Date | 01 January 1994 |
| Creators | Dufresne, Michele Lauroesch |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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