Rupley, W. H., Blair, T. R. & Nichols, W. D. (2009). "Effective reading instruction for struggling readers: the role of direct/explicit teaching". Reading & Writing Quarterly, 25:125-138.
The article proposes that direct/explicit instruction is an effective way for struggling readers. The heart of direct/explicit instruction is that teachers provide some modeling or demonstration, guided practice and meaningful teacher-student interactions to guide students’ learning. A number of studies have claimed the importance of explicit instruction. The effective instruction recommended several components such as imparting new information to past learning, explaining useful skills and cognitive strategies to students, providing step-by-step explanations of modeling to engage students in reading texts. The active communication and interaction between teachers and students is integral part of the approach. During the process, by giving modeling and guided practice to students, teachers could conceptualize important reading skills and cognitive strategies to students. In this way, students could practice their reading ability in a variety of texts and groupings independently. Scaffolding in direct instruction allows teachers to transfer responsibility of learning to students gradually.
The majority of learning outcomes can be classified into skills and cognitive strategies. Skills consist of lower level cognitive processing and decoding methods like phonics, context analysis and sequential development. Cognitive strategies involve higher level processing such as predictions, summary and inference. Moreover, it is crucial for teachers to use appropriate materials to provide students opportunities to apply their skills and strategies into different kinds of reading texts. There is another point stated in the article that learning the ability of various word identification skills is necessary for comprehension. In addition to accuracy of identifying words, fluency of word identification is also important. Fluency is developed through abundant teacher-directed practice and successive exposure to reading. However, there is no formula for teachers to follow that how much time or instruction should be given to individual students. The answer to this question is that teachers have to understand individual differences to determine the amount of explicit instruction to students.
From this journal, I get some reflection about reading instruction. The article provides clear steps and some important features of explicit instruction. I think it is important for teachers to teach students some reading skills and strategies to master different reading texts especially for those low achievers. How to make active communication to students by providing scaffolding and develop them to become independent readers is a great challenge for teachers. Moreover, teachers should also pay attention to students’ individual differences to adjust their teaching formula to fit various types of students.
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