UMRP.html

The Penn Reading Initiative is a tutor training program developed by the Linguistics Laboratory

with the support of the Netter Center

at the University of Pennsylvania

Using The Reading Road, a tutoring manual for struggling readers,

Stories and instruction by

Bill Labov and Bettina Baker

Program manager: Brittany McLaughlin (penn.reading@gmail.com)

For more information on the Penn Reading Initiative or to download The Reading Road, please visit our new website at http://www.ling.upenn.edu/pri/index.html.

Scope of the program

The READING ROAD is a tutoring program designed to raise reading levels of minority children in inner city schools. It includes

an introduction to the basic sound-to-letter correspondences of the English alphabet for consonants, vowels, and letters which are sometimes consonants and sometimes members of the vowel nucleus
routines for focusing children's attention on the more complex, many-to-one and one-to-many, sound to letter correspondences.
narratives illustrated in full color written with a controlled vocabulary on themes that engage the interests and concerns of inner city children;
questioning on the motivations and reasoning of the characters in the narrative to develop comprehension.
diagnostic tests for each section to measure readers' progress.

The Cultural Context and Themes

The READING ROAD is written for struggling readers in schools in low-income neighborhoods. Both style and content are aimed at the concerns and interests of children in communities that suffer from poverty, illiteracy and social conflict. The program has been used successfully with African American, Latino and White children in the 2nd to 5th grade who were one-to-two years behind in reading grade level. It has been particularly successful with discouraged and alienated readers.

Tony and Tanya: the Mentors

The READING ROAD provides readers with two "Mentors": Tony and Tanya. They appear on many pages of the narratives witih questions for the readers to respond to, building comprehension of the story line beyond decoding at the word level. No matter where readers start in The Reading Road, they begin with the Introduction to Tony and Tanya, where Tony explains how he became interested in reading.

Use of the Reading Road

The READNG ROAD is designed for use by tutors in extended time programs and for use by school staff and tutors as supplemental instruction complementary to existing school district curricula. The sequence of instruction is based on the profile of each childís reading abilities, determined by the initial diagnostic Alpha-Monster game.
After completing the comprehension questions based on the stories just read, students write responses to the lessons and stories they completed in individual journals, which help to assess orthographic development as well as comprehension ability. At the end of each section is a form of the Tower Game, which assesses students' decoding skills for the topic of tha section: students capture a domino from the the tutor's stack for each of 20 words that is read right.