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)
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.