The Individualized Reading Program:
Reading for the Real World
Linguistics Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania
William Labov, Director
Bettina Baker, Project Manager
Scope of the progam
The Individualized Reading Program [IRP] is a continuing
program for raising reading levels of minority children in inner city schools.
It is currently funded by contract with the Interagency Educational Research
Initiative [IERI], comprising three agencies: NSF, NIH, and OERI.
The IRP began as a research project funded by the Office of Education
(OERI) from 1998 to 2000, in collaboration with California State Hayward
and the Oakland Unified School Board (Hollins, Towner & Labov 2000).
The research program was designed to discover whether knowledge of the
home dialect of African American Vernacular English would be helpful in
improving the reading levels of African American struggling readers.
The research has been combined with academically based
service learning courses and America Reads programs, in which students from
the University of Pennsylvania have participated actively in both tutoring and
development of educational materials. The program was originally oriented to
the specific reading problems of African American children, but is currently
designed for children from all low-income school districts, including White
and Latino struggling readers.
For an overall view of the goals and methods of the program
see W. Labov & B. Baker, Testing the effectiveness
of an individualized reading program for African-American, Euro-American
and Latino inner city children. This is a poster session prepared for
a meeting of IERI project directors in November 2001. It presents some
early results as well as the plan of work for 2001-2005.
The Individualized Reading Manual.
The Individualized Reading Manual: A Textbook for Tutors
and Children (Labov and Baker, 1999) [henceforth, IRM] is the main instrument
of instruction used in the IRP to raise the reading levels of minority
children in inner city schools.. It includes:
-
diagnostic readings for analysis by the RX computer program (below);
-
organizational frameworks and reporting instruments for tutors;
-
an introduction to the basic sound-to-letter correspondences of the English
alphabet for consonants, vowels, and tletters which are sometimes consonants
and sometimes members of the vowel nucleus
-
routines for focusing children's attention on the elements of word structures
with complex onsets, nuclei and codas (section 3);
-
direct instructions on the English word structures that involve relations
of sounds to letters that are not 1-to-1
-
narrative texts written with a controlled vocabulary on themes that engage
the interests and concerns of inner city children;
-
comprehension questions on the motivations and reasoning of the characters
in the narrative;
-
a page asking students to register how much they liked the story
-
diagnostic tests for each section to measure children's achievement
-
a final diagnostic reading with the same range of orthographic structures
as the initial reading..
The vocabulary of the texts is controlled so
that the most frequent and the most complex structures were those just
taught. The narratives are preceded by an introduction that introduces
the theme and any words outside of that vocabulary. Color is used in direct
instruction to focus attention on the letters that are involved in the
correspondences being taught. Almost all pages of the IRM include four-color
illustrations for both direct instruction in sound to letter correspondences
and narrative texts.
The Cultural Context and Themes
The IRM 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. For many of them, the standard reading
programs are irrelevant and alien in both style and content, and many begin
the program with the explicit position that they "hate ro read."
Tony and Tanya: the Mentors.
The IRM 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
IRM, they begin with the Introduction to Tony and Tanya,
where Tony explains how he got interested in reading.
Use of the IRM
The IRM 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. Tutors receive
a copy of the reading error profile for each student, together with a plan
of instruction from the tutor coordinator as to which sections of the manual
were most important for advancing the reading skills of that student.
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. These writing activities
are followed by the section-specific assessments of tests of the
students' knowledge of the decoding principles presented in the IRM lessons.
Subjects are required to correctly read ninety percent of the words in
each section's mastery test before receiving instruction in another. If
a subject does not read ninety percent of the words in a section's mastery
test correctly, he or she is given repeated instruction in the sound to
letter correspondences not learned.
The Individualizd Reading Manual
The RX Program
The Rx Program analyzes a given oral text for thirty-two phonemic/graphemic relations
and produces a tabulation of error rates for each relation, a graphic display of group
and individual error rates, lists of words with leading error rates and errors listed.
It is presently designed only for the Macintosh platform (System OS-X).
If you download one or more sections of the IRM and use them with struggling
readers,
please send an email message to Bill Labov, labov@earthlink.net, describing
your use and the results you have had.