reading readiness essay

Literacy and Reading Readiness Essay

Being literate is a relatively broad term, especially in the context of the 21 st century. On the one hand, literacy implies set elements correlating with basic cognitive skills. Namely, reading and writing are the concepts correlating with the term. On the other hand, being literate in the 21 st century correlates with additional circumstances, such as the practical appliance of the aforementioned skills in regard to interacting with the outside world. For example, the word is often incorporated in relation to modern technology, such as in the phrase “information literacy” (UNESCO, 2006). As a result, literacy is a broad term that, scientifically, is related to cognitive abilities while metaphorically, to how one operates in society and in the modern world.

Teachers are essential in developing literacy concepts in regard to speaking, listening, reading, and writing for students with disabilities. There are several practical implementations a teacher can employ to maximize said skills. First, it is essential to determine the elements of literacy that can be addressed in class. Namely, one’s ability to use oral language, knowledge of print concepts, comprehension of the alphabet, and phonological processing skills are among the elements that can be worked on (Opiz, 2020). Teachers can address alphabet knowledge through interaction with children while creating a personalized alphabet book in which students choose the words that are to be included. For phonological awareness, activities such as asking children to identify similar letters in a sentence can maximize comprehension. Print concepts can also be addressed in multiple ways, such as asking the children questions about where the text starts and where certain letters in the text are located, and reading together as a group. Oral language can be implemented through reading out loud and similar practices that can be incorporated with other literacy concepts, such as print knowledge.

Needless to say, teachers aiming to address literacy for children with disabilities may encounter specific challenges that require a personalized approach. Namely, one barrier is the determination of possible gaps before the student reaches an older age. For example, while the expectation is to ensure each student is able to read well by third grade, certain students may only show signs of difficulties during the same age (Kaderavek & Justice, 2000). Another barrier correlates with the concept of reading readiness. Namely, certain students may struggle to fit the standardized informal assessments for reading readiness despite having the cognitive skills to do so. For example, some elements that are being considered when deciding whether a student is ready to learn to read include abilities to follow directions, collaborate, and follow instructions (Irvin et al., 2013). As a result, teachers may have difficulties identifying the presence of literacy skills when behavioral problems persist.

Assessing student skills is important in determining literacy. Both standardized and alternative assessments can be implemented to determine whether a child has been developing in regard to being literate. In relation to standardized texts, multiple assessment types exist that cover several elements within the notion of literacy. For example, the Yopp-Singer Test of Phoneme Segmentation, the DIBELS Phoneme Segmentation Fluency, and Concepts About Print (CAP) are among the tests that can be administered to assess a student’s phonological perception and print concepts comprehension (Opiz, 2020). However, needless to say, a teacher can examine one’s literacy through informal, alternative measures. For example, observing children during games and classroom activities in terms of how they interact, communicate, and perceive the information around them may give a rather objective perspective on their cognitive abilities. For example, a speed reading test may not show one’s abilities if the child stops to relate a personal experience similar to what happened in the text. From a formal perspective, the reading time has lengthened. From an informal one, the teacher is able to see that the student has high text comprehension.

Teachers can motivate children with disabilities to read by applying a multitude of techniques. For example, Directed Thinking and Listening is a technique that addresses a potential lack of interest or motivation to participate in the reading exercise (Opiz, 2020). Based on the measure, the teacher is to interest the children before reading through a set of questions directed at the classroom. Furthermore, a similar approach is to be employed during reading when children are asked about the content, their thoughts, and other elements correlating with the text. Last but not least, the children are inquired about the text after reading it.

Literacy is the set of skills possessed by a person, highlighting the cognitive abilities of said individual. Namely, reading and writing are the elements most commonly associated with the notion of literacy (UNESCO, 2006). The notion of literacy is also connected with the idea of acquiring a level of social awareness, operating in the socio-economic environment, and reflecting critically on both personal and social concepts (UNESCO, 2006). Thus, being literate is a combination of possessing certain cognitive skills as well as their practical appliance in the physical world.

Emergent literacy is the concept illustrating one’s literate abilities before acquiring the skills to actually read and write. In this case, a very young child is constantly in the process of cognitive development, which, later on, shifts into literary. For example, naming various letters, knowing how each of them sounds, and reading words are among the activities often associated with the concept of emergent literacy (Kaderavek & Justice, 2000). Before conventional reading, the child is able to perform the aforementioned activities, which is a precursor to being considered literate. The importance of emergent literacy is connected with the outcomes followed by the notion. Namely, a child with no skills in relation to phonetic perception and letter recognition is likely to encounter severe difficulties when learning to read.

Emergent literacy is different from the concept of reading readiness. Reading readiness illustrates the presence of skills and circumstances highlighting that the child is ready to learn to read. On the one hand, emergent literacy implies that literacy is a process, and acquiring reading and writing skills is the step after showing signs, such as identifying letters, scribbling, and pretending to read. On the other hand, reading readiness is not a process but rather a point in time at which the student has acquired all the necessary precursors to start to read.

Three questions can be identified to contribute to the pool of knowledge in regard to the reading material. What would a standardized assessment for reading readiness include? The question. Arises as a result of the determination that the concept is more socio-behavioral rather than academic and scientific (Irvin et al., 2013). Moreover, is emergent literacy a definite precursor to literacy? In this case, statistical analyses can be applied to determine the answers. Last but not least, how can teachers encourage emergent literacy in children who show signs of slow development?

Irvin, S. P., Alonzo, J., Nese, J. F. T., & Tindal, G. (2013). Learning to read: Kindergarten readiness growth in reading skills. National Center on Assessment and Accountability for Special Education .

Kaderavek, J. N., & Justice, L. (2000). Children with LD as emergent readers: Bridging the gap to conventional reading. LD Online .

Opiz, J. E. M. (2020). Understanding, assessing, and teaching reading: A diagnostic approach (8th ed.). Pearson.

UNESCO. (2006). Understandings of literacy. In Education for All Global Monitoring Report (pp. 147–159). UNESCO.

• Emergent Literacy Skills in Children With Hearing Loss
• Emergent Leadership Programs for Student Athletes
• Difference between Deliberate and Emergent Strategies
• "Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom" by Hooks
• The Importance of Satisfaction in Education
• Perception of Education by the Students in the RES 7700 Course
• Perception of the School: The Informal System
• Perception of Early Childhood Pre-Service Teachers
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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• Importance Of Reading Essay

Importance of Reading Essay

500+ words essay on reading.

Reading is a key to learning. It’s a skill that everyone should develop in their life. The ability to read enables us to discover new facts and opens the door to a new world of ideas, stories and opportunities. We can gather ample information and use it in the right direction to perform various tasks in our life. The habit of reading also increases our knowledge and makes us more intellectual and sensible. With the help of this essay on the Importance of Reading, we will help you know the benefits of reading and its various advantages in our life. Students must go through this essay in detail, as it will help them to create their own essay based on this topic.

Importance of Reading

Reading is one of the best hobbies that one can have. It’s fun to read different types of books. By reading the books, we get to know the people of different areas around the world, different cultures, traditions and much more. There is so much to explore by reading different books. They are the abundance of knowledge and are best friends of human beings. We get to know about every field and area by reading books related to it. There are various types of books available in the market, such as science and technology books, fictitious books, cultural books, historical events and wars related books etc. Also, there are many magazines and novels which people can read anytime and anywhere while travelling to utilise their time effectively.

Benefits of Reading for Students

Reading plays an important role in academics and has an impactful influence on learning. Researchers have highlighted the value of developing reading skills and the benefits of reading to children at an early age. Children who cannot read well at the end of primary school are less likely to succeed in secondary school and, in adulthood, are likely to earn less than their peers. Therefore, the focus is given to encouraging students to develop reading habits.

Reading is an indispensable skill. It is fundamentally interrelated to the process of education and to students achieving educational success. Reading helps students to learn how to use language to make sense of words. It improves their vocabulary, information-processing skills and comprehension. Discussions generated by reading in the classroom can be used to encourage students to construct meanings and connect ideas and experiences across texts. They can use their knowledge to clear their doubts and understand the topic in a better way. The development of good reading habits and skills improves students’ ability to write.

In today’s world of the modern age and digital era, people can easily access resources online for reading. The online books and availability of ebooks in the form of pdf have made reading much easier. So, everyone should build this habit of reading and devote at least 30 minutes daily. If someone is a beginner, then they can start reading the books based on the area of their interest. By doing so, they will gradually build up a habit of reading and start enjoying it.

Frequently Asked Questions on the Importance of Reading Essay

What is the importance of reading.

1. Improves general knowledge 2. Expands attention span/vocabulary 3. Helps in focusing better 4. Enhances language proficiency

What is the power of reading?

1. Develop inference 2. Improves comprehension skills 3. Cohesive learning 4. Broadens knowledge of various topics

How can reading change a student’s life?

1. Empathy towards others 2. Acquisition of qualities like kindness, courtesy

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Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children (1998)

Chapter: 1. introduction, 1 introduction.

Reading is essential to success in our society. The ability to read is highly valued and important for social and economic advancement. Of course, most children learn to read fairly well. In fact, a small number learn it on their own, with no formal instruction, before school entry (Anbar, 1986; Backman, 1983; Bissex, 1980; Jackson, 1991; Jackson et al., 1988). A larger percentage learn it easily, quickly, and efficiently once exposed to formal instruction.

SOCIETAL CHALLENGES

Parents, educators, community leaders, and researchers identify clear and specific worries concerning how well children are learning to read in this country. The issues they raise are the focus of this report:

1. Large numbers of school-age children, including children from all social classes, have significant difficulties in learning to read.

2. Failure to learn to read adequately for continued school success is much more likely among poor children, among nonwhite

children, and among nonnative speakers of English. Achieving educational equality requires an understanding of why these disparities exist and efforts to redress them.

3. An increasing proportion of children in American schools, particularly in certain school systems, are learning disabled, with most of the children identified as such because of difficulties in learning to read.

4. Even as federal and state governments and local communities invest at higher levels in early childhood education for children with special needs and for those from families living in poverty, these investments are often made without specific planning to address early literacy needs and sustain the investment.

5. A significant federal investment in providing bilingual education programs for nonnative speakers of English has not been matched by attention to the best methods for teaching reading in English to nonnative speakers or to native speakers of nonstandard dialects.

6. The passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) provides accommodations to children and to workers who have reading disabilities. In order to provide full access for the individuals involved, these accommodations should reflect scientific knowledge about the acquisition of reading and the effects of having a reading difficulty.

7. The debate about reading development and reading instruction has been persistent and heated, often obscuring the very real gains in knowledge of the reading process that have occurred.

In this report, we are most concerned with the children in this country whose educational careers are imperiled because they do not read well enough to ensure understanding and to meet the demands of an increasingly competitive economy. Current difficulties in reading largely originate from rising demands for literacy, not from declining absolute levels of literacy (Stedman and Kaestle, 1987). In a technological society, the demands for higher literacy are constantly increasing, creating ever more grievous consequences for those who fall short and contributing to the widening economic disparities in our society (Bronfenbrenner et al., 1996). These economic dispari-

ties often translate into disparities in educational resources, which then have the self-reinforcing effect of further exacerbating economic disparities. Although the gap in reading performance between educational haves and have-nots has shrunk over the last 50 years, it is still unacceptably large, and in recent years it has not shrunk further (National Academy of Education, 1996). These rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer economic effects compound the difficulties facing educational policy makers, and they must be addressed if we are to confront the full scope of inadequate literacy attainment (see Bronfenbrenner et al., 1996).

Despite the many ways in which American schools have progressed and improved over the last half century (see, for example, Berliner and Biddle, 1995), there is little reason for complacency. Clear and worrisome problems have to do specifically with children's success in learning to read and our ability to teach reading to them. There are many reasons for these educational problems—none of which is simple. These issues and problems led to the initiation of this study and are the focus of this report.

The many children who succeed in reading are in classrooms that display a wide range of possible approaches to instruction. In making recommendations about instruction, one of the challenges facing the committee is the difficult-to-deal-with fact that many children will learn to read in almost any classroom, with almost any instructional emphasis. Nonetheless, some children, in particular children from poor, minority, or non-English-speaking families and children who have innate predispositions for reading difficulties, need the support of high-quality preschool and school environments and of excellent primary instruction to be sure of reading success. We attempt to identify the characteristics of the preschool and school environments that will be effective for such children.

The Challenge of a Technological Society

Although children have been taught to read for many centuries, only in this century—and until recently only in some countries—has there been widespread expectation that literacy skills should be universal. Under current conditions, in many ''literate" societies, 40 to

60 percent of the population have achieved literacy; today in the United States, we expect 100 percent of the population to be literate. Furthermore, the definition of full-fledged literacy has shifted over the last century with increased distribution of technology, with the development of communication across distances, and with the proliferation of large-scale economic enterprises (Kaestle, 1991; Miller, 1988; Weber, 1993). To be employable in the modern economy, high school graduates need to be more than merely literate. They must be able to read challenging material, to perform sophisticated calculations, and to solve problems independently (Murnane and Levy, 1993). The demands are far greater than those placed on the vast majority of schooled literate individuals a quarter-century ago.

Data from the National Education Longitudinal Study and High School and Beyond, the two most comprehensive longitudinal assessments of U.S. students' attitudes and achievements, indicate that, from 1972 through 1994 (the earliest and most recently available data), high school students most often identified two life values as "very important" (see National Center for Educational Statistics, 1995:403). "Finding steady work" was consistently highly valued by over 80 percent of male and female seniors over the 20 years of measurement and was seen as "very important'' by nearly 90 percent of the 1992 seniors—the highest scores on this measure in its 20-year history. "Being successful in work" was also consistently valued as very important by over 80 percent of seniors over the 20-year period and approached 90 percent in 1992.

The pragmatic goals stated by students amount to "get and hold a good job." Who is able to do that? In 1993, the percentage of U.S. citizens age 25 and older who were college graduates and unemployed was 2.6 percent (U.S. Department of Labor, Office of Employment and Unemployment Statistics, quoted in National Center for Education Statistics, 1995:401). By contrast, the unemployment rate for high school graduates with no college was twice as high, 5.4 percent, and for persons with less than a high school education the unemployment rate was 9.8 percent, over three times higher. An October 1994 survey of 1993-1994 high school graduates and dropouts found that fewer than 50 percent of the dropouts were holding

jobs (U.S. Department of Labor, 1995 ; quoted in National Center for Education Statistics, 1995:401).

One researcher found that, controlling for inflation, the mean income of U.S. male high school dropouts ages 25 to 34 has decreased by over 50 percent between 1973 and 1995 (Stringfield, 1995 , 1997). By contrast, the mean incomes of young male high school graduates dropped by about one-third, and those of college graduates by 20 percent in the 1970s and then stabilized. Among the six major demographic groups (males and females who are black, white, or Hispanic), the lowest average income among college graduates was higher than the highest group of high school graduates.

Academic success, as defined by high school graduation, can be predicted with reasonable accuracy by knowing someone's reading skill at the end of grade 3 (for reviews, see Slavin et al., 1994). A person who is not at least a modestly skilled reader by the end of third grade is quite unlikely to graduate from high school. Only a generation ago, this did not matter so much, because the long-term economic effects of not becoming a good reader and not graduating from high school were less severe. Perhaps not surprisingly, when teachers are asked about the most important goal for education, over half of elementary school teachers chose "building basic literacy skills" (National Center for Education Statistics Schools and Staffing Survey, 1990-1991, quoted in National Center for Education Statistics, 1995:31) .

The Special Challenge of Learning to Read English

Learning to read poses real challenges, even to children who will eventually become good readers. Furthermore, although every writing system has its own complexities, English presents a relatively large challenge, even among alphabetic languages. Learning the principles of a syllabic system, like the Japanese katakana, is quite straightforward, since the units represented—syllables—are pronounceable and psychologically real, even to young children. Such systems are, however, feasible only in languages with few possible syllable types; the hiragana syllabary represents spoken Japanese with 46 characters, supplemented with a set of diacritics (Daniels

and Bright, 1996). Spoken English has approximately 5,000 different possible syllables; instead of representing each one with a symbol in the writing system, written English relies on an alphabetic system that represents the parts that make up a spoken syllable, rather than representing the syllable as a unit.

An alphabetic system poses a challenge to the beginning reader, because the units represented graphically by letters of the alphabet are referentially meaningless and phonologically abstract. For example, there are three sounds represented by three letters in the word "but," but each sound alone does not refer to anything, and only the middle sound can really be pronounced in isolation; when we try to say the first or last consonant of the word all by itself, we have to add a vowel to make it a pronounceable entity (see Box 1-1).

Once the learner of written English gets the basic idea that letters represent the small sound units within spoken and heard words, called phonemes, the system has many advantages: a much more limited set of graphemic symbols is needed than in either syllabic (like Japanese) or morphosyllabic (like Chinese) systems; strategies

for sounding out unfamiliar strings and spelling novel words are available; and subsequences, such as prefixes and suffixes, are encountered with enough frequency for the reader to recognize them automatically.

Alphabetic systems of writing vary in the degree to which they are designed to represent the surface sounds of words. Some languages, such as Spanish, spell all words as they sound, even though this can cause two closely related words to be spelled very differently. Writing systems that compromise phonological representations in order to reflect morphological information are referred to as deep orthographies. In English, rather than preserving one-letter-to-one-sound correspondences, we preserve the spelling, even if that means a particular letter spells several different sounds. For example, the last letter pronounced "k" in the written word "electric" represents quite different sounds in the words "electricity" and ''electrician," indicating the morphological relation among the words but making the sound-symbol relationships more difficult to fathom.

The deep orthography of English is further complicated by the retention of many historical spellings, despite changes in pronunciation that render the spellings opaque. The "gh" in "night" and "neighborhood" represents a consonant that has long since disappeared from spoken English. The "ph" in "morphology" and "philosophy" is useful in signaling the Greek etymology of those words but represents a complication of the pattern of sound-symbol correspondences that has been abandoned in Spanish, German, and many other languages that also retain Greek-origin vocabulary items. English can present a challenge for a learner who expects to find each letter always linked to just one sound.

SOURCES OF READING DIFFICULTIES

Reading problems are found among every group and in every primary classroom, although some children with certain demographic characteristics are at greater risk of reading difficulties than others. Precisely how and why this happens has not been fully understood. In some cases, the sources of these reading difficulties

are relatively clear, such as biological deficits that make the processing of sound-symbol relationships difficult; in other cases, the source is experiential such as poor reading instruction.

Biological Deficits

Neuroscience research on reading has expanded understanding of the reading process (Shaywitz, 1996). For example, researchers have now been able to establish a tentative architecture for the component processes of reading (Shaywitz et al., 1998; Shaywitz, 1996). All reading difficulties, whatever their primary etiology, must express themselves through alterations of the brain systems responsible for word identification and comprehension. Even in disadvantaged or other high-risk populations, many children do learn to read, some easily and others with great difficulty. This suggests that, in all populations, reading ability occurs along a continuum, and biological factors are influenced by, and interact with, a reader's experiences. The findings of an anomalous brain system say little about the possibility for change, for remediation, or for response to treatment. It is well known that, particularly in children, neural systems are plastic and responsive to changed input.

Cognitive studies of reading have identified phonological processing as crucial to skillful reading, and so it seems logical to suspect that poor readers may have phonological processing problems. One line of research has looked at phonological processing problems that can be attributed to the underdevelopment or disruption of specific brain systems.

Genetic factors have also been implicated in some reading disabilities, in studies both of family occurrence (Pennington, 1989; Scarborough, 1989) and of twins (Olson et al., 1994). Differences in brain function and behavior associated with reading difficulty may arise from environmental and/or genetic factors. The relative contributions of these two factors to a deficit in reading (children below the local 10th percentile) have been assessed in readers with normal-range intelligence (above 90 on verbal or performance IQ) and apparent educational opportunity (their first language was English and they had regularly attended schools that were at or above national

norms in reading). This research has provided evidence for strong genetic influences on many of these children's deficits in reading (DeFries and Alarcon, 1996) and in related phonological processes (Olson et al., 1989). Recent DNA studies have found evidence for a link between some cases of reading disability and inheritance of a gene or genes on the short arm of chromosome 6 (Cardon et al., 1994; Grigorenko et al., 1997).

It is important to emphasize that evidence for genetic influence on reading difficulty in the selected population described above does not imply genetic influences on reading differences between groups for which there are confounding environmental differences. Such group differences may include socioeconomic status, English as a second language, and other cultural factors. It is also important to emphasize that evidence for genetic influence and anomalous brain development does not mean that a child is condemned to failure in reading. Brain and behavioral development are always based on the interaction between genetic and environmental influences. The genetic and neurobiological evidence does suggest why learning to read may be particularly difficult for some children and why they may require extraordinary instructional support in reading and related phonological processes.

Instructional Influences

A large number of students who should be capable of reading ably given adequate instruction are not doing so, suggesting that the instruction available to them is not appropriate. As Carroll (1963) noted more than three decades ago, if the instruction provided by a school is ineffective or insufficient, many children will have difficulty learning to read (unless additional instruction is provided in the home or elsewhere).

Reading difficulties that arise when the design of regular classroom curriculum, or its delivery, is flawed are sometimes termed "curriculum casualties" (Gickling and Thompson, 1985; Simmons and Kame'enui, in press). Consider an example from a first-grade classroom in the early part of the school year. Worksheets were being used to practice segmentation and blending of words to facili-

tate word recognition. Each worksheet had a key word, with one part of it designated the "chunk" that was alleged to have the same spelling-sound pattern in other words; these other words were listed on the sheet. One worksheet had the word "love" and the chunk "ove.'' Among the other words listed on the sheet, some did indicate the pattern ("glove," "above," "dove"), but others simply do not work as the sheet suggests they should ("Rover," "stove," and "woven"). In lesson plans and instructional activities, such mistakes occur in the accuracy and clarity of the information being taught.

When this occurs consistently, a substantial proportion of students in the classroom are likely to exhibit low achievement (although some students are likely to progress adequately in spite of the impoverished learning situation). If low-quality instruction is confined to one particular teacher, children's progress may be impeded for the year spent in that classroom, but they may overcome this setback when exposed to more adequate teaching in subsequent years. There is evidence, however, that poor instruction in first grade may have long-term effects. Children who have poor instruction in the first year are more seriously harmed by the bad early learning experience and tend to do poorly in schooling across the years (Pianta, 1990).

In some schools, however, the problem is more pervasive, such that low student achievement is schoolwide and persistent. Sometimes the instructional deficiency can be traced to lack of an appropriate curriculum. More often, a host of conditions occur together to contribute to the risk imposed by poor schooling: low expectations for success on the part of the faculty and administration of the school, which may translate into a slow-paced, undemanding curriculum; teachers who are poorly trained in effective methods for teaching beginning readers; the unavailability of books and other materials; noisy and crowded classrooms; and so forth.

It is regrettable that schools with these detrimental characteristics continue to exist anywhere in the United States; since these schools often exist in low-income areas, where resources for children's out-of-school learning are limited, the effects can be very detrimental to students' probabilities of becoming skilled readers (Kozol, 1991; Puma et al., 1997; Natriello et al., 1990). Attending a

school in which low achievement is pervasive and chronic, in and of itself, clearly places a child at risk for reading difficulty. Even within a school that serves most of its students well, an instructional basis for poor reading achievement is possible. This is almost never considered, however, when a child is referred for evaluation of a suspected reading difficulty. Evidence from case study evaluations of children referred for special education indicate that instructional histories of the children are not seriously considered (Klenk and Palincsar, 1996). Rather, when teachers refer students for special services, the "search for pathology" begins and assessment focused on the child continues until some explanatory factor is unearthed that could account for the observed difficulty in reading (Sarason and Doris, 1979).

In sum, a variety of detrimental school practices may place children at risk for poorer achievement in reading than they might otherwise attain. Interventions geared at improving beginning reading instruction, rehabilitating substandard schools, and ensuring adequate teacher preparation are discussed in subsequent chapters.

DEMOGRAPHICS OF READING DIFFICULTIES

A major source of urgency in addressing reading difficulties derives from their distribution in our society. Children from poor families, children of African American and Hispanic descent, and children attending urban schools are at much greater risk of poor reading outcomes than are middle-class, European-American, and suburban children. Studying these demographic disparities can help us identify groups that should be targeted for special prevention efforts. Furthermore, examining the literacy development of children in these higher-risk groups can help us understand something about the course of literacy development and the array of conditions that must be in place to ensure that it proceeds well.

One characteristic of minority populations that has been offered as an explanation for their higher risk of reading difficulties is the use of nonstandard varieties of English or limited proficiency in English. Speaking a nonstandard variety of English can impede the easy acquisition of English literacy by introducing greater deviations

in the representation of sounds, making it hard to develop sound-symbol links. Learning English spelling is challenging enough for speakers of standard mainstream English; these challenges are heightened for some children by a number of phonological and grammatical features of social dialects that make the relation of sound to spelling even more indirect (see Chapter 6).

The number of children who speak other languages and have limited proficiency in English in U.S. schools has risen dramatically over the past two decades and continues to grow. Although the size of the general school population has increased only slightly, the number of students acquiring English as a second language grew by 85 percent nationwide between 1985 and 1992, from fewer than 1.5 million to almost 2.7 million (Goldenberg, 1996). These students now make up approximately 5.5 percent of the population of public school students in the United States; over half (53 percent) of these students are concentrated in grades K-4. Eight percent of kindergarten children speak a native language other than English and are English-language learners (August and Hakuta, 1997).

Non-English-speaking students, like nonstandard dialect speakers, tend to come from low socioeconomic backgrounds and to attend schools with disproportionately high numbers of children in poverty, both of which are known risk factors (see Chapter 4). Hispanic students in the United States, who constitute the largest group of limited-English-proficient students by far, are particularly at risk for reading difficulties. Despite the group's progress in achievement over the past 15 to 20 years, they are about twice as likely as non-Hispanic whites to be reading below average for their age. Achievement gaps in all academic areas between whites and Hispanics, whether they are U.S. or foreign born, appear early and persist throughout their school careers (Kao and Tienda, 1995).

One obvious reason for these achievement differences is the language difference itself. Being taught and tested in English would, of course, put students with limited English proficiency at a disadvantage. These children might not have any reading difficulty at all if they were taught and tested in the language in which they are proficient. Indeed, there is evidence from research in bilingual education that learning to read in one's native language—thus offsetting the

obstacle presented by limited proficiency in English—can lead to superior achievement (Legarreta, 1979; Ramirez et al., 1991). This field is highly contentious and politicized, however, and there is a lack of clear consensus about the advantages and disadvantages of academic instruction in the primary language in contrast to early and intensive exposure to English (August and Hakuta, 1997; Rossell and Baker, 1996).

In any event, limited proficiency in English does not, in and of itself, appear to be entirely responsible for the low reading achievement of these students. Even when taught and tested in Spanish, as the theory and practice of bilingual education dictates, many Spanish-speaking Hispanic students in the United States still demonstrate low levels of reading attainment (Escamilla, 1994; Gersten and Woodward, 1995; Goldenberg and Gallimore, 1991; Slavin and Madden, 1995). This suggests that factors other than lack of English proficiency may also contribute to these children's reading difficulties.

One such factor is cultural differences, that is, the mismatch between the schools and the families in definitions of literacy, in teaching practices, and in defined roles for parents versus teachers (e.g., Jacob and Jordan, 1987; Tharp, 1989); these differences can create obstacles to children's learning to read in school. Others contend that primary cultural differences matter far less than do "secondary cultural discontinuities," such as low motivation and low educational aspirations that are the result of discrimination and limited social and economic opportunities for certain minority groups (Ogbu, 1974, 1982). Still others claim that high motivation and educational aspirations can and do coexist with low achievement (e.g., Labov et al., 1968, working in the African American community; Goldenberg and Gallimore, 1995, in the Hispanic community) and that other factors must therefore explain the differential achievement of culturally diverse groups.

Literacy is positively valued by adults in minority communities, and the positive views are often brought to school by young children (Nettles, 1997). Nonetheless, the ways that reading is used by adults and children varies across families from different cultural groups in ways that may influence children's participation in literacy activities

in school, as Heath (1983) found. And adults in some communities may see very few functional roles for literacy, so that they will be unlikely to provide conditions in the home that are conducive to children's acquisition of reading and writing skills (Purcell-Gates, 1991, 1996). The implications of these various views for prevention and intervention efforts are discussed in Part III of this volume.

It is difficult to distinguish the risk associated with minority status and not speaking English from the risk associated with lower socioeconomic status (SES). Studying the differential experiences of children in middle- and lower-class families can illuminate the factors that affect the development of literacy and thus contribute to the design of prevention and intervention efforts.

The most extensive studies of SES differences have been conducted in Britain. Stubbs (1980) found a much lower percentage of poor readers with higher (7.5 percent) than with lower SES (26.9 percent).  Some have suggested that SES differences in reading achievement are actually a result of differences in the quality of schooling; that is, lower-SES children tend to go to inferior schools, and therefore their achievement is lower because of inferior educational opportunities (Cook, 1991). However, a recent study by Alexander and Entwisle (1996) appears to demonstrate that it is during nonschool time—before they start and during the summer months—that low-SES children fall academically behind their higher-SES peers and get progressively further behind. During the school months (at least through elementary school) the rate of progress is virtually identical for high- and low-SES children.

Regardless of the specific explanation, differences in literacy achievement among children as a result of socioeconomic status are pronounced. Thirty years ago Coleman et al. (1966) and Moynihan (1965) reported that the educational deficit of children from low-income families was present at school entry and increased with each year they stayed in school. Evidence of SES differences in reading achievement has continued to accumulate (National Assessment of Educational Progress, 1981, 1995). Reading achievement of children in affluent suburban schools is significantly and consistently higher than that of children in "disadvantaged" urban schools (e.g.,

NAEP, 1994, 1995; White, 1982; Hart and Risley, 1995). An important conceptual distinction was made by White (1982) in a groundbreaking meta-analysis. White discovered that, at the individual level, SES is related to achievement only very modestly. However, at the aggregate level, that is, when measured as a school or community characteristic, the effects of SES are much more pronounced. A low-SES child in a generally moderate or higher-SES school or community is far less at risk than an entire school or community of low-SES children.

The existence of SES differences in reading outcomes offers by itself little information about the specific experiences or activities that influence literacy development at home. Indeed, a look at socioeconomic factors alone can do no more than nominate the elements that differ between middle-class and lower-class homes. Researchers have tried to identify the specific familial interactions that can account for social class differences, as well as describe those interactions around literacy that do occur in low-income homes. For example, Baker et al. (1995) compared opportunities for informal literacy learning among preschoolers in the homes of middle-income and low-income urban families. They found that children from middle-income homes had greater opportunities for informal literacy learning than children of low-income homes. Low-income parents, particularly African-American parents, reported more reading skills practice and homework (e.g., flash cards, letter practice) with their kindergarten-age children than did middle-income parents. Middle-income parents reported only slightly more joint book reading with their children than did low-income families. But these middle-income parents reported more play with print and more independent reading by children. Among the middle-class families in this study, 90 percent reported that their child visited the library at least once a month, whereas only 43 percent of the low-income families reported such visits. The findings of Baker et al. that low-income homes typically do offer opportunities for literacy practice, though perhaps of a different nature from middle-class homes, have been confirmed in ethnographic work by researchers such as Teale (1986), Taylor and Dorsey-Gaines (1988), Taylor and Strickland (1986), Gadsden (1993), Delgado-Gaitan (1990), and Goldenberg et al. (1992).

ABOUT THIS REPORT

Charge to the committee.

The Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children has conducted a study of the effectiveness of interventions for young children who are at risk of having problems in learning to read. It was carried out at the request of the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education Programs and its Office of Educational Research and Improvement (Early Childhood Institute) and the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development (Human Learning and Behavior Branch). The sponsors requested that the study address young children who are at -risk for reading difficulties, within the context of reading acquisition for all children. The scope included children from birth through grade 3, in special and regular education settings. The project had three goals: (1) to comprehend a rich research base; (2) to translate the research findings into advice and guidance for parents, educators, publishers, and others involved in the care and instruction of the young; and (3) to convey this advice to the targeted audiences through a variety of publications, conferences, and other outreach activities. In making its recommendations, the committee has highlighted key research findings that should be integrated into existing and future program interventions to enhance the reading abilities of young children, particularly instruction at the preschool and early elementary levels.

The Committee's Perspective

Our recommendations extend to all children. Of course, we are most worried about children at high risk of developing reading difficulties. However, there is little evidence that children experiencing difficulties learning to read, even those with identifiable learning disabilities, need radically different sorts of supports than children at low risk, although they may need much more intensive support. Childhood environments that support early literacy development and

excellent instruction are important for all children. Excellent instruction is the best intervention for children who demonstrate problems learning to read.

Knowledge about reading derives from work conducted in several disciplines, in laboratory settings as well as in homes, classrooms, and schools, and from a range of methodological perspectives. Reading is studied by ethnographers, sociologists, historians, child developmentalists, neurobiologists, and psycholinguists. Reading has been approached as a matter of cognition, culture, socialization, instruction, and language. The committee that wrote this report embraces all these perspectives—but we acknowledge the difficulty of integrating them into a coherent picture.

The committee agrees that reading is inextricably embedded in educational, social, historical, cultural, and biological realities. These realities determine the meaning of terms like literate as well as limits on access to literacy and its acquisition. Literacy is also essentially developmental, and appropriate forms of participation, instruction, and assessment in literacy for preschoolers differ from those for first graders and also from those for sophisticated critical readers.

Reading as a cognitive and psycholinguistic activity requires the use of form (the written code) to obtain meaning (the message to be understood), within the context of the reader's purpose (for learning, for enjoyment, for insight). In children, one can see a developmental oscillation between these foci: the preschool child who can pretend to read a story she has heard many times is demonstrating an understanding that reading is about content or meaning; the same child as a first grader, having been taught some grapheme-phoneme correspondences, may read the same storybook haltingly, disfluently, by sounding out the words she had earlier memorized, demonstrating an extreme focus on form. The mature, fluent, practiced reader shows more rapid oscillations between form-focused and meaning-focused reading: she can rely on automatic processing of form and focus on meaning until she encounters an unfamiliar pharmaceutical term or a Russian surname, whereupon the processing of meaning is disrupted while the form is decoded.

Groups define the nature as well as the value of literacy in culturally specific ways as well. A full picture of literacy from a cultural

and historical perspective would require an analysis of the distribution of literacy skills, values, and uses across classes and genders as well as religious and social groups; it would require a discussion of the connections between professional, religious, and leisure practices and literacy as defined by those practices. Such a discussion would go far beyond the scope of this report, which focuses on reading and reading difficulties as defined by mainstream opinions in the United States, in particular by U.S. educational institutions at the end of the twentieth century. In that context, employability, citizenship, and participation in the culture require high levels of literacy achievement.

Nature of the Evidence

Our review and summary of the literature are framed by some very basic principles of evidence evaluation. These principles derive from our commitment to the scientific method, which we view not as a strict set of rules but instead as a broad framework defined by some general guidelines. Some of the most important are that (1) science aims for knowledge that is publicly verifiable, (2) science seeks testable theories—not unquestioned edicts, (3) science employs methods of systematic empiricism (see Box 1-2). Science renders knowledge public by such procedures as peer review and such mechanisms as systematic replication (see Box 1-3). Testable theories are those that are potentially falsifiable—that is, defined in such a way that empirical evidence inconsistent with them can in principle be accumulated. It is the willingness to give up or alter a theory in the face of evidence that is one of the most central defining features of the scientific method. All of the conclusions reached in this report

are provisional in this important sense: they have empirical consequences that, if proven incorrect, should lead to their alteration.

The methods of systematic empiricism employed in the study of reading difficulties are many and varied. They include case studies, correlational studies, experimental studies, narrative analyses, quasi-experimental studies, interviews and surveys, epidemiological studies, ethnographies, and many others. It is important to understand how the results from studies employing these methods have been used in synthesizing the conclusions of this report.

First, we have utilized the principle of converging evidence. Scientists and those who apply scientific knowledge must often make a judgment about where the preponderance of evidence points. When this is the case, the principle of converging evidence is an important tool, both for evaluating the state of the research evidence and also for deciding how future experiments should be designed. Most areas of science contain competing theories. The extent to which one particular theory can be viewed as uniquely supported by a particular study depends on the extent to which other competing explanations have been ruled out. A particular experimental result is never equally relevant to all competing theoretical explanations. A given experiment may be a very strong test of one or two alternative theories but a weak test of others. Thus, research is highly convergent when a series of experiments consistently support a given theory while collectively eliminating the most important competing explanations. Although no single experiment can rule out all alternative explanations, taken collectively, a series of partially diagnostic studies can

lead to a strong conclusion if the data converge. This aspect of the convergence principle implies that we should expect to see many different methods employed in all areas of educational research. A relative balance among the methodologies used to arrive at a given conclusion is desirable because the various classes of research techniques have different strengths and weaknesses.

Another important context for understanding the present synthesis of research is provided by the concept of synergism between descriptive and hypothesis-testing research methods. Research on a particular problem often proceeds from more exploratory methods (ones unlikely to yield a causal explanation) to methods that allow stronger causal inferences. For example, interest in a particular hypothesis may originally stem from a case study of an unusually successful teacher. Alternately, correlational studies may suggest hypotheses about the characteristics of teachers who are successful. Subsequently, researchers may attempt experiments in which variables identified in the case study or correlation are manipulated in order to isolate a causal relationship. These are common progressions in areas of research in which developing causal models of a phenomenon is the paramount goal. They reflect the basic principle of experimental design that the more a study controls extraneous variables the stronger is the causal inference. A true experiment in controlling all extraneous variables is thus the strongest inferential tool.

Qualitative methods, including case studies of individual learners or teachers, classroom ethnographies, collections of introspective interview data, and so on, are also valuable in producing complementary data when carrying out correlational or experimental studies. Teaching and learning are complex phenomena that can be enhanced or impeded by many factors. Experimental manipulation in the teaching/learning context typically is less ''complete" than in other contexts; in medical research, for example, treatments can be delivered through injections or pills, such that neither the patient nor the clinician knows who gets which treatment, and in ways that do not require that the clinician be specifically skilled in or committed to the success of a particular treatment.

Educational treatments are often delivered by teachers who may enhance or undermine the difference between treatments and controls; thus, having qualitative data on the authenticity of treatment and on the attitudes of the teachers involved is indispensable. Delivering effective instruction occurs in the context of many other factors—the student-teacher relationship, the teacher's capability at maintaining order, the expectations of the students and their parents—that can neither be ignored nor controlled. Accordingly, data about them must be made available. In addition, since even programs that are documented to be effective will be impossible to implement on a wider scale if teachers dislike them, data on teacher beliefs and attitudes will be useful after demonstration of treatment effects as well (see discussion below of external validity).

Furthermore, the notion of a comparison between a treatment group and an untreated control is often a myth when dealing with social treatments. Families who are assigned not to receive some intervention for their children (e.g., Head Start placement, one-on-one tutoring) often seek out alternatives for themselves that approximate or improve on the treatment features. Understanding the dynamic by which they do so, through collecting observational and interview data, can prevent misguided conclusions from studies designed as experiments. Thus, although experimental studies represent the most powerful design for drawing causal inferences, their limitations must be recognized.

Another important distinction in research on reading is that between retrospective and prospective studies. On one hand, retrospective studies start from observed cases of reading difficulties and attempt to generate explanations for the problem. Such studies may involve a comparison group of normal readers, but of course inference from the finding of differences between two groups, one of whom has already developed reading difficulties and one of whom has not, can never be very strong. Studies that involve matching children with reading problems to others at the same level of reading skill (rather than to age mates) address some of these problems but at the cost of introducing other sources of difficulty—comparing two groups of different ages, with different school histories, and different levels of perceived success in school.

Prospective studies, on the other hand, are quite expensive and time consuming, particularly if they include enough participants to ensure a sizable group of children with reading difficulties. They do, however, enable the researcher to trace developmental pathways for participants who are not systematically different from one another at recruitment and thus to draw stronger conclusions about the likely directionality of cause-effect relationships.

As part of the methodological context for this report, we wish to address explicitly a misconception that some readers may have derived from our emphasis on the logic of an experiment as the most powerful justification for a causal conclusion. By such an emphasis, we do not mean to imply that only studies employing true experimental logic are to be used in drawing conclusions. To the contrary, as mentioned previously in our discussion of converging evidence, the results from many different types of investigations are usually weighed to derive a general conclusion, and the basis for the conclusion rests on the convergence observed from the variety of methods used. This is particularly true in the domains of classroom and curriculum research.

For example, it is often (but not always) the case that experimental investigations are high in internal validity but limited in external validity, whereas correlational studies are often high in external validity but low in internal validity. Internal validity concerns whether we can infer a causal effect for a particular variable. The more a study approximates the logic of a true experiment (i.e., includes manipulation, control, and randomization), the more we can make a strong causal inference. The internal validity of qualitative research studies depends, of course, on their capacity to reflect reality adequately and accurately. Procedures for ensuring adequacy of qualitative data include triangulation (comparison of findings from different research perspectives), cross-case analyses, negative case analysis, and so forth. Just as for quantitative studies, our review of qualitative studies has been selective and our conclusions took into account the methodological rigor of each study within its own paradigm.

External validity concerns the generalizability of the conclusion to the population and setting of interest. Internal validity and exter-

nal validity are often traded off across different methodologies. Experimental laboratory investigations are high in internal validity but may not fully address concerns about external validity. Field classroom investigations are often quite high in external validity but, because of the logistical difficulties involved in carrying out such investigations, are often quite low in internal validity. Hence, there is a need to look for a convergence of results—not just consistency across studies conducted with one method. Convergence across different methods increases confidence that the conclusions have both internal and external validity.

A not uncommon misconception is that correlational (i.e., nonexperimental) studies cannot contribute to knowledge. This is false for a number of reasons. First, many scientific hypotheses are stated in terms of correlation or lack of correlation, so that such studies are directly relevant to these hypotheses. Second, although correlation does not imply causation, causation does imply correlation. That is, although a correlational study cannot definitively prove a causal hypothesis, it may rule one out. Third, correlational studies are more useful than they used to be because some of the recently developed complex correlational designs allow for limited causal inferences. The technique of partial correlation, widely used in studies cited in this report, provides a case in point. It makes possible a test of whether a particular third variable is accounting for a relationship.

Perhaps the most important argument for quasi-experimental studies, however, is that some variables (for instance, human malnutrition, physical disabilities) simply cannot be manipulated for ethical reasons. Other variables, such as birth order, sex, and age, are inherently correlational because they cannot be manipulated, and therefore the scientific knowledge concerning them must be based on correlational evidence. Finally, logistical difficulties in carrying out classroom and curriculum research often render impossible the logic of the true experiment. However, this circumstance is not unique to educational or psychological research. Astronomers obviously cannot manipulate the variables affecting the objects they study, yet they are able to arrive at scientifically founded conclusions.

Outline of the Report

In Chapter 2 we present a picture of typical skilled reading and the process by which it develops. We see this as crucial background information for understanding reading difficulties and their prevention.

Part II presents a fuller picture of the children we are addressing in this report. We survey the population of children with reading difficulties in Chapter 3. In Chapter 4 we discuss risk factors that may help identify children who will have problems learning to read.

Part III presents our analysis of preventions and interventions, including instruction. Chapter 5focuses on the preschool years. Chapter 6 discusses prevention and literacy instruction delivered in classrooms in kindergarten and the primary grades. Chapter 7 presents our analysis of organizational factors, at the classroom, school, or district level, that contribute to prevention and intervention for grades 1 through 3. Chapter 8 continues discussion of grades 1 through 3, presenting more targeted intervention efforts to help children who are having reading difficulties.

Part IV presents our discussion of how the information reviewed in the report should be used to change practice. Chapter 9 discusses a variety of domains in which action is needed and obstacles to change in those domains. Chapter 10 presents our recommendations for practice, policy, and research.

While most children learn to read fairly well, there remain many young Americans whose futures are imperiled because they do not read well enough to meet the demands of our competitive, technology-driven society. This book explores the problem within the context of social, historical, cultural, and biological factors.

Recommendations address the identification of groups of children at risk, effective instruction for the preschool and early grades, effective approaches to dialects and bilingualism, the importance of these findings for the professional development of teachers, and gaps that remain in our understanding of how children learn to read. Implications for parents, teachers, schools, communities, the media, and government at all levels are discussed.

The book examines the epidemiology of reading problems and introduces the concepts used by experts in the field. In a clear and readable narrative, word identification, comprehension, and other processes in normal reading development are discussed.

Against the background of normal progress, Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children examines factors that put children at risk of poor reading. It explores in detail how literacy can be fostered from birth through kindergarten and the primary grades, including evaluation of philosophies, systems, and materials commonly used to teach reading.

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Wednesday-May-29-2024

Why Read? The importance of instilling a love of reading early.

Definitionally, literacy is the ability to “read, write, spell, listen, and speak.”

Carol Anne St. George, EdD, an associate professor and literacy expert at the University of Rochester’s Warner School of Education, wants kids to fall in love with reading .

“It helps grow their vocabulary and their understanding about the world,” she says. “The closeness of snuggling up with a favorite book leads to an increase in self-confidence and imagination, and helps children gain a wealth of knowledge from the books you share. And it only takes 15 minutes a day of reading together to nurture this growth.”

Reading is necessary for learning, so instilling a love of reading at an early age is the key that unlocks the door to lifelong learning. Reading aloud presents books as sources of pleasant, entertaining, and exciting formative experiences for children to remember. Children who value books are more motivated to read on their own and will likely continue to hold that value for the rest of their lives.

Instilling a love of reading early gives a child a head start on expanding their vocabulary and building independence and self-confidence. It helps children learn to make sense not only of the world around them but also people, building social-emotional skills and of course, imagination.

“Reading exposes us to other styles, other voices, other forms, and other genres of writing. Importantly, it exposes us to writing that’s better than our own and helps us to improve,” says author and writing teacher, Roz Morris. “Reading—the good and the bad—inspires you.”

Not only that, but reading is a critical foundation for developing logic and problem-solving skills. Cognitive development is “the construction of thought processes, including remembering, problem solving, and decision-making, from childhood through adolescence to adulthood” (HealthofChildren.com).

Why Focus on Summer?

Summer vacation makes up about one-quarter of the calendar year. This is a time when students face different opportunities based on the social and economic status of their families. An analysis of summer learning (Cooper, Nye, et al., 1996) found that “all students lost mathematics and reading knowledge over the summer…This evidence also indicated that losses were larger for low-income students, particularly in reading.” Summer reading has emerged as a key component of state legislation aimed at promoting student literacy.

The Horizons at Warner program is committed to maintaining and improving student literacy with our kids every summer they return. Nationwide, each affiliate of Horizons National administers reading assessments to students during the first and last weeks of program. Pre-assessment allows our teachers to customize the learning experience on a student-need basis, and post-assessment reinforces this by not only revealing student progress in each area, but by giving insight into how we can improve program design in the future.

Research demonstrates that if a child is not reading at grade level by third grade, their ability to meet future academic success and graduate on time is diminished. Teachers know that up to third grade children are learning to read. After third grade, students are reading to learn. According to St. George, it is impossible to be successful in science, social studies, and even mathematics without a strong foundation in reading and literacy.

On average, we see an improvement by 1 to 3 reading levels in our students here at Horizons at Warner. Keeping true to our mission, these levels will account for all and more of the percentage of summer learning loss that we know our students would face without this kind of academic intervention, and leave our students five to six months ahead of where they would have been without Horizons.

Reading TO children

According to Jim Trelease, author of the best-seller, The Read-Aloud Handbook: “Every time we read to a child, we’re sending a ‘pleasure’ message to the child’s brain… You could even call it a commercial, conditioning the child to associate books and print with pleasure” (ReadAloud.org)

Developing a connection between “pleasure” and reading is crucial. Learning is the minimum requirement for success in every field of life.

Teach the Seven Strategies of Highly Effective Readers

To improve students’ reading comprehension, teachers should introduce the seven cognitive strategies of effective readers: activating, inferring, monitoring-clarifying, questioning, searching-selecting, summarizing, and visualizing-organizing. This article includes definitions of the seven strategies and a lesson-plan template for teaching each one.

To assume that one can simply have students memorize and routinely execute a set of strategies is to misconceive the nature of strategic processing or executive control. Such rote applications of these procedures represents, in essence, a true oxymoron-non-strategic strategic processing. — Alexander and Murphy (1998, p. 33)

If the struggling readers in your content classroom routinely miss the point when “reading” content text, consider teaching them one or more of the seven cognitive strategies of highly effective readers. Cognitive strategies are the mental processes used by skilled readers to extract and construct meaning from text and to create knowledge structures in long-term memory. When these strategies are directly taught to and modeled for struggling readers, their comprehension and retention improve.

Struggling students often mistakenly believe they are reading when they are actually engaged in what researchers call mindless reading (Schooler, Reichle, & Halpern, 2004), zoning out while staring at the printed page. The opposite of mindless reading is the processing of text by highly effective readers using cognitive strategies. These strategies are described in a fascinating qualitative study that asked expert readers to think aloud regarding what was happening in their minds while they were reading. The lengthy scripts recording these spoken thoughts (i.e., think-alouds) are called verbal protocols (Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995). These protocols were categorized and analyzed by researchers to answer specific questions, such as, What is the influence of prior knowledge on expert readers’ strategies as they determine the main idea of a text? (Afflerbach, 1990b).

The protocols provide accurate “snapshots” and even “videos” of the ever-changing mental landscape that expert readers construct during reading. Researchers have concluded that reading is “constructively responsive-that is, good readers are always changing their processing in response to the text they are reading” (Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995, p. 2). Instructional Aid 1.1 defines the seven cognitive strategies of highly effective readers, and Instructional Aid 1.2 provides a lesson plan template for teaching a cognitive strategy.

Instructional aids

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McEwan, 2004. 7 Strategies of Highly Effective Readers: Using Cognitive Research to Boost K-8 Achievement. Wood, Woloshyn, & Willoughby, 1995. Cognitive Strategy Instruction for Middle and High Schools.

McEwan, E.K., 40 Ways to Support Struggling Readers in Content Classrooms. Grades 6-12, pp.1-6, copyright 2007 by Corwin Press. Reprinted by permission of Corwin Press, Inc.

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• Our Mission

Play-Based Activities That Build Reading Readiness

Preschool teachers can use these activities to promote six early reading skills even as the kids enjoy themselves.

Preschool students work hard at playing . They incorporate what they see in everyday life into their play, and they incorporate the skills and knowledge gained during play into their everyday lives.

This is certainly true when it comes to reading readiness. Even though some students look as though they go through a magical and seamless transition from non-reader to reader, research shows that it’s not that simple.

Students start getting ready to read years before they do it, using a set of six critical reading readiness skills. This skill set, also known as pre-reading or early reading, is often built through play, and teachers can use the following play-based activities to build each of the skills.

1. Vocabulary

What it is: The words students know and use to make sense of the world around them, including receptive and expressive vocabulary In the preschool years, vocabulary tends to grow from about 200 words to closer to 2,000 words.

How it supports reading: Students use oral vocabulary to contextualize the words they see in print. It’s easier to decode a word that is already recognizable and holds meaning.

Activity—What am I?/What am I describing? Teachers can link this activity to a current unit of study, or pretend they’re preparing for an activity, like making breakfast. It can also be limited to what’s in the room.

Think of an item and describe it, using as much detail as possible. Each detail adds additional vocabulary for students to learn. For example, in describing an egg, you might say, “We eat it. It needs to be refrigerated. It usually comes as one of a dozen. It could be white or brown and fits in the palm of my hand.” Once a student guesses correctly, it’s their turn to describe something.

2. Print Motivation

What it is: Students’ active interest in and enjoyment of books and being read to.

How it supports reading: Students with high print motivation look through books on their own and may even recite memorized books, looking closely at the words to match them to the words they’re speaking. They’re less likely to give up trying to learn to read, even if it’s difficult for them.

Activity—Retell, or Your Favorite Book:  Pick five to 10 books you’ve read together as a class and display them. Ask for a volunteer to retell one of the stories—they should not say out loud which book they have picked. Remind the volunteer to use details and to include the beginning, middle, and ending of the story, and set a timer for five minutes. During the retelling, other students can ask questions about the plot, characters, and setting to get more information. When the timer goes off, whichever student can guess the correct book takes the next turn.

3. Print Awareness

What it is: Understanding that print has meaning and is organized in a certain way, such as that letters form words, that words form sentences, and that the spaces in between matter.

How it supports reading: Students learn that books start at the front cover, that English print is read from left to right and top to bottom, and that the words they point to match the words being said. Students with strong print awareness skills tend to practice the act of reading books even before they can read.

Activity—My “I Can Read…” Environmental Print Book:  Students recognize environmental print—the words found all around them, such as the logo of a favorite cereal, restaurant, or toy brand, or the exit sign in the classroom—long before they can read the words. Environmental print books create an artifact of all the words students recognize through everyday life.

Provide each student with a notebook. Write an A on the first page and continue the rest of the alphabet on additional pages. Throughout the year, give students food labels, flyers, and other print materials. Words they’re able to recognize and “read” for each letter can be glued to the correct page all year long.

For a digital version, create a Google Slide deck for each student, with one slide for each letter of the alphabet. With your help, or the support of a caregiver at home, they can add photos or digital logos to each slide.

4. Narrative Skills

What they are: Being able to understand and tell stories in a sequenced manner.

How they support reading: Narrative skills help students understand meaning and sequence in stories, which ladders up to reading comprehension skills as they begin reading.

Activity—What’s My Story? You may already have sequencing cards in your classroom. If you don’t, print some to have on hand. Put a set of cards in an envelope and provide one to each student, and ask them to put the cards in a line and tell you the story in their own words. Students may not put the pictures in an order you expect, but if they can tell you a coherent story for the sequenced pictures, there’s no need to correct the order.

5. Letter Knowledge

What it is: Recognizing and understanding that letters are different from each other and that they have names, and that certain sounds are associated with each letter.

How it supports reading: Letter knowledge provides students with a symbol imagery schema, which, when combined with phonological awareness skills, helps them decode words more easily.

Activity—Hanging Up the Letter Laundry: This activity requires a little setup but can be played independently. Use a permanent marker to put one letter of the alphabet on each of 26 clothespins. Then find pictures—magazine images, photos, or clipart—of common, recognizable items to glue to index cards; find at least one for each letter. Turn each index card over and write the name of the object on the back.

Put the index cards and clothespins in a bin or ziplock bag. Students can then “hang up the laundry” by taking a card, naming the picture, and clipping the card to the clothespin whose letter matches the sound their word begins with. Once all the laundry is “drying,” students can check their work by turning the cards over to see if the first letter in the name of the object matches the letter on the clothespin.

6. Phonological Awareness

What it is: The ability to hear and work with the sounds in spoken words.

How it supports reading: The ability to hear rhymes, alliteration, and word family chunks (such as -at , -it , or -up ) helps students move from noticing to doing. Once they can play with oral language, they combine this with letter knowledge to build a comparable skill in reading: phonemic awareness.

Activity—Sounding off to the beat: This is a chant-clap-knee tap game during which your students need to sit in a circle, in chairs or on the floor in criss-cross applesauce position. Start a rhythm that your students can follow. It’s best to start with something slow, like clap-tap, clap-tap, clap-tap, clap-tap.

Once the students can keep the rhythm going, decide if you want them to manipulate the beginning sound of a word or come up with a rhyming word. Here’s how a round might go if you choose rhyming words:

(clap-tap, clap-tap, clap-tap, clap-tap) Teacher: “Let’s start with a rhyme. It’s time, let’s rhyme!”

(clap-tap, clap-tap, clap-tap, clap-tap) Teacher: “Jog”

(clap-tap, clap-tap, clap-tap, clap-tap) First student: “Dog”

(clap-tap, clap-tap, clap-tap, clap-tap) Second student: “Clog!”

(clap-tap, clap-tap, clap-tap, clap-tap) Third student: “Frog!”

A round ends when nobody can produce another rhyming word.

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A study by researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) provides new evidence about the pandemic’s impact on learning among students in the earliest grades, showing distinct changes in the growth of basic reading skills during different time periods over the past year.

Ben Domingue (Image credit: Courtesy Graduate School of Education)

Results from a reading assessment given to first- through fourth-graders nationwide show that the students’ development of oral reading fluency – the ability to quickly and accurately read aloud – largely stopped in spring 2020 after the abrupt school closures brought on by COVID-19. Gains in these skills were stronger in fall 2020, but not enough to recoup the loss students experienced in the spring.

“It seems that these students, in general, didn’t develop any reading skills during the spring – growth stalled when schooling was interrupted and remained stagnant through the summer,” said Ben Domingue , an assistant professor at Stanford GSE and first author on the study , which was released by Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), a nonpartisan research network housed at Stanford.

“It picked up in the fall, which is a testament to the work that educators did in preparing for the new school year and their creativity in coming up with ways to teach,” Domingue said. “But that growth was not robust enough to make up for the gaps from the spring.”

Second- and third-graders were most affected, the study found. Overall, students’ reading fluency in second and third grade is now approximately 30 percent behind what would be expected in a typical year.

Reading fluency is fundamental for academic development more broadly, the researchers said, because problems with this skill can interfere with students’ ability to learn other subjects as they make their way through later grades.

“Reading is kind of a gateway to the development of academic skills across all disciplines,” said Domingue. “It’s a key that opens all of the doors. If a kid can’t read effectively by third grade or so, they’re unlikely to be able to access content in their other courses.”

Measuring periodically, not annually

The new study differs from previous research on COVID-19 learning loss in that students’ skills were measured periodically throughout the year, making it possible to assess growth at different stages of the pandemic.

“Most studies on learning loss so far have looked at fall-to-fall changes to show how students have been affected by COVID,” said Domingue. “But just measuring the cumulative effect doesn’t help us understand what was going on between those two time points. There were a lot of changes in what school looked like during different periods between those two points, and it seemed likely there would be some differences in the patterns of learning.”

The study’s focus on students in early elementary grades also distinguishes it from others on learning growth and loss, which typically look at the impact on students in grades 3 through 8 – the ages most often included in annual standardized exams and other routine assessments.

A fundamental skill

The findings were based on data generated by an oral assessment measuring reading fluency in more than 100 school districts nationwide. The reading assessment used in the study takes only a few minutes, and though normally administered in a classroom, it was also conducted remotely during the pandemic. Students were recorded while reading aloud from a device, and their score was based on a combination of human transcription and speech recognition.

The researchers examined trends in the students’ long-run growth back to 2018, observing fairly steady growth until the onset of the pandemic in the spring of 2020. The trajectory flattened at that point and remained flat throughout the summer, indicating that children’s reading abilities had stopped. “It was flat in an absolute sense, not just relative to years past,” said Domingue.

Growth resumed in the fall at levels similar to what the researchers saw before the pandemic. But those gains weren’t enough to make up for the ground lost earlier in the year.

The researchers also observed inequitable impact: Students in historically lower-achieving districts (based on data from the Stanford Education Data Archive ) developed reading skills at a slower rate than those in higher-achieving ones. Schools that typically score low on annual standardized tests often serve a greater share of low-income and minority students – populations disproportionately affected by the pandemic in ways that impinge on their readiness to learn, including lack of access to computers, reliable internet access or a parent at home.

“It’s quite likely that lower-achieving schools are dealing with a whole battery of problems that educators in more affluent districts aren’t facing,” said Domingue. “But there was still growth. The teachers were probably moving heaven and earth to help their kids learn to read, and it’s reflected in the gains. But it’s important to recognize the differential impact on students.”

The researchers also found that about 10 percent of students who were tested before the pandemic were not observed in fall 2020. It’s not clear why they were missing, but the researchers suggest that if these students had trouble accessing the assessment remotely, they may be less engaged with school overall and could be falling even further behind than students who were tested.

The researchers caution that, while their analysis provides important evidence on learning loss in the early grades, it doesn’t include information about whether students attended school in person, remotely or in some hybrid form.

They also note that their findings should not be applied to other academic subjects, largely because of the focus on reading in the early grades and the likelihood that it was a centerpiece of many schools’ instruction for the fall of 2020.

While the full extent of COVID-19’s impact on learning won’t be clear for months or even years, this study provides evidence that – after the initial shock of the pandemic –educators found ways to teach and assess young students’ reading skills. And even in the midst of continued uncertainty and disruption, these students were able to achieve gains in the fall similar to pre-pandemic times.

“We can build on this research by identifying practices that accelerate learning for students who’ve fallen behind, and by making sure schools have the resources they need,” said Heather Hough, executive director of PACE and coauthor of the study. “These findings are worrisome, but they do not need to be catastrophic.”

Other co-authors on the study include Jason Yeatman , an assistant professor at Stanford GSE and the School of Medicine and David Lang, a GSE doctoral student.

Media Contacts

Carrie Spector, Stanford Graduate School of Education: (650) 724-7384; [email protected]

Summer Reading Readiness: The Key to Fluency and Comprehension

Summer Reading Readiness: The Key To Fluency and Comprehension

Books wield incredible power. They can transport us to new worlds, impart knowledge and wisdom, and connect us more fully to each other and the world around us. Reading teaches, entertains, and empowers us all. During the summer months, students have extra time to dive into the world of books and harness these benefits. This is particularly crucial for those in rural areas, where resources may be limited, as summer reading programs can be a vital tool in maintaining and improving literacy rates.

In this article, we’ll explore why summer reading is so essential, how to promote reading readiness, and how to enhance reading skills and comprehension over the summer.

The Importance of Summer Reading

For children, summer represents a break from school—a chance to play, explore, and relax. However, it also opens the door to “summer slide,” the loss of academic skills that can occur when school isn’t in session. Reading during summer can help prevent this slide, keeping children academically engaged. A study on how summer reading can affect achievement gaps found that “the effect of reading four to five books on fall reading scores is potentially large enough to prevent a decline in reading achievement scores from the spring to the fall.”

In rural areas, the educational gains from summer reading are especially crucial. Often, these communities have limited access to educational resources, libraries, or enrichment programs, which can put children at an academic disadvantage during school breaks. By encouraging reading during the summer, these gaps can be bridged, ensuring children in rural areas continue to develop their reading skills and knowledge even when school isn’t in session.

Summer reading can also help enhance students’ reading fluency , their ability to read accurately, quickly, and with appropriate expression. Fluency enables readers to comprehend the text they’re reading. Without fluency, a reader spends too much cognitive effort decoding words, making it challenging to understand and retain the content of the text.

With the free time that summer provides, children can engage in extensive, regular reading, enhancing their word recognition skills and thereby increasing their speed and accuracy. The more relaxed summer environment also helps children experiment with expression, intonation, and pacing. By tackling different genres and levels of texts, children can incrementally challenge their reading abilities and further hone their fluency. In all these ways, summer reading provides the practice necessary for students to become fluent and flourishing readers.

Furthermore, a focus on summer reading can foster a culture of continuous learning, encouraging literacy and intellectual curiosity within the community. With books acting as windows to the wider world, reading can expose rural students to diverse ideas, cultures, and experiences they might not otherwise encounter, broadening their worldview and enhancing their understanding.

Promoting Reading Readiness

Summer is also an excellent time for students to learn the value and joy that can be found in reading, and to begin to seek out books for themselves. Summer reading readiness can be promoted by exposure to books and print, building vocabulary, and fostering an interest in storytelling.

In rural areas, communities can leverage their strengths to promote reading readiness. Local schools, churches, or community centers could host book exchanges, storytime sessions, or even summer reading challenges. Local businesses could sponsor reading initiatives, making books more accessible and fostering a community-wide culture of reading.

Improving Reading Skills and Comprehension Over the Summer

Improving reading skills requires regular practice. Start with books that match the child’s reading level, gradually introducing more complex texts as their confidence grows. Encourage active reading—asking questions, predicting the plot, and discussing characters—to enhance comprehension.

Making reading enjoyable is key. Students who see reading as a chore are less likely to engage with it. Introduce books about topics they’re interested in, or try different formats like graphic novels, e-books, or audiobooks. Variety can help maintain interest and appeal to different learning styles.

One of the best ways to build reading skills over the summer is through online reading programs. These can be particularly helpful for students in rural areas that may lack local resources, or for students whose parents may not have time to devote to family reading activities.

Tiers Free Academy provides two online evidence-based reading programs: Fast ForWord and DreamBox Reading Plus. These programs are designed to improve reading fluency and literacy skills in rural communities, and are made available thanks to generous grant funding from the United Way of Greater Atlanta, the Dollar General Literacy Foundation, and Vincent and Annabella Villacci’s Butterflies & Heart Shaped Clouds Fund.

• Fast ForWord is focused on helping students build cognitive skills such as memory, attention, processing, and sequencing, as well as developing their language and reading skills. Its curriculum is centered around listening accuracy, phonological awareness, and language structure, which are critical skills for students who are learning to read. This program tends to be most suitable for struggling readers in grades K-4.
• DreamBox Reading Plus is geared toward improving students’ reading fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary. This program incorporates an adaptive learning environment that also helps to build stamina, motivation, and confidence in emerging readers who struggled with reading in early grades. Reading Plus participants begin by taking an assessment to identify their proficiencies and areas of improvement. Based on their results, each child will then be assigned the lessons that best fit their needs. Reading Plus’s easy-to-navigate student dashboard also utilizes a simple checkbox format that allows students and parents to track progress.

If your child could use a little extra help meeting their reading goals, accelerated learning programs like DreamBox Reading Plus and Fast ForWord offer data-driven, personalized, and flexible solutions to support students in building reading fluency and literacy. For more information on how the Dr. Annise Mabry Foundation can help your child succeed, fill out this form to get started today!

Summer Reading Tips

Here are some of our best tips for making the most of summer reading:

• Make a reading plan: Set reading goals for the summer and create a plan to achieve them. Consider creating a visual chart or calendar to track progress.
• Create a reading space: Designate a quiet, comfortable area in the house for reading. This can make reading feel special and can provide a distraction-free environment.
• Join a reading program: Many libraries offer summer reading programs with incentives. If local resources are limited, check out virtual reading programs that can be accessed online.
• Explore different genres: Encourage children to read a variety of genres. This can help broaden their understanding and appreciation of literature.
• Make reading a family activity: Reading together can foster a love for books and can create opportunities for meaningful discussions and learning.

Summer reading is more than just an activity to pass the time. It’s an opportunity to cultivate a lifelong love for reading, enhance fluency, and improve comprehension skills. It can help bridge educational gaps and contribute to better academic outcomes and brighter futures. With the right strategies and support, every child can make strides in their reading journey this summer.

The Dr. Annise Mabry Foundation is dedicated to improving our community by enhancing education opportunities, promoting synchrony between law enforcement and constituents, and encouraging community engagement. Our programs and initiatives include the Southwest GA Community Policing Resource Center and the Tiers Free Academy, a homeschool cooperative for students in grades 9-12 that provides an alternative diploma program for homeless LGBTQ youth, sex trafficking survivors, and high school dropouts. To learn more about our offerings or support our work, consider subscribing to our newsletter or donating today!

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Reading is Good Habit for Students and Children

 500+ words essay on reading is good habit.

Reading is a very good habit that one needs to develop in life. Good books can inform you, enlighten you and lead you in the right direction. There is no better companion than a good book. Reading is important because it is good for your overall well-being. Once you start reading, you experience a whole new world. When you start loving the habit of reading you eventually get addicted to it. Reading develops language skills and vocabulary. Reading books is also a way to relax and reduce stress. It is important to read a good book at least for a few minutes each day to stretch the brain muscles for healthy functioning.

Benefits of Reading

Books really are your best friends as you can rely on them when you are bored, upset, depressed, lonely or annoyed. They will accompany you anytime you want them and enhance your mood. They share with you information and knowledge any time you need. Good books always guide you to the correct path in life. Following are the benefits of reading –

Self Improvement: Reading helps you develop positive thinking. Reading is important because it develops your mind and gives you excessive knowledge and lessons of life. It helps you understand the world around you better. It keeps your mind active and enhances your creative ability.

Communication Skills: Reading improves your vocabulary and develops your communication skills. It helps you learn how to use your language creatively. Not only does it improve your communication but it also makes you a better writer. Good communication is important in every aspect of life.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Increases Knowledge: Books enable you to have a glimpse into cultures, traditions, arts, history, geography, health, psychology and several other subjects and aspects of life. You get an amazing amount of knowledge and information from books.

Reduces Stress: Reading a good book takes you in a new world and helps you relieve your day to day stress. It has several positive effects on your mind, body, and soul. It stimulates your brain muscles and keeps your brain healthy and strong.

Great Pleasure: When I read a book, I read it for pleasure. I just indulge myself in reading and experience a whole new world. Once I start reading a book I get so captivated I never want to leave it until I finish. It always gives a lot of pleasure to read a good book and cherish it for a lifetime.

Boosts your Imagination and Creativity: Reading takes you to the world of imagination and enhances your creativity. Reading helps you explore life from different perspectives. While you read books you are building new and creative thoughts, images and opinions in your mind. It makes you think creatively, fantasize and use your imagination.

Develops your Analytical Skills: By active reading, you explore several aspects of life. It involves questioning what you read. It helps you develop your thoughts and express your opinions. New ideas and thoughts pop up in your mind by active reading. It stimulates and develops your brain and gives you a new perspective.

Reduces Boredom: Journeys for long hours or a long vacation from work can be pretty boring in spite of all the social sites. Books come in handy and release you from boredom.

Read Different Stages of Reading here.

The habit of reading is one of the best qualities that a person can possess. Books are known to be your best friend for a reason. So it is very important to develop a good reading habit. We must all read on a daily basis for at least 30 minutes to enjoy the sweet fruits of reading. It is a great pleasure to sit in a quiet place and enjoy reading. Reading a good book is the most enjoyable experience one can have.

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Reading readiness.

Act of preparing, or degree of preparedness, for formal reading instruction or any other reading activity or task.

Criterion-related validity refers to the capacity of test scores to predict future performance, or to estimate current performance on some valued measure other than the test itself. For example, a reading readiness test might be used to predict future reading achievement, or a test of dictionary skills might be used to estimate the capacity to use a dictionary (as determined by observation) (Hite, 2001: 49).

Parenting The Preschooler

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Home » Learning and Changing » Reading Readiness

Reading Readiness

Written by Yia Lor, Eau Claire County Family Engagement & Relationships Extension Educator.

Reading out loud is the most important thing you can do to prepare children to read. Building pre-literacy skills in young children helps them achieve greater success in school. Throughout the day, read what you see around you: signs, labels, recipes, or words from a text message.

Download the ”Reading Readiness” Fact Sheet

Read the fact sheet:

• Español – Preparación para la lectura   (PDF, 2 pages, 635 KB)

References:

• “Reading with Your Child” – https://www.readingrockets.org/article/reading-your-child#:~:text=Children%20learn%20to%20love%20the,to%20understand%20the%20written%20word.
• “A Daily Experience, A LifeLong Benefit” – https://www.reachoutandread.org/why-we-matter/child-development/
• “Kids & Family Reading Report: Finding Their Story” – https://www.scholastic.com/readingreport/our-diverse-world.html

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Placement Testing

The Testing Center administers placement tests or accepts  measures of readiness to help determine a student's starting courses. Incoming college students must take a test or submit their measures after they submit an application but before registering for classes. Students who still need to satisfy college readiness may take one or more academic preparation courses before starting credit courses.

Take the placement tests with these instructions . Incoming traditional college students will take a placement test. The Testing Center administers the following placement tests to new students to measure their readiness for college courses:

• CollegeBoard ACCUPLACER Reading and WritePlacer for U.S. students whose primary language is English.
• The ESL ACCUPLACER test for international students.
• The ALEKS-PPL math test to assess mathematics readiness.

Exemptions and waivers are here . The Testing Center also accepts other measures that grant exemptions to the placement test. Students may submit any or all of the following if they are less than 5-years-old:

• High SAT, ACT, or GED scores.
• A cumulative GPA of 3.0 or higher for graduates of U.S. public high schools.
• Transfer credit from other institutions.
• Recent, high placement test scores from other institutions.

WDCE programs have special instructions here . Students in some WDCE programs need a special version of the ACCUPLACER placement tests, which they may take in person or online. Traditional college students should not use these instructions.

Transfer placement test scores with these instructions . PGCC accepts some placement test scores from other institutions if they are less than four years old . Other institutions may accept some placement test scores taken at PGCC under certain rules and conditions. Please verify the other institution's rules for sending and receiving scores before attempting a score transfer.

The Placement Test Requires a Photo ID

Students must present one of these forms of photo ID for placement tests, waivers, and exemptions.

• PGCC student ID or employee ID card (with name and photo).
• State-issued driver's license.
• Maryland state (MVA) ID card.
• Employer's ID (with name and photo).
• Valid passport.
• U.S. Uniformed Service ID Card (military ID).
• U.S. DoD Common Access Card.
• Permanent Resident Card (Green Card/Form I-551).
• Employment Authorization Document (work permit).

Rules for Placement Testing

Please complete all tests on your own using appropriate resources, such as a pencil and blank scratch paper.

• Math tests provide a built-in calculator resource only for questions that require them. Students are not permitted to use their own calculators on the placement test.
• Inappropriate resources include, but are not limited to, the following: other people, books, notes, the internet, phones, tablets, calculators, computers, smart watches, etc.
• If the College finds evidence that a student used an inappropriate resource while taking a placement test, their test scores will be invalidated and removed from their student record. Then, the student must take all future placement tests in person.
• Incoming students must follow the College's Code of Conduct and other Testing Center rules .

PGCC uses ACCUPLACER and ALEKS-PPL Placement Tests

Prince George’s Community College uses different placement tests to help determine college readiness .

We use CollegeBoard's ACCUPLACER to evaluate reading and writing readiness for students educated in the United States and other countries. International students must take an ESL test to determine their English readiness. High school graduates will take ALEKS-PPL to evaluate their math readiness, while students in Early College Access programs will take ACCUPLACER's math tests.

Multiple Attempts

If you took a placement test multiple times, the College uses the best outcome to determine your final course placement. However, you may not take a placement test after you enroll in English or math courses since the test results cannot be used as a substitute for course performance. This applies even if you have only taken the placement test once.

Taking Each Test

All of the College's placement tests are web-based, but they will not work on phones or tablets. Click or tap the name of each placement test to read more about it. When you’re ready to take a placement test, please read our instructions for taking the placement test .

ACCUPLACER, from CollegeBoard, is a web-based test of English and Reading readiness for U.S. English-speaking students. ESL students are not eligible to use ACCUPLACER scores for placement.

• ACCUPLACER WritePlacer is a single-question essay test of English readiness.
• The platform will assign a single topic and you must write a roughly 300-word essay about it. The essay must be completed in one sitting.
• This test takes around one hour to complete and is usually evaluated immediately. A result of “Score Pending” will become a final score on the next business day.
• ACCUPLACER Reading is a multiple-choice test of Reading readiness.
• You will have to read passages and answer questions about them.
• The ACCUPLACER Reading test is adaptive. It usually has 20 questions, but may vary for each student and attempt.
• This test takes around 40 minutes to complete and results are available immediately.

Current policy allows only two attempts at any ACCUPLACER test within a two-year time period. You may only take the test again if you did not enroll in an English or ESL class.

ALEKS-PPL is a web-based test of math readiness intended to replicate the pencil-and-paper experience. Students should use paper and pencil to work out the solution to each test question and enter it into ALEKS. It is not multiple-choice.

• The ALEKS-PPL test is adaptive, and the number of questions changes as it measures your mathematics readiness. This test must be completed in one sitting and never exceeds 25 questions.
• You have a time limit of two hours to complete and submit the test. If you exceed the time limit, the test will end, and you will receive a score and placement based on the work completed.
• Most students need roughly one hour and 30 minutes for the test. Test results are available immediately.

When you finish, the ALEKS platform creates a series of prep and learning modules to help you improve your math skills for another attempt.

• The Prep and Learning modules are self-paced math review lessons tailored to the results of your first ALEKS-PPL score.
• You must spend at least five (5) hours of total work in the modules and wait at least one full day before you can retake the test. You do not have to complete all the work in one sitting.
• ALEKS-PPL allows up to one year of time to work on the modules and retake the test before your access expires. Your previous scores will remain, but you may lose access to your modules and second test attempt. It is strongly recommended that you complete your required hours and retake the test as soon as possible.
• Current policy allows only two attempts at the ALEKS-PPL test within a two-year time period. You may only retake the test if you did not enroll in a mathematics class.
• The modules do not work on phones and tablets. You must use a desktop or laptop computer running recent versions of Windows, macOS, or recent Chromebook models.
• The yellow button below lets you to log into ALEKS-PPL and continue working on your prep and learning modules. This link is not the placement test .

ALEKS-PPL STUDY MODULE

Starting in 2023, PGCC uses Accuplacer ESL to measure English and Reading readiness for international students. There is not a registration process. Students may take the ESL test immediately after applying to the college.

• The ESL Test has four required sections: the ESL WritePlacer essay, Sentence Meaning, Language Use, and Reading Skills. You must complete all sections to get a final score.
• The ESL WritePlacer section is a single-question essay. The platform will give you a topic and you must write a roughly 300-word essay under a 90-minute time limit.
• The Sentence Meaning, Language Use, and Reading Skills sections have 20 multiple-choice questions each.
• Each section can only be taken once.
• The whole test takes roughly two and a half hours to complete, and results are available after two to three business days.

Students may only take the ESL test twice within a two-year time period.

Who takes the ESL Accuplacer test?

The ESL Accuplacer test is for  incoming international students who need to demonstrate their level of English and Reading Readiness . However, international students may take the same English and Reading placement test as U.S. students if they satisfy any of the following conditions:

• They completed all of their middle and high school education in the U.S.
• They have a diploma from passing the  GED tests in the U.S. Students with a GED diploma should submit their official GED transcripts to PGCC .
• Antigua & Barbuda
• The Bahamas
• Cayman Islands
• Commonwealth of Dominica
• New Zealand
• St. Kitts & Nevis
• St. Vincent & the Grenadines
• Solomon Islands
• Trinidad & Tobago
• Turks & Caicos Islands
• United Kingdom
• United States of America
• Virgin Islands

Sample Tests and Study Guides

This list of online resources can help students improve skills needed for the placement tests . Some may also be useful after starting courses.

• Official CollegeBoard ACCUPLACER Guide
• ESL Accuplacer Sample Test
• Khan Academy
• Purdue Online Writing Lab
• Read Theory
• Calculus Help
• S.O.S. Mathematics

myPGCC, Owl Link, and Navigate

The College creates a myPGCC account for every student, unlocking many College services such as Owl Link and Navigate, without needing to visit our campus. These services will only work for students who  submit their applications , pay any outstanding fees, and activate their myPGCC accounts.

You will need  Owl Link to register for classes. Go to myPGCC  and log in, then click Owl Link. If you have never used myPGCC, click First Time Login. New users may need to change their passwords. After you verify your Owl Link account, you can use PGCC Navigate to schedule appointments with advising and other offices.

Please contact the Technology Service Desk to resolve any issues.

Doing Well on the Placement Tests

No student will be denied admission to the College based on placement test results except for international students (F-1 visa) , who must score high enough to allow full-time enrollment. However, your test performance will determine which college courses you may or may not take. Academic preparation courses may be required for students whose scores do not satisfy college readiness. Students are advised to take the placement tests seriously and employ a common-sense approach when preparing for the test:

• Eat well and get plenty of rest.
• Allow yourself ample time to review the sample tests and study guides.
• Review math operations with decimals, fractions, exponents, and algebra.

After Finishing the Placement Tests

For the in-person placement tests, students will receive a printed copy of their scores immediately. Instructors must evaluate the ESL test, which takes 2-3 business days. Typically, all scores will be posted to a student's record within two business days of receiving final scores from tests or assessments. Still, holidays and other college closures might delay this process.

Contacting an Advisor

After you finish the placement process, you must contact an advisor to register for courses. Please visit the College's advising site  for the best ways to ask questions and schedule appointments.

ALEKS-PPL Prep and Learning Modules

When you finish the ALEKS-PPL math placement test, the ALEKS platform creates a series of prep and learning modules to help you improve your math skills for another attempt. The study modules do not work on phones and tablets . You must use a desktop or laptop computer running recent versions of Windows or macOS. You may also use recent Chromebook models. Use the yellow button below to log into ALEKS-PPL and continue working. This link is not the placement test.

Getting Copies of Placement Test Scores

If you have already taken a placement test at a PGCC campus within the last four years, you may request a printed copy of your placement test scores from the Testing Center. You must come to the Testing Center in person and show a valid photo ID to get your scores. The testing center is located in Bladen Hall, Room 100, at PGCC's main campus in Largo, MD.

Transferring Placement Test Scores

Students may also request a transfer of certain placement test scores directly to other accredited institutions. The College cannot guarantee which scores other institutions and organizations will accept or use. Contact us below for more information.

Contact the Testing Center

Email: [email protected] Phone number: 301-546-0147

• Get Ready to Take the Placement Test
• Learn About Exemptions and Test Waivers
• Sample Tests
• WDCE Program Tests
• Transfer placement test scores

Principals Have a Lead Role in the ‘Science of Reading.’ Are They Ready?

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This is the first of two stories about how to support principals in the work of shifting how schools teach reading. Part 2 will appear next week.

Nathaniel Messick thought he’d learned a lot about reading. The biology teacher-turned-principal of the Fertile-Beltrami school in northwest Minnesota had little knowledge about “evidence-based” literacy instruction when he first took on the role in 2014, so he taught himself the basics by reading the teacher guides that were part of the school’s curriculum. Hoping to become more valuable as an instruction leader, he even put himself through the LETRS for Leaders training program, which took him deep into the research about how children learn to read.

But Messick has had no time to rest on his laurels. In 2023, Minnesota became one of the 38 states to pass legislation overhauling how reading is taught . Like those others, the state is trying to shift towards a vast body of theoretical knowledge and practice called the “science of reading.”

The new law brought with it a tightly curated set of three curricular choices, new screening tools that must be applied to all grades, and brand-new professional development for teachers.

Messick is especially nervous about the last part. It means he’s got to cajole his staff—teachers, literacy coaches, paraprofessionals, and assistant principals—to change the way they’ve taught reading for the last decade. And he has to retrain himself for unfamiliar aspects of the new curriculum, which is supposed to be more culturally responsive .

“Teachers understand that reading well is the foundation of everything. But they are overwhelmed, … worried about when they’ll find the time to learn [a new curriculum],” Messick said. “I’m trying to find ways to do this well. But we don’t have a choice. It’s the law now.”

Messick’s conundrum is one that principals all over the United States are facing as they shift practices on reading.

Principals are a linchpin to the success or failure of any school’s instructional reform, but despite decades of research showing the link between principals, student achievement, and teacher satisfaction, the contours of their role as instructional leaders aren’t always clear, experts say. Principals are treated, at best, as supporting cast members.

“In the last 20 years of education reform, the entire orientation has been to stay close to the classroom. The policy instinct is to think of teachers first, get them what they need,” said Emily Freitag, the CEO of Instructional Partners, which works with school districts to train teachers and principals on using evidence-based curricula. “But very rarely do we think through what principals need to know and do to make this change happen.”

Building principal knowledge on ‘science of reading’ shifts

In the text of Minnesota’s new reading law , for instance, there are extensive directives to schools on the content and frequency of teacher training. Training for principals—which isn’t specifically differentiated from teacher training in the law—is only mentioned in a reference to unspent district funds. Minnesota’s state legislature has earmarked $70 million to implement the new reading law.

“Maybe it feels too hierarchical, too removed [from the classroom] to focus on what school leaders need to know about instruction. But we’ve paid the price for that over and over. We simply have to change that strategy,” Freitag added.

For one thing, the science of reading doesn’t come neatly in a box of textbooks; it’s a body of knowledge that braids together numerous strands of research. That’s why, said Freitag, it’s important for principals to be steeped in the science. The distinct components—phonics, language structure, reading comprehension , writing , and building knowledge —all work in tandem, and principals need to know how these parts are connected to each other, where they’re embedded in the curriculum, and making sure lessons attend to each.

“Maybe it feels too hierarchical, too removed [from the classroom] to focus on what school leaders need to know about instruction. But we’ve paid the price for that over and over."

“Anyone observing can know if the curriculum is being used. But principals need to know if it’s being used well. They also need to know what parts teachers are likely to skip,” said Freitag.

It’s complicated to build this depth of knowledge quickly. Before Kathy Daugherty, the coordinator for reading and RTI for the Murfreesboro district in Tennessee, took on the challenge, the district had been using a “hodgepodge” of reading techniques and modules from the lesson marketplace Teachers Pay Teachers.

“Everything you heard on Sold A Story was happening in our district,” Daugherty said, referring to a popular 2021 podcast about how reading curricula used by schools had long eschewed the evidence-based practices associated with the science of reading.

Daugherty’s job was to bring coherence in the district’s literacy instruction. She needed to attack on two fronts: to implement an explicit approach to word-reading that begins with manipulating sounds and letters in parallel with improving comprehension. And principals had to be trained alongside teachers.

Murfreesboro, which has 13 schools and about 750 teachers, created an in-house literacy network—a system of district literacy experts—who train teachers and coaches in the schools. Principals attend the same meetings.

“Some of the principals even attended our summer bootcamp on the sounds-first approach when we first started,” said Daugherty. In addition to this general training, the network hosts a monthly meeting with principals separately, to discuss new instructional strategies and identify challenges that principals may face in implementing the curriculum.

The principal’s delicate job of working with teachers on reading

About a decade ago, Kirsten Jennette was an elementary school principal in the Seaford. Del., district as it switched to the Bookworms reading curriculum. Jennette was tasked with implementing a switchover much like Murfreesboro’s—from guided reading, which relies heavily on tiered books assigned on the basis of iffy gauges of students’ reading levels , to the science of reading.

The new curriculum didn’t raise any red flags for Jennette, when she first spent time learning it. In fact, she liked how it threaded together instructional strategies across grades. But getting her teachers on board was a whole other story.

“The curriculum has a specific way of teaching letters in kindergarten. It focuses on the letters ‘b’ and ‘m’ before any others. Teachers found that strange because they were used to starting with ‘a,’” said Jennette.

For the first few years of implementation, Jennette simply asked her teachers to implement the strategies, without worrying too much about the background science. Implicitly, she also asked teachers to trust her. What helped, said Jennette, was that both principals and teachers were trained on smaller chunks of teaching techniques instead of everything at once.

First, they’d learn strategies to teach the whole class to read together, and then move on to tailoring instruction to skills each student needed extra help on. It helped teachers adjust to the new curriculum, and for principals like Jennette, giving feedback wasn’t overwhelming.

Jennette wasn’t afraid of putting her foot down if her teachers resisted the curriculum or questioned it too much; she trusted that its creators knew more about translating research into practice than she or they did. What helped, Jennette said, was that she always presented herself as a partner to the teachers in their inquiries. She would carry back teachers’ questions about the lesson plans to the curriculum designer to get answers.

Teacher attitudes also shifted as the receipts came back—the school’s literacy scores improved across grades. By the second year of the implementation, teacher professional learning teams had begun to address the deeper science behind the instructional strategies.

Principals use ‘learning walks’ to support shift to ‘science of reading’

One of the key characteristics of an effective principal, as detailed in the research, is their ability to support their teachers on instructional strategies.

Murfreesboro’s main intervention with principals on that front was training them on how to do an observational learning walk in their school. The purpose of the walk is to observe how teachers enact the curriculum in action and give teachers granular feedback on specific instructional decisions.

Each observation could target something different. For instance, if a class is supposed to work on decoding, principals must look for specific signs: Are the students sounding out words? Are they manipulating letter sounds? Are they encoding —writing the letters and words down? On their learning walks, principals need to pay special attention to the sequence of the lessons—decoding letters, for instance, generally comes before writing, and alongside knowledge building.

Learning walks also highlight where teachers have let old habits slip back.

“I don’t think it’s intentional. Teachers had their first training back in 2021. There is a tendency to go back to what’s comfortable,” Daugherty said. “We noticed on our walks that teachers weren’t spending two to three minutes manipulating sounds at the start of their class, like they’re supposed to.”

That accountability component is critical and can distinguish what principals bring to the table that’s different from what informal coaches do, said Freitag.

Principals may leave it up to the coaches to observe and tweak instructional strategies. Ultimately, though, coaches are not evaluators. The principal holds that responsibility, said Freitag. “For teachers, [it’s like] a mom and dad effect.”

Districts must support principals’ efforts on reading

Four years into implementing the new curriculum, Murfreesboro’s literacy network is pulling back from its schools, and has put principals in charge of the whole operation.

The pullback will be a meaningful change for the principals, who until now have relied heavily on Daugherty or her colleagues to be physically present in the schools, and by their side, on the learning walks.

The district wants principals to run the learning walks, give teachers feedback, and direct them to more training if required—a delicate balance toggling between their roles as managers and instructional leaders.

But as principals grow in their confidence and take on more responsibility for getting the work done, they’ll still need ongoing guidance. Jennette’s former role as a principal informs her new one, as the district’s instructional lead, a role she just stepped into this year. She now meets with the school leaders three times a month and spends at least an hour discussing their school improvement plans and schools’ literacy scores.

Small or large, her new job is to support the instructional team that principals put together. This kind of support is best given, said Freitag, when it’s coupled with on-site visits to schools as principals observe and give their feedback, instead of delivered as one-off PD meetings.

Best practices for principals who lead change in reading are still emerging. Freitag’s organization has recently concluded a 17-district survey to pin down more exactly what that role should look like. That research is forthcoming.

I’ve learned that you must take yourself out of the moment. Keep one eye on what’s being taught, and the other on how it meets the standards. It takes a long time to become proficient.

It can’t come fast enough for principals like Messick, who will begin the next school term with a new reading curriculum.

For now, Messick’s counting on his previous experience.

“I’ve learned that you must take yourself out of the moment. Keep one eye on what’s being taught, and the other on how it meets the [state’s] standards,” he said."It takes a long time to become proficient.”

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How I learned to make the most of summer reading

The leisurely season, I came to realize, offered me the freedom and time to delve into classics like “The Brothers Karamazov” and “Invisible Man.”

It’s hard to tell this story without sounding pretentious, but here goes. Not too long ago, I reached for my old copy of “The Brothers Karamazov.” (I wanted to refamiliarize myself with the Grand Inquisitor sequence.) Opening the pages, I was startled to see a tiny rivulet of sand spill out. I could be even more pretentious and call the moment Proustian, because in the next second, I was lofted back over a span of decades to the place where I first read that book.

It was a beach in Duck, N.C., where my mother liked to rent a house every summer. Like many other English people I’ve met, she welcomed unfiltered sunshine wherever she could find it, and I was happy to go along because, more than the ocean or the salt air, I was drawn to the emptiness, which I knew I would be able to fill with reading.

By then I’d ventured into some approximation of post-collegiate adulthood, and it had dawned on me that reading was no longer a thing the world rewarded. It had to be carried out on the bounce, on the sly, when the day’s drudgery was done or before it had begun. So a week at the beach was the kind of gift I was in no mood to squander. I can still see myself, collapsed in a folding chair beneath a rented beach umbrella. Every part of me is covered or lotioned up (half-English kids burn easy) except for my feet, which are buried in the sand. From time to time, I look up, stare at a sandpiper or a garland of kelp. If there’s no breeze to cool things down, I might get up and wade out in the water, execute a few halfhearted body surfs. Then it’s back to the chair.

I was in a family that valued the written word, which meant that nobody bothered me or expected me to do anything other than what I was doing. The hours didn’t so much fly by as condense into a tidal pool. And it was precisely because I’d been given this expanse of freedom that I couldn’t see spending it on what are normally called “summer books.” This wasn’t snobbery: I was a way-back lover of mysteries and thrillers, which I read and enjoyed throughout the year. But where else would I have the leisure to read, yes, “The Brothers Karamazov”? Or “The Magic Mountain,” “Invisible Man,” “Lord Jim,” “Wuthering Heights” or “Sense and Sensibility”?

It had to be summer because that was the only route to immersion. When I learned, for instance, that I had two months after my college graduation to be idle, I didn’t lounge by a pool — I started reading Henry James and kept reading. “The American,” “The Portrait of a Lady,” “The Bostonians,” “The Golden Bowl”: I plowed through them like sand castles. The more byzantine James’s syntax grew, the harder I pushed, because I had never encountered a sensibility of such infinite subtlety and nuance. (In later months, I would learn that James was both a great writer and a terrible writing model, but the original enchantment lingered.)

Summer reading

I suppose you’d call all these books warhorses now, or else tokens of overstriving, but when I think back to that ardent young man, I don’t believe he was trying to impress anybody. He was operating on the assumption that had driven him since childhood, that people out there knew things, and if he wanted to know them, too, he had to come knocking. And that innocence, that hunger, was part and parcel with summer, because he was entering his own life’s summer.

I sit now, in effect, at the tail end of that summer. The future, which once seemed an endless plain of possibility, is now a peninsula. So many things have changed, including my relationship to the written word. I couldn’t possibly sit down today and read — or do anything — for six consecutive hours. Books are now inseparably tied to my work. When I’m not reading for research, I’m reading for a review or a writer’s workshop or some other professional obligation. Now and again a book fills me with the old engine roar of wonder — I cherish that — but even then, I’m still, consciously or unconsciously, poking under the hood to see how it’s happening. The authorial eye never relaxes. In my mind, I edit the instructions on shampoo bottles.

So I miss, even envy, that disinterested lad on the beach, swathed in towels and sunblock, and I wonder if, by the time my life’s autumn and winter roll around, I’ll be ready to rejoin him. Not on the beach, perhaps, but the nearest best thing. All the deadlines and contracts will be cast to one side, and I’ll be able to say once more, and mean it: Tell me a story . The Karamazovs will be there waiting.

Louis Bayard, a Book World contributing writer, is the author of several novels, including “Jackie & Me” and the upcoming “The Wildes.”

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Love everything about books? Make sure to subscribe to our Book Club newsletter , where Ron Charles guides you through the literary news of the week.

Check out our coverage of this year’s Pulitzer winners: Jayne Anne Phillips won the fiction prize for her novel “ Night Watch .” The nonfiction prize went to Nathan Thrall, for “ A Day in the Life of Abed Salama .” Cristina Rivera Garza received the memoir prize for “ Liliana’s Invincible Summer .” And Jonathan Eig received the biography prize for his “ King: A Life .”

Best books of 2023: See our picks for the 10 best books of 2023 or dive into the staff picks that Book World writers and editors treasured in 2023. Check out the complete lists of 50 notable works for fiction and the top 50 nonfiction books of last year.

Find your favorite genre: Three new memoirs tell stories of struggle and resilience, while five recent historical novels offer a window into other times. Audiobooks more your thing? We’ve got you covered there, too . If you’re looking for what’s new, we have a list of our most anticipated books of 2024 . And here are 10 noteworthy new titles that you might want to consider picking up this April.

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Types of essays to expect in your IELTS Writing Task 2

Discover the Common Essay Types in IELTS Writing Task 2. Explore types of IELTS Essays with Questions and Samples.

In the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) Writing test Task 2, you need to write an essay with at least 250 words. This applies to both the Academic and General training modules.

But should you approach all essay questions the same way? The answer is 'no.' That's because there are different types of questions you might get. It is important to know what each question is asking you to do. Even if your grammar and vocabulary are excellent, you could still lose points if you don't understand the task. So, let’s take a closer look to make you understand all about Writing task 2 essays to help you score higher on your IELTS test .

Types of essays in IELTS Writing task 2

There are different types of essays in the IELTS Writing Task 2 , you can use these in your IELTS test preparation to score higher:

1. Opinion essay

These essays are often known as 'agree or disagree' or 'argumentative' essays and are quite common in IELTS Task 2.

The question usually starts with a statement. Afterward, you'll be asked for your own opinion about that statement. They might use these kinds of phrases:

What do you think?

Do you agree or not?

How much do you agree or disagree?

Example question: With traffic jams and pollution increasing every year in big cities, some people say that public transport should be free in big cities to help reduce these problems which are caused by cars. To what extent do you agree or disagree?

At the beginning of your essay, it's a good idea to share some background information. However, what's really important is to rephrase the words used in the question and also show where you stand on the issue. For instance:

”With the growth of middle classes around the world, ownership of motor cars has become much more common, particularly for those who reside in large urban areas. It has been argued that free public transport should be provided in these metropolises as a method to curb the amount of polluted air and traffic congestion. This essay will explain why this approach should not be undertaken for cost and mobility reasons.”

Regarding your body paragraphs, it's crucial to focus on a single main idea that you elaborate on and expand. You can achieve this by providing more details about a specific point, offering an example, discussing a result, or even acknowledging an opposing viewpoint.

Discussion essay

In discussion essays, you're required to talk about both sides of an argument. Typically, you'll also be asked for your own opinion. The simplest way to tackle this kind of IELTS Task 2 question is to select one perspective to support and another to oppose.

Example question:

Some people say that children should learn a foreign language when they are in kindergarten, but others feel that it is better for children to do this when they are teenagers. Discuss both of these views and give your own opinion.

The key concept to grasp in a task like this is that your response should have three components:

Discuss both of these perspectives (1st and 2nd part)

Present your own opinion (3rd part)

In your introduction, it's essential to address both of these perspectives, and indicating your stance can also be an effective approach. For instance:

“ Given that the world has become more globalised, the need to be able to use foreign languages has increased. As a result, there are those who believe that a child’s kindergarten years should be when another language is introduced, while the opposing view is that it is ideal to wait for when a youngster reaches adolescence. This essay will reflect on both of these viewpoints before concluding with why the infancy argument is more valid.”

When you 'discuss both of these perspectives' in your body paragraphs, remember to refrain from mentioning your personal viewpoint. This helps prevent any confusion between your own thoughts and the opinions of others.

Two-part questions

In IELTS Writing Task 2 , you might get two-part questions. These questions require you to address two different aspects or viewpoints related to a specific topic or issue. It's crucial to understand how to approach and structure your response to effectively address both parts of the question and provide a well-rounded answer.

Typically, two-part questions will ask you to:

Discuss both sides: You will be expected to present arguments or perspectives from different angles. This involves examining the pros and cons, advantages and disadvantages, or contrasting viewpoints on the given topic.

Give your opinion: In addition to discussing both sides, you will also need to express your own opinion or position on the matter. This means you should clearly state whether you agree or disagree with the topic and provide reasons for your stance.

To approach these questions successfully, follow these steps:

Introduction: Begin by introducing the topic and paraphrasing the question. Make it clear that you will discuss both sides and express your opinion.

Body Paragraphs: Dedicate one paragraph to each side of the argument. Present the arguments, evidence, or examples supporting each perspective. Avoid revealing your opinion in these paragraphs.

Conclusion: Summarise the main points from both sides of the argument and restate your opinion. Your conclusion should offer a clear and concise summary of your position.

Remember to use appropriate transition words to guide the reader through your essay and maintain a logical flow between paragraphs. Additionally, ensure that your essay is well-organised and that you provide adequate support for your arguments. Practicing with sample two-part questions can help you become more proficient in handling this type of task in the IELTS Writing test .

These days, many cities have problems when they grow quickly, such as accidents and traffic jams. Why do these problems occur? How do these problems impact people who travel for work or study?

A trend in current times is the need for many workers to spend time outside of company hours on answering text and e-mail messages for their jobs. What problems does this cause for the worker? What can be done to reduce the impact of these problems?

It is becoming very common these days for students to take courses over the Internet instead of in face-to-face classrooms. Why are more students choosing this way of learning? Is this a positive or a negative development?

In this type of task, you can write a body paragraph on each of the two questions, but it is important to fully understand what your focus should be. Try to match these tasks (A, B, or C) with the type of response required:

We hope that this article has provided you with valuable insights to improve your readiness for the various essay types you may come across in the IELTS Writing test.

In your IELTS journey, remember that consistent practice, careful analysis of question prompts, and effective time management are key elements to achieving success. So, keep practicing, stay focused, and approach each essay task with confidence to reach your desired IELTS score.

If you want to know more about the IELTS test , you can get in touch with your nearest IDP IELTS test centre. Our team of IELTS experts will help you with your queries.

Read more insightful articles:

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Old Essay Written by a Teenage Travis Scott Surfaces, He Talks Kid Cudi, Big Sean, Ye and More

Travis Scott was a huge hip-hop buff even in his teenage years. In an old college essay that surfaced online, the famed rapper-producer wrote about Kid Cudi , Big Sean , Ye and more.

Travis Scott Writes About G.O.O.D Music, Big Sean and More

On Sunday (May 26), Travis Scott's 2009 college essay about G.O.O.D Music record label members Kid Cudi, Big Sean, Ye and more was leaked on social media. The Houston rhymer, who attended The University of Texas at San Antonio and dropped out during his sophomore year, penned a four-page paper in December of 2009 to what seems to be his English teacher. In the essay, which can be seen below, Travis Scott explained that although Big Sean and Kid Cudi had different approaches to their music, they shared a love for hip-hop.

"Good Music is known all around the world," Travis Scott wrote in the essay's first sentence. "Rappers such as Big Sean and Kid Cudi are well-known rappers that had similar lifestyles but different messages. What they had in common carried them an opportunity to get sign to an multi-million dollar company called G.O.O.D MUSIC."

According to Travis' following excerpt, Big Sean and Kid Cudi's passion for rhymes led them to bet on themselves and blindly approach Kanye West for an opportunity to get recognized and signed.

"Both of these rappers had enough courage to step up to the famous Kanye West and rap there heart which led them to instant success," Travis continued. "Even though these two moguls are sign to the same label and are part of the same music family there styles and there background are different but they were brought together by a beautiful sound we call music."

After, La Flame gave a background story about Cudi and Sean Don's upbringing and explained how they caught Ye's eye. The overarching theme in Travis' paper is for people to create their own opportunities instead of waiting for one.

"Success is not something that is given out," the 33-year-old artist wrote in his last paragraph. "You must go out and take what you want."

The G.O.O.D Music record label was founded by Ye in 2004.

Read More:  Travis Scott's Utopia Immediately Draws Comparisons to Kanye West's Yeezus Album

Ye performs during travis scott's circus maximus tour.

Ye and Travis Scott seem to still have a close-knit relationship after all these years. In February of 2024, Ye joined the artist on stage during Travis Scott's Circus Maximus Tour stop in Orlando, Fla. In the video, which can be seen below, the Yeezy founder performed "Runaway," "All of the Lights" and "Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1." Sometime later, Ye was joined by Ty Dolla $ign and Bump J to perform their "Vultures" single.

In August of 2023, Travis Scott brought out Ye during his tour stop at Circus Maximus in Rome, Italy, as well. Before bringing Ye out, he praised him for sticking by him through thick and thin. The visual can be seen below.

Read More:  Travis Scott Brings Out Kanye West at Circus Maximus Concert - Watch

Take a look at Travis Scott's college essay below.

See Travis Scott's Old Essay Where He Talks Kid Cudi, Big Sean, Ye and More

Watch ye perform "runaway,"  "vultures" and more at travis scott's concert, watch travis scott bring out kanye west to perform during his circus maximus tour, see 50 of the greatest hip-hop album covers, more from xxl.

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What I Realized After Reading Solangeu0026#039;s Essay

Ruby and I walked through the streets of Chico, California.

I was an exchange student and Ruby came from Taiwan. There was a house party happening that we were excited to attend. We talked about all the other events we could go to together while out there. However, what happened later that night is something I am still trying to understand to this day.

A red car slowly passed us and one of the passengers opened the car window. He threw a few white objects toward my direction, yelling “N****r!” His friends laughed – perhaps from their view, he appeared cool or right .

Across the street another black person witnessing the occurrence got yelled at as well. I looked down at the ground and noticed that those white objects were eggs. I had been egged, because of my skin color. A sense of fear and shame overwhelmed me.

I thought to myself, “ What if they would return? Are others laughing as well? How can I get away from here as soon as possible?”

Reading Solange’s essay “ AND DO YOU BELONG? I DO” reminded me the unfortunate event that happened to me back in 2014.

During my childhood and teenage years , I often experienced being treated differently than my peers. Finding a side job was a constant challenge–at some point, I considered removing the headshot from my resume. What I can say is that my experience in that city changed me forever: I didn’t enjoy going out, and when walking outside in the evening, I would avoid passing groups of youngsters. But b y the end of that year, I decided to respond how Solange did.

I refused to put myself in a hutch and label myself as solely a skin color.

I am more than a gorgeous build-up of melanin. Like everyone else, I am a person . I have emotions, achievements, and abilities. I started surrounding myself with friends who did not choose to label me by color, either.

In reflection, I asked myself, “ Why am I doing this to myself? Why am I being hard to myself based on my skin color?”

You can walk on water and someone will still try to find a reason to bring you down. Whether it is based on your skin color, your personality, or even your family, people will seek out ways to make you feel bad for your differences, or try to take away from the things you cherish most. Just remember that those people are ignorant; many of them have been raised with the belief that they are superior to others simply because of their skin color. It is not your fault that they choose to live in a bubble while time continues to evolve.

Globalization urges professionals to negotiate with other cultures. Based on my experience, I still believe every student needs to study abroad. You simply cannot succeed when you are close-minded. Those who manage to do so will certainly face some life-changing moments to change their mind eventually – because, like Solange, there will be someone who will choose to speak up against their incorrect beliefs.

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