Comprehensive Literacy for All

Teaching Students with Significant Disabilities to Read and Write

Karen Erickson, David Koppenhaver

• Publisher: Brookes Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781681253732
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Literacy improves lives—and with the right instruction and supports, all students can learn to read and write. That's the core belief behind this teacher-friendly handbook, your practical guide to providing comprehensive, high-quality literacy instruction to students with significant disabilities. Drawing on decades of classroom experience, the authors present their own innovative model for teaching students with a wide range of significant disabilities to read and write print in grades preK–12 and beyond. Foundational teaching principles blend with concrete strategies, step-by-step guidance, and specific activities, making this book a complete blueprint for helping students acquire critical literacy skills they'll use inside and outside the classroom. An essential resource for educators, speech-language pathologist, and parents—and an ideal text for courses that cover literacy and significant disabilities—this book will help you ensure that all students have the reading and writing skills they need to unlock new opportunities and reach their potential. READERS WILL:

• Discover 10 success factors for helping students with significant disabilities become literate
• Teach emergent readers and writers skillfully, with evidence-based strategies for shared and independent reading, early writing instruction, and alphabetic and phonological awareness
• Help students acquire conventional literacy skills, with adaptable strategies for teaching reading comprehension, vocabulary, writing, decoding, and spelling
• Organize and deliver comprehensive literacy instruction in a variety of settings, both inside and outside of school
• Use assistive technology effectively to support reading, writing, and communication
• Engage and motivate students and make literacy instruction meaningful to their everyday lives
• PRACTICAL MATERIALS: Sample teaching scenarios and dialogues, how-to strategies, and downloadable resources, including sample lessons, a quick-guide to key literacy terms, lesson sequences, and flowcharts to guide instruction.

SECTION III

Learning to Read and Write

CHAPTER 6

Comprehensive Literacy Instruction

A Research-Based Framework

Each summer the authors of this book hold a week-long literacy camp for students with complex communication needs (see the Camp ALEC web site at http://www.campalec.com/home). We teach classroom teachers, special educators, SLPs, and other professionals to administer diagnostic reading assessments. During the rest of the week, under our guidance, they explore and experiment with motivating reading and writing activities for the campers to expand their repertoires and contribute to a report detailing assessment results and instructional recommendations to families and the campers’ home schools.

Here are the diagnostic reading profiles of three recent campers, each a male adolescent with cerebral palsy, physical impairments, and complex communication needs (see Table 6.1). Jerrold can decode and read high school–level words and read seventh-grade texts with understanding, but he struggles to comprehend text above a fifth-grade difficulty level that is read aloud to him. He needs to strengthen his written language comprehension skills to grow as a reader. Marco can decode and read words at a ninth-grade level and understand texts at a third-grade level that are read aloud to him, but he struggles to read texts to himself with understanding if they are above a first-grade difficulty level. He needs to strengthen his print processing skills to grow as a reader. Jorge can understand texts up to an eighth-grade difficulty level that are read aloud to him, but he can read neither words nor texts above a first-grade level. He needs to strengthen his sight word and decoding skills to grow as a reader.

These are three adolescents with similar disabilities who use high-end speech-generating devices (SGDs) for their face-to-face interactions, and they each have very different needs as readers. It is a small wonder that teachers at every grade level and in every classroom find individual student differences challenging. In this chapter, we describe the theoretical foundation of a comprehensive literacy instruction framework you can use to more systematically organize instruction to address diverse student profiles such as these.

ORIGINS OF OUR APPROACH

Research focused on literacy in students with significant disabilities began in earnest in the 1990s with the creation of the Center for Literacy and Disability Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (https://med.unc.edu/ahs/clds); the authors of this book were involved in this work, each serving as director of the Center at different times. The Center’s research initially focused on the learning needs of individuals with severe physical impairments and complex communication needs and expanded over time to include students with ASD, intellectual disabilities, deafblindness, Rett syndrome, Williams syndrome, and other developmental disabilities. The Center’s earliest work primarily addressed emergent literacy, seeking to implement strategies and programs that enacted David Yoder’s (2001) argument that “no one is ‘too anything’ to learn to read” (p. 6).

Table 6.1.Reading profiles of three students with complex communication needs

Student	Word identification	Silent reading comprehension	Listening comprehension
Jerrold	12th grade	Seventh grade	Fifth grade
Marco	Ninth grade	First grade	Third grade
Jorge	First grade	First grade	Eighth grade

We recognized from the start, however, that emergent literacy was necessary but not sufficient to address the literacy needs of individuals with significant disabilities. Both of us had the good fortune to study advanced reading methods with Jim Cunningham—David in the 1980s and Karen in the early 1990s. Jim was a wealth of knowledge and practice who told our classes, “In the absence of truth, you must have diversity.” He meant there is no foolproof method of identifying a singular approach that will teach all children to read (i.e., basal reading series, commercial reading program, software, other curricular guide), and even the needs of individual children are not stable as they respond or fail to respond to instruction and intervention. He also pointed out to us that reading is a complex cognitive, linguistic, social, and cultural act. His conclusion was that what teachers needed to do, in the absence of such a “reading truth,” was to teach in diverse ways, but systematically rather than eclectically. Jim was advocating for comprehensive instruction long before the term gained popularity. We now discuss the theoretical foundation of comprehensive reading instruction, why comprehensive literacy is necessary for students with significant disabilities, and what it looks like.

THEORETICAL FOUNDATION: THE WHOLE-TO-PART MODEL

The whole-to-part (WTP) model of silent reading comprehension is the theoretical framework underlying our approach to reading instruction (Cunningham, 1993; Erickson, Koppenhaver, & Cunningham, 2017). The WTP model assumes that coordinated effort is required of three abilities, or whole parts—word identification, language comprehension, and print processing—in order to achieve the goal of reading silently with comprehension at every level of text difficulty (see Figure 6.1).

The model assumes that teaching students to read silently, not orally, and doing so with understanding, or comprehension, is the primary goal of literacy instruction in school. It is the ability to read silently with comprehension that changes lives. Over time, it enables students to read text of increasing length and difficulty more efficiently and with greater understanding (Morris et al., 2017). Silent reading with comprehension is the ability that can lead to lifelong learning; rich opportunities accompany this ability. We explain the components of the WTP model in more detail next.

Figure 6.1.Silent reading comprehension.

Word Identification

Word identification is the cognitive process of making print-to-sound links in order to translate printed words into their speech equivalents (Cunningham et al., 2004). For young, typically developing readers, word identification begins with spoken word identification; however, the process itself does not require speech and is achieved subvocally or even neurologically during silent reading (Erickson, Koppenhaver, & Cunningham, 2017). Word identification supports working memory, which enables readers to remember words and word order, assign prosody, and support comprehension (De Jong, Bitter, Van Setten, & Marinus, 2009; Eiter & Inhoff, 2010; Rayner & Pollatsek, 1989). Word identification can be achieved either automatically or consciously with decoding strategies (i.e., mediated word identification). Automatic word identification occurs when the reader gains access to a phonological representation of a word effortlessly from memory; this supports understanding, or reading comprehension, because it frees cognitive resources to be directed toward language comprehension (Samuels, Ediger, Willcutt, & Palumbo, 2005). Mediated word identification involves the conscious decoding of those words not automatically recognized. Decoding requires gaining access to letter–sound knowledge, or spelling pattern–sound correspondences, in order to form a phonological representation for the target printed word. It also supports reading comprehension because it leads to automaticity over time (Share, 1999). This is one explanation for why beginning readers may struggle in comprehending text—they are devoting extensive cognitive resources to mediating nearly every word they encounter. In presenting predictable texts to beginning readers, we attempt to decrease the burden of extensive mediated word identification and provide sufficient repetition with variety to increase automatic word identification.

Language Comprehension

Language comprehension comprises two components—knowledge of the world and knowledge of text structures. It represents an individual’s ability to comprehend written language, either while listening to a text read aloud or while reading silently. Knowledge of the world is language-based knowledge or experiences related to the topics and situations represented in any given text. Readers must not only possess relevant language-based knowledge but must also be able to gain access to that knowledge at the appropriate time in order for language comprehension to occur successfully while listening or reading. In addition, language comprehension requires knowledge of text structures, including syntax, cohesion, genre, and length (Mesmer, Cunningham, & Hiebert, 2012). (Syntax refers to the part of grammar dealing with the way sentences are constructed. Cohesion refers to the ways that ideas in a text are systematically linked to one another.) Without experience and familiarity with a variety of text structur...