SCENARIO

You have been asked to support secondary-level struggling readers during a lab period designed to provide extra reading instruction and support. You will need to design reading assessments to determine progress and support methods for a student.

In this task, you will use the attached “Student Profiles” to describe reading strategies that could provide support to the two students to improve their reading comprehension.

Also describe reading comprehension strategies to help support one student’s homework assignment and develop reading assessments to determine a student’s progress.

Student Profiles

Student One: Sofia

Sofia is a 10th-grade student who desires to be successful but often disengages from her studies when she encounters a challenge. She only speaks English. The academic challenges she encounters are often related to reading comprehension. In particular, Sofia struggles with decoding grade-level vocabulary, particularly multisyllabic words. Because she spends excessive amounts of time on individual words in assigned readings, she finds that she is unable to comprehend the main points presented within disciplinary texts. When reading aloud, Sofia also encounters fluency issues and frequently stumbles over words. She must reread texts, causing her to spend excessive amounts of time on a selected passage. This inhibits her ability to comprehend the content. When listening to others read, Sofia successfully comprehends a text’s literal meaning, though making inferences based on the text is challenging for her. Past teachers have been successful in helping her make inferences by providing scaffolded instruction and support. When reading and writing for her own purposes, such as to communicate with friends and family using text messaging and social media, Sofia is successful.

Student Two: Matteo

Matteo is a dedicated 11th-grade student whose first language is Italian. He and his family have lived in the United States for three years, and he possesses conversational English literacy skills, allowing him to engage in casual discussions with his classmates. These skills also allow him to successfully write and read text messages and engage in social media interactions. Academically, he exhibits strong logical reasoning and mathematical abilities, which allow him to be successful at some tasks in his mathematics and science classes. His transcripts from his school in Italy indicate that he was a successful and high-achieving student in all content areas prior to immigrating to the United States. However, in his current school setting, Matteo struggles to succeed on tasks that require heavy reading of informational texts or literature. When charts, graphs, photographs, or other images accompany printed text, his success increases. While reading texts without visual aids, Matteo has difficulty decoding academic language; though if given time to analyze words in the text, he can be successful at the individual word level by extracting meaning and internalizing the word for later use. However, due to the amount of time this word-level analysis takes him, he often has difficulty identifying a text’s overall message. Matteo’s text comprehension, both when reading on his own and when being read to, is severely limited. It also is notable that Matteo’s text comprehension is particularly poor when being read to, but it is slightly improved by reading a text on his own. When reading aloud, Matteo exhibits some fluency issues as he tries to pronounce words.