Reflection paper: I.R.I-Assessment Tool Designed To Recognise Reading Dificulties

Reflection Paper: I.R.I-Assessment Tool Designed To Recognise Reading Dificulties

Though Jony was being referred for special services, it was still Paul's job to improve his reading. Because of Jony's relative strength with print, the third grade-level passage represents an appropriate level of difficulty for instructional purposes as long as important word meanings are discussed before the material is read. Paul decided that Jony's instruction should focus on two major areas. First, the development of word meanings should be emphasized during pre-reading and post-reading, focusing on the salient, discriminating features of words. Jony had global senses of words but not specific senses. Second, systematic instruction should be developed in the area of using text information to infer word meanings by analyzing the words in context (Blachowicz & Zabroske, 1990). This type of instruction has a strong metacognitive and metalinguistic overlay, recognizing the need for conscious control of strategies which often emerges in middle school and secondary readers (Ehren, 1994).

Focusing on features. Words can be highlighted before readings and predictive activities generating tentative meanings can be emphasized, so that the reader has a focus for contextual learning. Semantic feature analysis (Blachowicz & Johnson, 1994; Pittleman, Heimlich, Berglund, & French, 1991) would be the process Paul would use to help focus Jony on the features of word meaning. Semantic feature analysis (see Figure 5) requires students to complete a grid which looks at characteristic discriminating elements indicated. This often involves contrastive pairs of words, as in the example of crude and sophisticated.

Paul also chose to use several other strategies that focused on featural distinction among words:

1. Insult or Compliment? This activity works well with adjectives, since it deals with the favorable or unfavorable connotations of words. The professional prepares a list of words and gives it to the students. The words may be unfamiliar, in which case students will use a dictionary, or they may be words that have already been defined and discussed, in which case the activity may be considered an application of word meanings. The students' task is to decide whether the use of these words to describe them personally would be a compliment or an insult. The professional follows these with a discussion.

2. Choose and Use. The professional has students think about the features of words to answer questions that make them think. For example: Would a street urchin be well dressed? Should you trust someone who bamboozled you? Discussion and explanation should follow along with further use of the words (Beck, Perfetti, & McKeown, 1982).

3. Word Sorts. In this activity students organize words into categories. The professional can provide the categories, or the students may be required to search for the relationships among word concepts in order to derive their own.

McKeown (1985) has documented the basic steps involved in learning from context: noting that an important word is unknown, generating hypotheses about meaning, crosschecking by reading on, going back or consulting a friend or ...