Chasing fireflies : understanding struggling readers

There is a wide gap between current understandings of how readers read and how reading is taught in school, particularly to "at-risk" readers. Contemporary reading research and reader-response theories suggest that struggling readers should not be subjected to remedial programs involving "drills and skills," simplified "decodable" reading material, and most of all, low expectations of their teachers. Reading problems are not solved by filling gaps in a child's knowledge or skills. Instead, reluctant readers must be treated as readers, encouraged to develop their personal interests and enthusiasms through reading, and, most importantly, to make their own sense of their reading. By helping my students to read and respond to texts rich in content and appropriate to their interests and ages, I observed significant improvement in their confidence and competence as readers.This teacher-research study describes the growth of four readers in grade-seven with long histories of failure in school. Their stories are told in case studies that contain descriptions of the classroom activities and events that influenced their progress, observations of their interactions with their peers and with me, their teacher, and finally, analyses of their work samples. This work is also about my role in my students' development and, thus, includes my reflections on how I transformed both reading and reader-response theory into practice and on relevant features of my classroom management. In the case study of each student, I have tried to capture their different learning styles and problems and also my thinking processes that arose from the beliefs, questions, observations, reflections, hunches, and flashes of insight that I, like most teachers, used daily and that formed the substance of my reader-based pedagogy. In addition, I discuss in detail the ideas in the research literature, such as reader-response theory and the whole language/phonics debate, that help to explain my students' progress.As a teacher-researcher, I describe my teaching, as well as its effects on my students. Through understanding struggling readers, I came to understand reading. This is an account of my learning that delineates the nature of the interactions between teacher and students which is, in fact, the real curriculum of any classroom. An essential part of teaching is evaluating its effectiveness; this dissertation is a sustained evaluation of my reading program through four of my students' responses to it during one and, in two cases, two school years