Interactions that Scaffold Reading Performance

Journal of Literacy Research, Winter 2004/2005 by Rodgers, Emily M

In this article, findings from case study research of two effective literacy teachers are presented in order to describe in rich detail the nature of effective scaffolding. The teachers worked one-to-one with first-grade students who were experiencing extreme difficulty in learning to read. The complexity of scaffolding is described in terms of the instructional decisions that teachers must make on a moment-by-moment basis about the kind of help (what to work on) and level or amount of help to provide at points of difficulty during reading.

Early intervention is key to changing the course of development for children most at risk of literacy failure (Clay, 1987; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). A powerful way to deliver this instruction is in the form of one-to-one tutoring (Leslie & Allen, 2000) because the teacher can customize instruction to a student's individual needs in this context (Lepper, Drake, & O'Donnell-Johnson, 1997).

Research suggests, however, that simply providing one-to-one assistance is not sufficient to ensure progress on complex tasks such as learning to read and write; rather, the way performance is scaffolded may also account for the progress (Pinnell, Lyons, DeFord, Bryk, & Seltzer, 1994). The type of assistance provided to the student seems critical for scaffolding development.

The purpose of this study, therefore, is to examine the nature of scaffolding in a one-to-one literacy tutoring intervention, in terms of the teacher's and the student's participation in the scaffolding process. The findings from this study provide a rich description about how effective literacy tutors deliver instruction in response to a student's growing and changing literacy competencies.

Theoretical Framework

The Reading Process

I view the process of learning to read as one of emerging into literacy. This period of literacy learning is generally thought of as lasting from birth until the child can read and write conventionally (Labbo & Teale, 1997). When this view was first introduced in the late 1960s (coined first by Marie Clay in her doctoral dissertation, according to Teale & Sulzby, 1986), it reflected a new perspective on literacy learning that contrasted with the prevailing view at the time: that children became ready to read once they mastered certain prerequisite skills (Yaden, Rowe, & MacGillivray, 2000). What I take from this theory of emergent literacy is that children are on individual paths to literacy, from the time they are born and throughout their early years at school, as they move toward more conventional ways of reading and writing. I also assume that instruction has the potential to foster and change the pace of reading and writing development; the teacher does not have to wait until the child has reached a certain level of maturity to teach the child about reading (Clay, 1991; Labbo & Teale, 1997).

Readers use several sources of information to anticipate what they are reading and to decode unfamiliar words, including the meaning of a story, their knowledge of the structure of language, and the visual information in the text (Clay, 1991, 2001a; Goodman & Goodman, 1977). Clay describes the process of using these sources of information:

If he [the high progress reader] cannot get the meaning with fast recall of known words he shifts to using slower analyses of words and letter clusters, and letters. If the first thing he notices are some letters he makes some letter-to-sound links to solve the words, which become chunked in phrases to get to messages.... Throughout this entire flexible process, the competent reader manages to stay focused on the messages conveyed by the text, while unpicking the detailed information stored in the print on the page. (Clay, 2002, p. 15)

Children must not only learn how to weigh and coordinate these sources of information, they must also learn to work strategically on text; to monitor or notice when the sources of information do not add up (e.g., a word might look right but not make sense in the story or an attempt might make sense but not look right). In addition to monitoring their reading, children must also know how to search for more information to make another attempt and how to check one source of information against another in order to self-correct and achieve a better match among the sources of information (Clay, 1969, 2001b; Vellutino & Scanlon, 2002). A child's reading development can thus be characterized as developing increasing control over sources of information so that attempts are meaningful, fit the structure of English language, and bear visual resemblance to the word in the text (Clay, 2001b).

The reader's task, therefore, is to integrate information from the hierarchical (words are made up of letters and sounds) and serial (words are written from left to right across a word and across a page) order of language with experiences and then tailor this integration of information to the text. This orchestration leads to what has been referred to as the construction of an inner control (Clay, 1991) or, similarly, the development of an executive system (Vellutino & Scanlon, 2002), in that the child monitors reading and checks one source against another in a sequential solving process.