Reading Recovery

Reading Recovery is a school-based, short-term intervention designed for children aged five or six, who are the lowest achieving in literacy after their first year of school. For instance, a child who is unable to read the simplest of books or write their own name, after a year in school, would be appropriate for a referral to a Reading Recovery program. The intervention involves intensive one-to-one lessons for 30 minutes a day with a trained literacy teacher, for between 12 and 20 weeks.

Reading Recovery was developed in the 1970s by New Zealand educator Marie Clay. After lengthy observations of early readers, Clay defined reading as a message-getting, problem-solving activity, and writing as a message-sending, problem-solving activity. Clay suggested that both activities involved linking invisible patterns of oral language with visible symbols.

A combination of teacher judgment and systematic evaluation procedures identify those lowest-achieving children for whom Reading Recovery was designed. The lowest performing children (the bottom 5-20% depending on the context) are identified using the Observation Survey (Clay, 2002), a multi-faceted series of assessment tools covering early reading and writing. The Observation Survey has been standardized in the UK and US to determine its validity and reliability, however coefficients have not been reported. Once a child has been identified and referred to the Reading Recovery program, intervention is developed. The intervention is different for every child, assessing what the child knows and what s/he needs to learn next. The focus of each lesson is to understand and construct "messages"—to understand messages in reading and construct messages in writing—and to learn how to attend to detail without losing focus on meaning.

Daily 30 minute lessons are individually designed and delivered by specially trained teachers. Drawing from their training, Reading Recovery teachers make moment-to-moment decisions to support the child's learning. During each lesson, children read many little books. These include two to three familiar books, a rereading of the previous day's new book and the introduction and reading of a new story. Teachers take a running record of the previous day's new book to analyse the child's independence and reading behaviour. Children also compose, write and read their own messages or stories. Magnetic alphabet letters are used for sorting, to assist visual discrimination, and to look closely at how words work. Reading skills, including phonetic skills, are taught in the context of extended reading and writing by Reading Recovery teachers who have completed a year-long inservice education program that focuses on moment-to-moment responses to children's actions and behaviour.

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Wikipedia