Struggling Readers : Engaging and Teaching in Grades 3-8

Teaching struggling students to become active, engaged, and successful readers is the focus of this idea-filled, comprehensive teaching resource. In this volume, best-selling authors Maureen McLaughlin and Tim Rasinski explore the multifaceted nature of struggling readers, provide practical approaches to teaching, and detail the roles that motivation and engagement play in the process. The book features a strong research base, a sound theoretical framework, and numerous practical ideas for teaching struggling readers. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction to Maureen and Tim's teaching beliefs. They begin by discussing the nature of struggling readers and then focus on the importance of knowing our students, their preferred modes of learning, and their need to represent their thinking in multiple ways. The authors also emphasize the importance of teaching through authentic tasks and basing instruction on the Gradual Release of Responsibility Model. In Chapters 2-8, Maureen and Tim address a variety of essential topics, including motivation and engagement, the nature of text, phonics and decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. In Chapter 9, the authors focus on writing and reading, processes that they believe to be inextricably linked, and in Chapter 10, they relate all that they have written to their long-standing belief that teaching is an art. The Appendix is filled with more than 20 reproducibles that include teaching ideas to stimulate motivation and engagement, as well as the teaching of phonics, vocabulary, and comprehension of narrative and informational texts. Struggling Readers: Engaging and Teaching in Grades 3-8 is based on Maureen and Tim's combined 80 years of teaching experience. It is an essential resource for classroom teachers, staff developers, reading specialists, literacy coaches, curriculum coordinators, and teacher educators.