Observations and Description

When I first saw Danny, he was returning from the resource room with the special education teacher. He was smiling and, somewhat awkwardly, trudging back to his seat in Ms. Smithson's fourth grade class. Danny is tall and athletic, has brown hair, brown eyes, and a mischievous smile. I learned that Danny was returning from extra help with reading, which he is pulled out from the regular classroom for everyday. As he approached his desk, the other students in his group were working quietly. Danny began to ask them questions about what they were doing and making jokes. The other students began to laugh at Danny's antics until they were told to quiet down. The teacher asked Danny to continue with his work and he said "I can't. I don't know how to do it". When he said this, he displayed a sort of "mock exasperation", since he was still smiling and laughing. I noticed that Danny has a tendency to be disruptive to the other students when he is not being helped by the teacher or an aide.

When asked to focus his attention on something, Danny frequently shifts in his seat, shakes his head, and looks around the room. The class went to the library to listen to a book-reading. Within several minutes, Danny was relocated to a seat in close proximity to the librarian because he was talking to a classmate. Despite this relocation, he began looking around the room, playing with an eraser, yawning, and slumping in his seat. The story was about shamans, and after reading the book to the class, the librarian asked the students to do an assignment involving shamans. The word had already been defined several times for the class, yet Danny asked what it meant. The librarian responded by saying, "I've told you already, and I'm not going to tell you again. Figure it out". Danny simply began playing with his eraser again.

During another visit to Danny's school, I observed him participating in physical education. As the children ran laps around the gymnasium, Danny strode beyond the pack, smiling. In this setting, Danny responded to most of the teacher's instructions and followed them carefully. During a game of kickball, he stood first in line to kick the ball and kicked it further than most of the students were able to kick. However, before the next game they played, the teacher asked the students to get their own balls from the closet. Danny approached the teacher and asked him to get a ball. The teacher responded by telling Danny that he had to get his own ball like the rest of the students. Later the teacher divulged to me that Danny typically wants to have "things done for him".

Observing Danny during his reading lesson was quite different than observing him in the physical education class. He is taught in a group with two other students and they spend much of their time taking turns reading aloud from the same book. Upon beginning the lesson Danny stated several times, "I wanna go last", meaning he wanted to be the last in the group to read. When Danny read aloud, he read very slowly, quietly and deliberately. He paused for long periods of time before reading certain words, and the teacher told him to cover parts of words to try to make sense of the whole word. Danny complied and eventually read the words. However, when Danny began to pick up speed while reading, he often replaced the words in the book with words that are visually similar. He also had difficulty when he approached words with endings, such as "-ing", "-ed", or "-s". When asked to predict events in the book, Danny seemed reluctant to answer and again asked if he "could go last". When it was his turn, he gave a similar answer to that of his peers.

Next the reading group and their teacher went to the resource room to work on illustrations they had started based on the book they were reading. Danny began working on his picture immediately and without distraction. He asked the other students to look at his color choices. He even corrected another student's technique and suggested an alternative way of using the media.

I can relate my own experiences with the klutz project to Danny's intimidation in certain areas he has difficulties in, as well as his enthusiasm for the areas in which he excelled. While in an atmosphere he is comfortable with, his confidence emerges. However, while in a place such as the library, he seems to become bored, distracted, and ultimately disruptive. He also uses humor to mask his lack of confidence at times, and relies heavily on the attention that comes with being assisted.

Journal Article 1: Heiervang, E. & Hugdahl, K. (2003). Impaired visual attention in children with dyslexia. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 36, 68-73.

The article, Impaired Visual Attention in Children with Dyslexia, deals with the correlation between difficulty reading and visual reaction time. For children without dyslexia, single-word reading generally requires little visual attention. According to the article, this may not be the case for children with reading disabilities. The article suggests that in children with dyslexia, the parts of the brain which control the processing of rapid sensory stimuli are not fully functioning (Heiervang and Hugdahl, 2003).

The study involved testing primary school-aged children for their reaction time when given cues of varying lengths. The children would watch a computer screen for a target which could appear either on the right or left of the screen. They were instructed to press the space bar on the keyboard as soon as the target appeared. In some cases, a cue would be given before the target appeared. The cue could either be valid, appearing on the same side of the screen, or invalid, appearing on the opposite side of the screen (Heiervang and Hugdahl, 2003).

The findings of the study indicate that children with dyslexia generally have a longer reaction time than the control group studied, particularly when no cue was given. Several explanations were provided for this conclusion. One is that children with dyslexia have a general motor slowness. Another explanation is that dyslexic children have a reduced alertness to visual stimuli. Lastly, a cognitive deficit could be to blame. The conductors of this study leaned strongly towards this last explanation, since problems with "recruitment of cognitive resources" is thought to also hamper the "speed and fluency of reading" (Heiervang and Hugdahl, 2003, p.72).

Journal Article 2: Venable, G. Portnuff. (2003). Confronting complex text: readability lessons from students with language learning disabilities. Topics in Language Disorders, 23, 225-240.

In this article, the author addresses the reasons for editing texts for students with language learning disabilities, as well as the many factors which must be considered when editing texts. She acknowledges the need to consider "not only what the book brings to the reader but also what the reader brings to the book" (Venable, 2003, p.225). Students must have a basic core of abilities in order to be fluent and to comprehend reading. For students who have deficits in these core abilities, books can be adapted to better suit their needs. The author addresses these specific deficiencies:

Students with dyslexia have significant problems remembering what words look like. They may also have poor phonological awareness, and have trouble discriminating, pronouncing, and retaining sequences of sounds and syllables (Venable, 2003, p.226).

When a student must overcome all of these problems, there is little time or energy left for comprehension.

Venable points out as the "trouble spots in text" the following areas: vocabulary, form (including decodability and morphology), and familiarity. She also addresses sentence structure, including items such as missing words, metaphors, pronouns and "tightly packed sentences" (Venable, 2003). With each of these areas in mind, strategies are given to simplify and edit texts so that readers with disabilities can be more successful, yet still be challenged.

Venable contends that students with language learning disabilities have difficulty deciphering new vocabulary because they cannot easily recognize roots and changes in words, and often replace new vocabulary words with familiar words that look similar. In addressing decidability of words, Venable reminds us that "the regularities of English are more complicated than simple letter-sound mappings" (Venable, 2003, p.227). Certain words cannot simply be "sounded out". In regards to morphology, inflectional suffixes may cause problems for students when they change the spelling, pronunciation, stress and vowel sounds. Venable claims that students with disabilities have difficulty learning the rules needed to decipher words, and the ones who do still tend to "get pulled away from the correct reading toward a similar word that is more familiar" (Venable, 2003, p.228).

The familiarity of words varies by grade level and meaning. Venable give the example of the word "arm". While a child in second grade is familiar with that word as a part of the body, it is highly unlikely that he or she will recognize its verb meaning "to give weapons to". Venable suggests using one's own intuition when discerning the difficulty of a word for a particular group of students, and then to check one's intuition against the students' performance (Venable, 2003).

According to Venable, while editing text for disabled students can reduce stress and mistakes, mistakes can serve as useful teaching tools:

Students need to be taught to read carefully, not to skip over punctuation, not to insert, omit or substitute sounds, syllables, suffixes, and so on, but when they do make mistakes, it is useful for us to ask ourselves what missing pieces of background or grammatical information may be behind the error and use the error as a teaching opportunity (Venable, 2003, p.230).

In conclusion, Venable stresses the need for teachers to listen carefully to students read so that the points of "fluency and comprehension breakdowns" can lend themselves to specialized instruction. She contends that important ways to help language disabled students overcome difficulties with written language include reading to the students at their highest listening level, as well as talking with the students about their difficulties with text they read and hear (Venable, 2003).

Journal Article 3: Kotula, A. Winokur. (2003). Matching readers to instructional materials: the use of classic readability measures for students with language learning disabilities and dyslexia. Topics in Language Disorders, 23, 190-203.

This article discusses the importance of finding appropriate reading material for students, and how to best match reading materials to students with dyslexia or language learning disabilities (LLD). The author of the article cites several reasons why finding appropriate text for students with LLD or dyslexia is so difficult. Most importantly, many of these students read below their grade level. Therefore it is difficult to find material for older students that is written at their level and maintains their interest level as well (Kotula, 2003). Furthermore, if a student is highly frustrated by trying to read, very few topics will be interesting enough to them to continue their attempts. Also, it is difficult to find material that presents "higher-level concepts and words that are easy to read" (Kotula, 2003, pg. 191). This article also discusses how a specialist can determine a student's reading level. Standardized reading tests can estimate a student's reading level, but the author warns against confusion of and misuse of the results. She suggests that standardized test results should be a "starting point" in figuring out the student's actual level. It is also suggested that other methods, such as the informal reading inventory, be used in conjunction with the standardized tests (Kotula, 2003, pg. 192).

Another important issue discussed in the article is appropriate instructional levels. Kotula states that "an appropriate instructional level is defined as text that a student can read with 95% accuracy and still maintain at least 75% comprehension" (Kotula, 2003, pg. 193). The point of this section of the article is for teachers to "find text that is challenging but not frustrating" (Kotula, 2003, pg. 193).

Enhancement of Danny's Educational Experience

While I am aware that Danny has a deficiency in reading, I am not sure about the extent of his deficiency. Danny's difficulty with words with inflectional endings is a classic sign of dyslexia, although I do not know if he has been diagnosed as such. I know that he also has difficulty with oral reading. This was evident in his slow, unsure reading of a book during my observations. Based on the articles I have read, I wonder if the book that the group was reading matched Danny's instructional level as well as his interest level.

As I observed Danny with the special education teacher and two other students in his group, he did not seem particularly stimulated. On both occasions, the students would take turns reading aloud from a book while the teacher and the other students followed along. While Danny followed along and read when it was his turn, he didn't seem to comprehend what he was reading. I believe that he was nervous reading in front of other people, even a small group, and my presence may have compounded his nervousness.

Ideally, I believe that Danny would fare better if he read with only one other person so that not so much time elapsed before it was his turn to read again. Furthermore, I believe that Danny needs to be asked many more questions about what he is reading to ensure his understanding. I would tap into Danny's prior knowledge and interests before choosing a book for him to read. Danny clearly has an interest in sports, so I believe that he might be more enthusiastic about oral reading concerning that topic. I might also give Danny the opportunity to bring in reading selections from home so that he would have some ownership and control over his learning.

To help Danny with decoding unfamiliar words, I would use the DISSECT approach, which I found in our text. Through this approach, the student discovers the word's context, isolates the prefix, separates the suffix, says the stem, examines the stem, checks with someone, and tries the dictionary (Vaughn et. al., 2003, pg. 362). Danny needs to be taught tools like this so that it becomes a routine way of finding word meanings.

Danny really seems to enjoy art. He showed pride in his artistic accomplishments, and even seemed to feel an air of expertise in the matter. I would take advantage of that pride and perhaps give Danny more opportunities to illustrate what he reads. This may be a good incentive for Danny to read. Since he can only illustrate what he has read and comprehended, his illustrations would be a fair assessment of his progress. I would also incorporate art during reading as a way for Danny to make predictions and answer higher order questions. Perhaps a modified version of the game "Pictionary" could be used in a small group of students who also enjoy art. This would also be an excellent way for Danny to interact with other students during reading who do not have learning disabilities. Danny would probably have more confidence, and more fun, in this type of situation.

Another way in which I could enhance Danny's educational situation would be to make him more accountable for his learning and to help him take a more active approach to learning. As the physical education teacher stated to me, Danny generally wants to have things done for him. He also thrives when given personal attention and help, either from his classroom teacher or the special education teacher. While giving personal attention to a student is generally a positive classroom practice, I believe that Danny needs to become more independent. To accomplish this, I would continue to assist Danny one-on-one, but my help would be in the form of teaching Danny critical thinking skills. Also, I would have the class work in pairs more often, so that Danny could have one-on-one interaction and be independent as well. I might employ classwide peer tutoring (CWPT) in which, according to our text, "students of different reading levels are paired, one average or high reader with one low reader" (Vaughn et. al., 2003, pg. 366). This practice would help Danny with both his oral reading skills and his comprehension skills. However, it would be important to pair Danny with students who are not easily distracted and are able to stay on task.

Bibliography of Sources Cited

Heiervang, E. & Hugdahl, K. (2003). Impaired visual attention in children with dyslexia.

Journal of Learning Disabilities, 36, 68-73.

Kotula, A. Winokur. (2003). Matching readers to instructional materials: the use of

classic readability measures for students with language learning disabilities and dyslexia. Topics in Language Disorders, 23, 190-203.

Vaughn, S., Bos, C., Schumm, J. Teaching Exceptional, Diverse, and At-Risk Students.

Pearson Education, Inc.:Boston, 2003.

Venable, G. Portnuff. (2003). Confronting complex text: readability lessons from

students with language learning disabilities. Topics in Language Disorders, 23, 225-240.