Closing the Gaps: Literacy for the Hardest-to-Teach.

A study examined the effectiveness of a program designed to help the hardest-to-teach, lowest-achieving readers to function at the level of the same-aged peers. Subjects, 35 children referred from Reading Recovery who did not meet discontinuation criteria, worked with specially trained teachers for 30 minutes daily, 5 days a week. The main difference between this project and Reading Recovery is that it assumed that these children had not yet learned to read or write because educators had not yet learned the best way to teach them. Teachers used collegial interaction, joint problem-solving, more refined ways of observing children's reading behavior, more adaptive teaching responses, and more detailed ways of recording teacher-child behavior to help these children. Results indicated that 24 children completed their programs. Out of these children, 19 were able to transfer out of the project and read and write in a group with their matched peer; those who did not transfer all made substantial gains; and children from different ethnic and language backgrounds were successful. Findings suggest that children who do not meet Reading Recovery discontinuing criteria can learn how to accelerate their progress and catch up to their same-age peers in a relatively short time. Findings also highlight the necessity for specialized training (focusing on teacher self-monitoring) to get specialized teaching. (Contains 9 references, 12 examples of teacher/student talk, and 4 graphs and a table of data.) (RS)