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Chapter 11: Help for Struggling Readers


Chapter 11 gave a better understanding on why all teachers should take a literacy class and should try to incorporate many strategies within the classroom to help students improve their reading skills. As the book exemplifies, reading is important in all subject matter. Whether it is to understand the lab procedures in biology class or basically comprehending the problem in math to solve word problems, they all require students to read and understand. So, although teaching reading is not the goal for all teachers, I feel like the chapter proves that it’s part of a teacher’s duty to help students improve in their skills when they struggle in reading because it is a necessary tool in all subjects.
One of the key strategies listed that I personally like is to “use materials students can successfully read.” Like mentioned in the text, I think using traditional textbooks is not the best way to teach the course contents and makes the class very dull. As a fellow student and being a student for 21 years of my life, I feel like textbooks makes things more confusing and is harder to understand since so many information is given in difficult words. And because some students have a hard time in understanding the materials given in the course, they lack motivation to participate in class and may lead to giving up on their studies. I believe there are many other ways to approach in teaching the content and to incorporate other materials that students can comprehend and have fun with will make the students more enthusiastic to participate in class and learn the subject.

WORD COUNT: 270


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Comments

  1. I completely agree with the strategy you chose! As a struggling reader, I find reading through textbooks is not an easy task. There are so many concepts handed to you at once that it is overwhelming. This makes reading the sections very difficult to absorb. In classes where I had to read a textbook for homework every night I was lacking motivation to actually do the assignment. I would not understand the material I read anyways so what was the point? 81

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