Educators focus on reading

By Jennifer Hiller
Advertiser Education Writer

Despite an emphasis on developing literacy skills at an earlier age, the good intentions of parents and teachers and millions of dollars spent on reading programs, many Hawai'i children can't read on grade level.

On the most recent National Association of Educational Progress, the only federally financed ongoing assessment of student reading achievement on a national scale, just 36 percent of high school seniors across the country could read and analyze challenging material, down from 40 percent in 1998.

But the new federal education law known as No Child Left Behind has forced new attention on one of the most persistent — and troubling — challenges in education: teaching children to read.

Under the law, all children should be reading on grade level by 2013. If children in a variety of subgroups, such as those living in poverty or learning English as a second language, can't read as well as their peers, schools could be sanctioned for the first time.

Marian Crislip of the state Department of Education said that provision of the law will force schools to make sure children aren't passed from grade to grade without getting help.

"All too often in the past we've ignored these children. The higher-performing children hid the other children when the test scores were averaged," Crislip said. "That's why I'm absolutely behind this No Child Left Behind."

But Crislip and others say the challenge is daunting, in part because learning to read is a highly individual process.

"I'd like to use the word 'different' a lot," Crislip said. "Different kids require different things in different times in different quantities."

Another problem is that reading is so hard to learn. Children have to learn to recognize and write letters, recognize that letters make sounds and that sounds make words. Then they have to learn to process it all quickly enough so they can concentrate on the content of the material instead of the challenge of sounding out words. And they must learn thousands of new vocabulary words so they can understand more complicated texts as they grow older.

Cheryl Taitague, lead curriculum developer at Pacific Resources of Education and Learning, said research shows that a typical first grade, native-English speaker has an oral vocabulary of 3,000 to 5,000 words. By second grade, students should expand their reading and writing vocabulary by 3,000 to 4,000 words a year. A literate high school graduate needs to know more than 60,000 words, she said.

With children spending vastly more time at home than at school throughout the year, parents are key in developing literacy skills, said Jed Gaines, founder of Read Aloud America — one program of many in Hawai'i using creative methods to address reading issues.

He and others believe that reading aloud to children from infancy can solve much of the reading problem in the schools because it will make children better prepared. Research shows that children who have been read to from an early age perform better in school.

Gaines said even if parents don't read or speak English well, they can get audiotapes of books from the library and listen to those as a family.

Lynne Waihee, president of Read To Me International, a nonprofit literacy group, and wife of former Hawai'i governor John Waihee, speaks to preschools, parent groups and teachers about the importance of reading aloud to children.

"Our goal is to share the love and joy of reading aloud," Waihee said. "It sounds really simple. What we know from research is that to be a good reader you need to have a good command of the English language. If children have been read to every day, then by the time they enter kindergarten they'll have good language skills and a good vocabulary. They'll be ready to learn to read."

Waihee said a common mistake that parents and teachers make is that they stop reading aloud to children. Students can understand spoken material at a higher level than they can the written word. Even college students can benefit from having, for example, Shakespeare read aloud, she said.

"We feel this is something that needs to be done throughout the education of a person," she said.

Read Aloud America's experience at Palolo Elementary School last semester underscored the need for reading aloud across all age groups.

Over the course of seven evenings, more than 1,600 people — children, parents, grandparents and an unlikely crowd teenagers — came to the campus cafeteria to listen to stories. There was the free pizza, soft drinks and snacks, but the heart of the program was reading aloud, and the joy and relaxation of listening to a good tale told.

"We just want them to hear the story for the pleasure of hearing the story," Gaines said.

Teaching reading has become a more difficult task in recent years. More than half of all Hawai'i students — 51.1 percent — either live in high poverty, have special education needs or do not speak English well; 12.4 percent have multiple disadvantages.

Makaha-based reading specialist Janet Powell works with young children who have fallen far behind in school. Many of them have watched hours of television a day since they were infants and some have been mistakenly diagnosed as having Attention Deficit Disorder or dyslexia, when she says they actually have problems with visual perception. For example, students have to be methodically taught how to draw letters, read sentences from left to right and how to make the "Z" pattern of reading as they move down lines of text.

"My students come here with such low self-esteem, just beaten down at ages 6 or 7," Powell said.

She said many schools move too quickly for children.

"Children can't do what they're not ready for," she said. "They have to be taught at their own level."

DOE officials hope they are starting to catch poor readers at a younger age. Dozens of schools that participate in an $18.5 million grant called the Reading Excellence Act have to give students a reading test three times per year that evaluates how much progress they're making. They have all used their grant money to start new reading and literacy programs on campus, although educators say it could take as many as five years before the results are seen.

"Reading is an unnatural act. We have to make what is unnatural very easy for our little ones," Crislip said. "We know if children cannot read 110 words per minute by third grade the probability is high that they will be poor readers in seventh grade. If they're poor readers in the seventh grade they are probably going to be poor readers in the ninth grade."

While the state focuses most of its money on reading in kindergarten through third grade, teachers in middle and high school have found themselves teaching reading skills.

Farrington High School Principal Catherine Payne said it would be hard to overemphasize the importance of parents reading to children before the children can even speak.

Her school has about 500 ninth- and 10th-graders in mandatory reading classes because they are reading below their grade level. Teachers focus much of their time on reading aloud to the students so that they hear the correct pronunciation of words, which is especially important for English language learners the school serves.

For about 100 students who are struggling the most, the school three years ago used $100,000 of its federal money for high-poverty schools to purchase an intensive reading program. Payne said the school felt it had to do something to improve student literacy. The ReadRight program uses lots of one-on-one interaction and reading aloud to improve reading skills.

At Farrington, teachers can tell individual students are making progress. But with a constant supply of new students from other countries, some of whom have never been to school before, Payne said progress can be more like treading water than swimming forward.

"The steps are so small. We're just holding our breath," Payne said. "We just keep doing the best we can. We have a tremendous population of students coming in who are learning English as a second language. That's not going away."

Reach Jennifer Hiller at jhiller@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8084.