The Rich Get Richer, The Poor Get Poorer
Students enter schools with varying exposure to language, both written and spoken. For instance, Jodie Rodgriguez discusses, in this article in Scholastic, the research shows that the number of books a child has available in their home, even prior to being literate, positively impacts their reading outcomes later in life. Our Chief Scientist, Dr. Julie Van Dyke, also summarizes these benefits in last December’s blog post: Buy a Book for the Holidays. Although parents can certainly provide an environment that promotes literacy for their children, this is easier said than done for many, and it doesn’t guarantee the child will not encounter reading difficulties throughout their adolescence and into adulthood.
When a student begins to show signs of reading difficulty, whether due to specific diagnosable issues, like dyslexia or developmental language disorder, or due to cognitive or motivational factors, they often enter into a feedback loop of reduced opportunity & avoidance. When students struggle with reading, they are less likely to voluntarily engage in literacy activities, creating a scenario where the students who need the most practice and exposure are getting the fewest opportunities to engage and participate. This tendency, sometimes referred to as the Matthew Effect, generates a widening gap between struggling and proficient readers as students progress through elementary and secondary grades, as described by Collette Coleman’s piece in The Hechinger Report. This can be somewhat mitigated by parental intervention if such resources are available, which Davia Sills points out in a recent Psychology Today article. For example, parents can improve kids’ reading comprehension by limiting their screen time and sharing books with them. This is not, however, always sufficient in changing the course of student reading abilities.
Walls of Text
Reading anxiety is a serious issue that is usually connected to poor reading skills. Although research, recently highlighted by Genevieve McArthur’s article in The Conversation, suggests there are methods for lessening this anxiety for children, even through the use of therapy dogs, sometimes the sheer amount of text presented on a page is enough to put a reader off from reading, especially if they are already coming into the task with a heightened level of reading anxiety. The complaint that struggling readers share very often is that text can appear daunting, even scary, when presented in the centuries old left justified block format. This suggests that different modes of presentation, or formats, may relieve some reading anxiety and stress.
Our own research at Cascade Reading has shown that Cascaded Text, this “new way of reading” as students call it, can help in this regard. For instance, data from an elementary school study with 4th and 5th graders in Wisconsin, currently under peer-review, shows that struggling readers were most likely to get a boost in confidence when reading passages broken down into our patented Cascade Format. Beyond these numbers, when we visit schools who have used the Cascade Format, many students report feeling more at ease when reading Cascaded Text compared to traditional text formatting (aka the “walls of text”). Even beyond the Cascade Format’s power in implicitly boosting students’ syntactic knowledge and reading comprehension abilities, our format’s ability to break sentences down so that they are less visually intimidating has the potential to remove some barriers that more anxious readers need to overcome and get them out of the precarious avoidance loop.
Tips for Motivating Students with Reading Anxiety
- Read with your student/child! Collaborative literacy activities could help reduce some anxiety when paired with people the reader trusts. You could take turns reading out loud, or you could even read to them until they are comfortable joining in. Make sure they are following along with the text as you read to maximize their exposure to the text.
- Get reading materials that interest the student. If a student is interested in volcanoes, have them read about volcanoes. If the student is interested in American history, have them choose some books from the library. Letting students guide their reading materials, where possible, can help them overcome anxiety with their own interest.
- Break the text down into smaller sessions. If students are specifically anxious about the wall of text, then tear down that wall! The Cascade Format offers a powerful solution to this problem; however, you can also have the student read content in smaller increments so their task doesn’t seem as daunting. Any amount of reading is better than no reading at all!
As Halloween draws nearer, let’s remember that reading doesn’t need to be scary, even if you’re reading something by Stephen King or one of R. L. Stine’s 240 Goosebumps books.
