reading strategies

In my experience, this classes as “you reap what you sow”. Having been taught for several years to look at the pictures and make up their own stories, to predict (guess wildly) what word they think should come next and just move along fast, to fill in words they don’t recognize with whatever they think completes the sentence, well, students do exactly what they have been taught. They leave the elementary and enter middle or high school and suddenly people are surprised at the weird stuff that comes out when they are supposedly reading — why?

Dealing with it takes time and hard work. And first you have to unteach several years of habits and attitudes, and no this is no fun at all for anyone concerned. If you care, you’ll do the hard work even if it isn’t fun.

I’ve worked/ am working with a number of students like this. One of my present students is handicapped, one has been labelld dyslexic but I think it;s more the lack of teaching, and one has no label but seems to have a memory/retention problem. What works, slowly but surely, is a combination of oral reading with immediate correction and an insistence on accuracy, plus teaching phonics — *not just* kindergarten single letters, but all those vowel patterns and silent gh and all that, that take a lot of time and work.
You will almost certainly find that this student has little idea of vowels, no idea of syllables, and just looks at the beginning and maybe the end of a word and takes a stab in the dark at the middle. The student also probably looks at the long words and makes up the short words that seem to fit. The idea of consistent left-to-right scanning of a word or a page is probably foreign.
So you get a book that isn’t too hard to read - I work somewhat below tested grade level anyway, even lower for many — you point at each word with a pen, and you have the student read out loud slowly and accurately. The student has to be required to self-correct mistakes, to say every word, and not to jump ahead. When you come to an unfamiliar word, you teach the student to sound it out, strictly left to right, syllable by syllable. Yes, this takes time — and how many years have been put into getting the student into the present state of confusion? Yes, it is frustrating for the student who thinks that faster is good — you have to teach that there is no value in a fast mistake, a big change in attitude and habit, not something that comes easily or overnight but it can be done. You also get a good phonics series with lots of practice, one that goes into the more advanced levels of vowel patterns and multisyllables, and you teach it directly — no silent seat work. You start at the beginning and review the “easy” parts and then work into the harder parts.
I find that in six months to a year most kids can really turn around. The funny thing about that is that, after they can really read, they know they are doing so much better but they don’t recognize what they were doing before — they think they always knew this basic stuff and do it automatically. You don’t get any recognition but you do see kids make huge progress.