If They Don't Read Much, How They Ever Gonna Get Good?

To help children who have difficulty developing fluent reading ability, educators have developed remedial and corrective reading classes and a host of training programs, materials and techniques to use in them. However, even with these intervention processes and strategies, many poor readers remain poor readers. Research continues to explore the etiology of the disability and also focuses on determining the effectiveness of the various intervention processes and strategies. While investigations of both types are valuable, it may also be fruitful to explore other facets of remedial and corrective instruction of reading. It is particularly interesting to look at whether teachers have confused the means of reading instruction with the end of fluent reading. For instance, a recent informal survey which counted the number of words read in context by students during the course of their lessons showed that during remedial and corrective reading instruction, the students were doing very little reading. (No claim is made that the sample was randomly selected, nor were rigidly constructed instruments used to collect the data. Rather, several remedial reading sessions were