What characteristics do proficient readers show in the classroom?
In a perfect world, every student is reading independently and at grade level expectations. We do not live in a perfect world.
It is important to know what successful readers look like in the classroom.
The instructional standards guide planning and instruction, but not necessarily what students are doing while reading. It is hard to measure and monitor the growth of student reading characteristics.
A knowledge of characteristics to monitor and model yields insight into intangibles that strong readers gain, but difficult to measure using current assessment practice.
What are reader characteristics?
Reader characteristics describe what readers do as they read. The characteristics grow as a student gains more experience. The list will grow with each grade level.
Basic questions start the process
- What characteristics do students exhibit as they learn to read in ELA and the content areas?
- What characteristics are obvious from moving from learning to reading to reading to learn?
- How will we know students are using the desired characteristics?
Characteristics of our proficient readers
Reading characteristics differ from the various texts students read in and out of the classroom. For a classroom, focus the list on the grade or course specifics.
Since students expect to be independent readers beginning in the upper elementary grades, add content areas specifics after third grade. For example, reading in science requires specific characteristics not normally applicable to fluency in early English language arts.
The characteristics enhance plans for teaching and modeling during daily instruction. Modeling, along with direct instruction, helps students understand the significance and value of learning the skill. Once a student understands and implements the desired characteristics in content areas, self-monitoring is an option.
What resources can we be used to create the characteristics?
The quickest way to start the list started is an online search to use existing examples or standard sets.
Starter list
- Understand the structure of text
- Interact with the text
- Make inferences about the text
- Read different texts differently
- Organize and combine information from one or more text
- Show age fluency
- Self correct for fluency and comprehension
- Understand the value of comprehension for many reading types
- Understand the value of background knowledge increasing comprehension
- Make predictions based on background knowledge
- Know their purpose for reading
- Know what to skim, and what needs to be read closely
- Confirm predictions
- Know the difference between reading for pleasure and reading to learn
- Know the structure of text based on type and content area
- Monitor comprehension in content areas and with different text types
Model characteristics
We learn reader characteristic behaviors, so modeling is important during instruction. List some ways to model the expected student behaviors. This creates a consistent learning environment for students across a team or department. Once establishing a consistent environment, identifying success and practices to build on, change or avoid becomes clear.
If possible, work with the grades below and above, or prerequisite courses to establish consistent modeling techniques and expectations.
Parents, especially at the young ages, help, but consider low expectations for support and modeling in the home environment.
Monitor student progress
It is easier to create and set expected fluency characteristics than measure. Measuring fluency or student learning from text, especially in the lower grades, is time-consuming.
Comprehension monitoring in ELA is easier than in other content areas. Item banks have ample resources to measure comprehension for reading, but are weak in measuring content area comprehension. Most content area items and passages measure knowledge. An item bank vendor may create the items for content specifics as part of the contract.
Formative tasks, with embedded instructional questions, work well in gauging student proficiency with many of the characteristics. If a team plans include using similar texts, creating questions to use during instruction to check on student progress is time saving and effective.