No. Think of how you’d feel if day in and day out you were frustrated. How do you act when stress is relentless, when you always feel overwhelmed, when all you expect is failure? How will this affect your mood, your optimism, your willingness to try? Chances are you’d get angry, get depressed, try to escape. Children are the same.
Morally, schools should help children, not harm them. But requiring children with reading disabilities to read lots of materials they can’t read, they can’t understand, they can’t escape from, and demanding that they succeed with these materials, harms them. It stigmatizes them. It tells them they’re failures. It creates emotional and motivational problems. It impedes progress. It creates animosity. Here’s what Lauren Leslie and Joanne Caldwell, two renowned literacy scholars, warned about frustration level materials: Avoid them.
When a child reads for pleasure, works independently (e.g., doing homework), or practices fluency, he should read materials at his independent level. This, Leslie and Caldwell note, is the level at which he “can read successfully without assistance. …. [His] accuracy in word recognition … should be 98% or higher. …. [He] should be able to answer 90% or more of … questions correctly.”
When a child is learning new reading skills or content, when he needs direct instruction, he should be reading materials at his instructional level. Leslie and Caldwell note that at this level the child can quickly recognize 90% of words (when all word recognition errors are counted) and correctly answer 70% of questions. “Materials written at this level should be chosen for reading and content-area instruction. This placement assumes that the teacher will introduce words and concepts that are likely to be unfamiliar to the readers.”
So far I’ve covered the level of materials children with reading disabilities should read when reading alone and when teachers continue to give them direct and immediate instruction and support. Now comes the level to avoid, which unfortunately is the level so many children with reading disabilities are asked to endure and benefit from, and which they can’t: The frustration level. This is the level at which the child “is completely unable to read the material with adequate word identification or comprehension…. Accuracy of word recognition is less than 90%, and less than 70% of the questions are answered correctly.”
To identify the three critical levels—independent, instructional, and frustration—schools can administer an informal reading inventory, like Leslie and Caldwell’s Qualitative Reading Inventory (QRI). Like many other informal reading inventories, this test has the child read lists of words and then has him read passages, retell the passages, and answer questions about them. It helps identify the levels of reading materials, like books, he can read.
The results of any test, including the QRI, are only suggestive. Teachers, examiners, and parents also need to look closely at other information and at the child himself. For example, does he get frustrated easily? Does his anxiety soar with materials that other students with similar reading problems find comfortable? Will he get overwhelmed and berate himself if he answers 80% of questions? If so, temporarily abandon the criteria above: Give him easier material. Gradually build up his tolerance and enjoyment of more difficult materials.
If the school will not abandon frustration level materials, show the school the QRI guidelines. Ask that throughout the day, it give him materials he can profitably and comfortably handle, materials he can understand, materials that he’s comfortable with, materials that motivate him to want to read more and that give him confidence he can become a successful reader. If the school wants to limit such materials to reading instruction, and give him frustration level materials in his other classes, like social studies, show it this quote from Richard Allington, former President of the International Reading Association:
Students need enormous quantities of successful reading to become independent, proficient readers…. In too many cases the lower-achieving students receive, perhaps, an hour of appropriate instruction each day and four hours of instruction based on grade-level texts they cannot read. No child who spends 80% of his or her instructional time in texts that are inappropriately difficult will make much progress academically.
If the school continues to insist that they’ll give your child frustration level materials—materials he’ll have to struggle to read—because that’s what they’ve got, and if your child is in special education, discuss with them this quote from the federal regulations for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004:
Special education means specially designed instruction … to meet the unique needs of a child with a disability…. Specially designed instruction means adapting, as appropriate to the needs of an eligible child … the content, methodology, or delivery of instruction-to address the unique needs of the child that result from the child’s disability; and … to ensure access of the child to the general curriculum, so that the child can meet the educational standards.
I hope that reason and the needs of your child will prevail and engender genuine cooperation. Sometimes it will. But sadly, the previous sentence started with sometimes.
References
Allington, R. L. (June 2002). What I’ve learned about effective reading instruction. Phi Delta Kappan, 740, 742-747.
Code of Federal Regulations [34 CFR § 300.39], italics added.
Leslie, L., & Caldwell, J. (2006). Qualitative Reading Inventory-4. Boston: Pearson, pp. 25-26.
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