2000 Conference Proceedings
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The Accessible Reading Solution for Students with
Disabilities
Jerry Stemach
Start to FInIsh
Kenwood, CA
Phone: 707-332-7323
Trisha Johnson
Don Johnston Incorporated
Volo, IL
Phone: 847-740-0749
FAX: 847-740-7326
The Circle of Literacy Learning represents the best
strategies for improving literacy skills for students with
disabilities; reading interventions are a critical component of
literacy instruction. Come learn the reading strategies that
will make your instruction more effective. And see how to use
Start-to-Finish™ Books can springboard your students to
reading success!
In this lab, we’ll give you hands-on experience with the
Start-to-Finish combination of paperback book, computer CD-ROM
and audiotape. You’ll see how these components work
together to improve students’ fluency, literal
comprehension and reading enjoyment. And you’ll learn how
to use Start-to-Finish to track students’ progress and
report their success.
This session will also focus on the exclusive "Written for
Success" structure of the books that eliminates the language
hurdles that students with disabilities have difficulty
with.
The Reading Struggles Encountered by Students with
Disabilities
Students who are significantly behind in reading may struggle
with decoding stories written at even a second-grade level.
Teachers who wish to provide instruction to these students
struggle with finding texts written at this level that are
engaging, age-appropriate, and consistent with a standard
curriculum.
Students with emerging reading skills present a unique set of
challenges. While they may have received traditional
intervention strategies in an attempt to "catch them up" to
grade expectancy, they continue to struggle with issues of
attention, decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.
They are "turned off" to reading. They lack the knowledge of
rules to break words down into manageable units. They block on
"easy" grammatical words. They ignore punctuation. They are
distractible. They read slowly, word by word. They misinterpret
the meaning of the text. Since their own oral language skills
for syntax and vocabulary are weak, they make poor guesses at
unfamiliar words. Some older second-language speakers attempt
to read grade-level texts in English before acquiring the
grammar to do so.
These students require texts written in language that
minimizes the linguistic "hurdles" impeding decoding, fluency,
comprehension, and independent reading. Story content must be
age-appropriate, extremely interesting, and tied to the demands
of the curriculum. Both student and teacher must be confident
that the student can read the story independently. The reading
assignment must be short enough to provide the satisfaction of
completion. Follow-up activities must be within the student's
ability level and document progress toward a measurable
goal.
To meet this need, Don Johnston Incorporated, in collaboration
with special education teachers, university language and
learning specialists, speech-language pathologists, and reading
specialists, has developed Start-to-Finish™ Books.
Start-to-Finish Books help struggling readers have successful
and satisfying experiences with reading. Here are some reasons
why.
“Written for Success” Formula
All Start-to-Finish Books are created using the "Written for
Success" formula. This is a set of 40 guidelines for writing
easy-to-read text. Don Johnston Incorporated had a group of
experts in the fields of reading, language, and learning
disabilities create these guidelines.
The "Written for Success" formula by Don Johnston Incorporated
is a set of over 40 guidelines for writing easy-to-read text.
All Start-to-Finish Books follow these rules. Here are some
examples of the rules.
Use the infinitive form of the verb instead of an object
gerund.
Difficult: The dog started barking.
Better: The dog started to bark.
When using interdependent clauses, express the relationship
between the two clauses clearly. When expressing causality (A
does something because of B), list the clauses in logical or
sequential order.
Difficult: Hannibal stopped for a rest. His men were
tired.
Better: Hannibal stopped for a rest because his men were
tired.
But not: Because his men were tired, Hannibal stopped for a
rest.
Avoid separating the subject and the predicate in a
sentence.
Difficult: John, hot and tired in the summer sun, could not
lift the bucket of rocks.
Better: John felt so hot and tired in the sun that he could
not lift the bucket of rocks.
Once Start-to-Finish manuscripts are written, they are
subjected to the scrutiny of four editors, each with over 25
years of experience in the fields of reading, language, and
learning disabilities. As they critique the stories, the
editors do not assume that readers would have any
sophistication with syntax, grammar, decoding, fluency, or
comprehension; the editors revise the text to meet exacting
standards of syntax and vocabulary. These standards represent
research and best practices in the fields of linguistics,
language acquisition, reading, and learning. In addition to
editing the text to comply with the guidelines, the editors
also draw upon their many years of working with dyslexic
students and students with language disorders. Using this
experience, the editors are able to predict what other language
features would cause a reader to stumble or misunderstand; all
stories are edited to anticipate and prevent as many of these
errors as possible. Once manuscripts are edited, they are put
into clinical trials to ensure that the books create a
successful reading experience. Start-to-Finish Books can be
read independently by students who are reading at the second-
or third-grade level. The subject matter is appropriate for
students from fourth grade through high school. The computer
and audiocassette support that is part of this product allows
students functioning below a second-grade reading level to read
these books. Using the paperback book alone, students at
second- or third-grade reading levels will need some support
from their teachers, but much less support than needed for
other published high-interest, low-vocabulary materials.
Many books designed for older struggling readers rely on
readability formulas to determine the level of their materials.
Because short sentences lead to lower readability levels,
authors often try to express ideas as compactly as possible. By
doing this they often eliminate the very words that could make
the intended meaning most clear. For example, when presented
with the sentence, "Harriet Tubman lived in a cabin with dirt
floors," students repeatedly read this as "Harriet Tubman lived
in a cabin with dirty floors" because they fail to recognize
that "dirt floors" is really a shorter version of "floors that
were made of dirt." Thus the shorter sentence becomes more
difficult than the longer one. Similarly, the sentence "Jane
stayed home because she was sick" might be broken up into "Jane
stayed home. She was sick." However, the omission of the word
"because" forces the student to infer the relationship between
the two simple sentences.
In the Start-to-Finish series, sentence structure is generally
limited to simple sentences of 12 words or less, and to complex
sentences of 18 words or less. Complex sentences usually
contain only two clauses and are used only when simple
sentences cannot convey the intended meaning adequately.
Start-to-Finish books use the shortest, simplest sentence
structures that can express the author's meanings
clearly.
In addition to sentence structure controls, the vocabulary of
the Start-to-Finish series is selected on the basis of
frequency of use, phonetic regularity, and instructional value.
Unfamiliar vocabulary is carefully introduced to maximize
success.
Thus, the extensive editing of the Start-to-Finish Books has
removed many of the linguistic "hurdles" that impede fluency,
comprehension, and independent reading.
Example of the “Written for Success” Formula
an original excerpt from Love of Life by Jack London:
He looked into every pool of water vainly, until, as the long
twilight came on, he discovered a solitary fish, the size of
a minnow, in such a pool. He plunged his arm in up to the
shoulder, but it eluded him. He reached for it with both
hands and stirred up the milky mud at the bottom. In his
excitement he fell in, wetting himself to the waist. Then the
water was too muddy to admit of his seeing the fish, and he
was compelled to wait until the sediment had settled. The
pursuit was renewed, till the water was again muddied. But he
could not wait. He unstrapped the tin bucket and began to
bale the pool. He baled wildly at first, splashing himself
and flinging the water so short a distance that it ran back
into the pool. He worked more carefully, striving to be cool,
though his heart was pounding against his chest and his hands
were trembling. At the end of half an hour the pool was
nearly dry. Not a cupful of water remained. And there was no
fish. He found a hidden crevice among the stones through
which it had escaped to the adjoining and larger pool -- a
pool which he could not empty in a night and a day. Had he
known of the crevice, he could have closed it with a rock at
the beginning and the fish
would have been his. Thus he thought, and crumpled up and sank
down upon the wet earth. At first he cried softly to himself,
then he cried loudly to the pitiless desolation that ringed him
around; and for a long time after he was shaken by great dry
sobs.
Text re-written using the "Written for Success" Formula by
Don Johnston Incorporated:
In one pool of water the man did find a fish. It was a tiny
fish, smaller than his little finger. He tried to catch the
fish with his hands. He became so excited that he fell into
the pool and stirred up the mud on the bottom. He waited for
the pool to clear. Then he took his tin pot and began to
empty the pool one pot full at a time. After an hour of work,
there was no water left. But there was no fish either. The
fish had escaped through a crack in a rock and was now
swimming in a much larger pool. This pool was too big to
empty with a tin pot. The man sat down and began to
cry.
Links to the Curriculum
Many older students have gaps in their general knowledge
because they have avoided reading or they read poorly. This
makes it progressively more difficult for them to comprehend
the material their peers are reading.
Start-to-Finish texts motivate the struggling reader with
age-appropriate stories about historically significant heroes,
fictional mysteries, and the retelling of classic adventures.
Each Start-to-Finish book contains links to the curriculum. For
example, Nick Ford Mysteries contain material related to
history, geography, social studies, biography or science. And
the Classic Adventures are books commonly used in middle- and
high-school curriculum. Because they include these links to the
curriculum, Start-to-Finish Books bring struggling students
closer to sharing the knowledge of their peers.
Fluency and Comprehension Checks
Start-to-Finish Books average 5,000 words in length. Each book
is divided into chapters that can be easily "read" in a single
session. At the end of each chapter, the student may complete a
100-word Cloze paragraph containing 8 sentence completions. A
hidden timer tracks how long the student takes to read and
respond to the passage. After completing the Cloze paragraph,
the student sees a bar graph of correct responses. The teacher
may view a second graph that tracks fluency by calculating the
student's rate of correct responding. A supplemental file
containing five multiple-choice questions is available for each
Start-to-Finish chapter.
The vocabulary used in the Cloze paragraph and multiple choice
questions is restricted to the vocabulary introduced to that
point in the story.
Data collection on fluency and comprehension link
Start-to-Finish Books to IEP goals and objectives.
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Reprinted with author(s) permission. Author(s) retain copyright.