No Simple Answer: Why Students Struggle with Lireracy in American Schools

No Simple Answer:
Why Students Struggle with Literacy in American Schools

Reading: perhaps the most complex cognitive function humans preform. Thus, why are we surprised that a percentage of people struggle to become fluent and purposeful readers (Tufts University, 2001; Lyon and Chhabra, 2004; Shaywitz, 2003)? Over the years, society dedicates significant time, money, and effort to discovering why some children learn to read and write easily, while others stagger on their journey to literacy. Current literature on literacy depicts classroom teachers as the strongest cause of students' struggles; however, literacy problems also steam from the learners, their families, governmental and district mandates, and teacher education programs.

THE TEACHER
Teaching combines art and science; this potent mixture requires emotion. While some teachers elevate self-esteem over learning, emotion in the classroom remains crucial for high student success. When teachers lack an emotional connection to their students and in turn disvalue the emotions of their students, then literacy problems ensue. Emotion in the classroom affects literacy success by ending conditional teaching and driving teacher and student passion and curiosity.

A teacher's stance on emotions influences the type of environment that teacher creates for her students. Cambourne (2002) defines an environment as a place, the people and objects that inhabit the place, and the routines that occur in that place. The individual lessons, or ìepisodes,î in the classroom ìpermeateî the classroom setting, which ìcan flow back and forth into the episode, thus shaping it and vice versaî (Cambourne, 2002). Thus, lessons shape the environment and the environment the lessons. Emotion heavily dictates the objects and behavior found in a classroom. Just like missing books and pencils, teachers failing to include emotion in a classroom affects student literacy.

Teachers attempting to create a warm learning environment sometimes do so in a flawed manner. Instead of unconditional acceptance, these teachers project that they value ìgoodî students more than those with low scores and less obedience. If the teacher's acceptance depends on certain scores or behaviors, then the students feel that their teacher does not value them as they are (Kohn, 2005). Studies note correlations between negative moods, such as sadness, to poor performance on academic activities as well as students responding to the mood of the teacher (Coles, 1999). Aim further explains by quoting ìchildren 'respond most often not to the activity but to the feeling that the adult displays about them in the course of asking them to do whatever it is the adult has in mind.'î Thus, conditional acceptance of students contributes to poor gains in literacy or any subject.

The practice of valuing a student based on scores or behavior prevents the teacher from seeing her student as whole, complex person with unique needs, backgrounds, and problems. As discussed through various case studies in class, the teacher needs to see the whole child or they do not get an accurate picture of the root of a student's struggles. ìPigeon holingî students with labels or tracks also affects students. When the teacher or librarian only allows a child to read materials at his ìlevelî despite intense curiosity or interest, the adult succeeds in diminishing that child's love of learning (Note 1). The most potent example described a little boy who was not making progress because he never finished his classwork. This child's teacher did not perceive him as a whole person and did not know how interact with him because he did not fit her ideas of what a good student should be. Additionally, this teacher would always talk to the strongest students first, which projected that she valued only students who were not struggling. If teacher had connected with him, she would have learned that he was being emotionally ignored because a of a new baby in the family (Note 2). Even though this example depicted a second grader, adult learners feel the same. Comments from individuals in adult literacy programs also reflect difficulties based on teachers not seeing the student as a whole individual (Amoroso). Thus it is important for a teacher to see a student as a whole person, not just a score.

When a teacher sees students as multidimensional individuals, she seeks out and reacts to her students' learning interests and their opinions on the content and teaching methods. In contrast, when teachers ignore the natural passions and curiosity already present in the students, the students suffer. Teachers who lack flexibility in how and what they teach set their students up to struggle by not including the students in the planning. Moreover, when teachers react negatively to how students react to their curriculum, the problem is compounded. An excellent example of a teacher ignoring student interests and student reactions to curriculum and methods deals with ìThe Rime of the Ancient Mariner.î An inexperienced eighth grade teacher introduced this challenging text and expected the students to be excited about discussing the ìmystical and metaphysicalî properties of the piece. The students rebelled against the assignment because it was too difficult and boring. Instead of fixing the error and reacting to the students, the teacher made the students memorize the first twenty stanzas of the poem! (Aim). Those students must remember this canonic work with grimaces since their teacher killed any possible curiosity or interest they could have in the poem.

A participant in an adult literacy program summarized the importance seeing student unconditionally as whole individuals through this advice: Just don't have the students in your class to learn but take an interest in what the problems are and what they're interested in learning. What you can do to make things better for them and get them interest in things they want to do. Help them to understand what they are doing and to like it because some teachers will if you don't want to do this I don't care if you are in my class. For a lot of people they don't want to hear this. They are fighting back and saying I don't understand this and I don't want to do this. When they are really asking for is in other words please help me, but I don't know how to ask you for it. Take an interest in them and show them what to do (Amoroso).

Even when teachers see students as complex beings, other poor instructional practices rob students of the passion and curiosity these teachers want to inspire. One pitfall of teachers is overusing purchased materials that claim to address all the needs of the students. Teachers think using a prepackaged system saves time and energy, but really these stiff programs do not addressing the individual needs of students. Another common mistake, which sometimes results from packaged materials, is inflexibility in pacing through adherence to the idea that simple concepts must be master before complex. Many students become bored and frustrated working on these simple skills and thus the teacher deprives students of the exciting challenges resulting in slow and dull classes (Note 3). Lastly, too many worksheets or isolated practices never show the students how the skills connect in real reading and writing situations. For example, Aim describes a classroom where phonics explicitly taught in the early morning, yet, come reading time, those skills were not applied. Thus, these students were left on their own to make connections between the phonics skills and the reading.

Passive teaching springs from a reliance on workbooks and scripted lessons. First of all, students need skills modeled (Kohn, 2005). Without modeling, students never see how a literate adult puts all the pieces together when reading or writing. When teachers write in front of students or do read-alouds, not only do students get a clearer picture of how to do the task, but students also see skills in practice. Furthermore, seeing skills implemented in real world situations shows validity in learning the skill. Additionally, an enthusiastic teacher increases the students interested in the content. When teachers are cold distributors of bland facts, then the passion and curiosity in students dies. Coles (1999) describes this as a ìstolid emotional stateî in the classroom and adds that when students are left to ìdraw solely up on their own motivation, they are unable to sustain a commitment to learning.î Worksheets rarely, if ever, display a teachers love for learning and thus do not inspire passion in students.

On a deeper level, telling, instead of showing and doing, harms students because it hammers out students' ability to think independently (Kohn, 2005). A child loses his natural curiosity when he realizes that to do well he simply must memorize facts and do exactly what the teacher says. Students instead need to question and challenge in order to be real problem solvers and to have real interest in what they are learning. Kohn proclaims, ìWe should reject a focus on right answers and conventual methodsî and instead ìask probing questionsî and provide in ìevery lesson ... chances to wonder, to argue, to criticize the text and what the teacher has said.î Instead of memorizing ìrightî answers, students should be lead to form their own opinions and understand how they came to them (Kohn, 2005). However, challenging authority does not fit into many teacher's plan and thus the students lose their passion and enthusiasm.

For all these reasons, teachers make a large impact on students' learning and thus impact if a student will succeed or fail. However, the teacher is not the only factor in a student's literacy development. No matter how connected and enthusiastic the teacher, other factors contribute to a student's success with literacy.

THE STUDENT
Many believe that students struggle due to learning disabilities inherent in the individual's brain from birth. On such disability is dyslexia, a condition where brain does not connect sound and print as easily as the average person. This results in slow, labored reading (Shaywitz, 2003). Even though dyslexia relates directly to the learning of how to read, it is not the only learning disability that affects reading. Other mental, social, and behavior disabilities can influence how a student learns. However, not all people accept learning disabilities and instead think that other factors, such as schools and family, situations contribute to these outcomes (Birth of a Syndrome). Some educators even believe that gender determines how successful a student will be with reading.

As a high school teacher, I find it difficult understand why my students struggle with reading when they have had nine years schooling before arriving in my class. Secondary teachers often jump to the conclusion that struggling students are lazy, disorganized, disrespectful, valueless, unmotivated, or unintelligent. However, factors students encountered over the years cause these symptoms or defense mechanisms. O'Brien (2003) describes this phenomenon: ìAs a result of early identification, labeling, and prolonged placement in corrective programs, the stigmatized students develop early, profound, negative perceptions about their ability. The tragic irony is that we are so preoccupied with fixing deficit skills that we ignore this syndrome of diminished self-efficacy, attribution of failure to factors students perceive as being beyond their control, and learned helplessness.î Most of the behaviors I see at the secondary level are a result of years of struggle with reading and the students have masked their immediate problems with reading and confidence with different behaviors.

However, not all students who fail my class have a problem reading. Instead, they are aliterate. They can read, but they choose to do otherwise. Unlike the student described above, the student who can read well, but chooses not to do so, is more of a challenge for a teacher because there can be so many reasons why the student is not reading, some intrinsic and some not. One outside factor that can thwart a teacher's efforts against aliteracy is the student's family.

FAMILY
Family affects literacy just as teachers do. Scientific research shows that the family environment a student spends the formative years before school even starts has a huge impact on literacy achievement. Students from ìdisadvantaged environmentsî show lags in literacy development very early which grows as their more wealthy peers advance. One reason for this discrepancy is children on welfare speak and listen to their parents far less then other economic groups (Lyon and Chhabra, 2004). Thus, being part of a particlar family and that family's economic status can affect a student's gains in literacy.

Family also affects literacy through how much exposer to the world and print a student receives from his family. ìReading is a psychological guessing gameî where we combine our prior knowledge of the world and the patterns of language to create our guesses. When children lack prior knowledge, reading becomes more difficult. We experimented with this in class by looking at phrases quickly on the overhead. When we knew the phrase due to our prior knowledge, we could easily figure out the end even if we did not technically have time to read it. However, when the prior knowledge removed from the equation, it became almost impossible to guess the next words, which required the reader to slow down and focus more (Note 4). Thus, the more one knows the easier the reading. So, students whose families expose them to more language, more books, and more experiences bring more prior knowledge to the table and thus make learning to read easier.

Learning disabilities are frequently diagnosed, which some see as a panacea to all reading problems. Some parent pressure educators into diagnosing a learning disability even though labeling a child with a disability can provide an excuse or the wrong intervention for the child. Some parents want every problem to be a learning disability and not a sign of rebellion, clashing morals, or mental illness. For these reasons, ìparental advocacy groups have remained the strongest force in keeping alive the concept of learning disabilitiesî (Birth of a Syndrome). It is unclear how often parents pressure educators into false diagnoses since sources conflict; some believe few students have real learning disabilities while others contend that no parents tries to push a learning problem on to their child (Birth of a Syndrome; Shaywitz, 2003). The division over learning disabilities among educators also hinders reading development because it sends mixed messages about the root of the problem resulting in confusion and second guessing instead of successful intervention.

GOVERNMENT AND DISTRICT ADMINISTRATION
Often teachers give into poor practices, such as passive teaching, condition teaching, or labeling students, because of outside pressures. Some pressure comes from parents, but the government's laws about education and the local administration's implementation of those laws can create an environment where teachers have little flexibility in curriculum, pacing, or methods. If a district values the scores of a student more than the student, then it is hard for the individual teacher to not do the same in their classrooms. Furthermore, the policies, procedures, and restrictions some districts put on teachers limit their ability to break away from isolated skill practice or dull distribution of facts (Kohn, 2005). In such ways, it is the government and district policy makers who affect students' literacy achievement through affecting how teachers are able to teach.

TEACHER EDUCATION PROGRAMS
As we discussed in class, there is often a mismatch between training of teachers and reality (Note 5). My own experiences with teaching coincide with this critique of pre-service training. No one can be fully taught how to be a teacher; one learns to teach by teaching. Yet, my minor in secondary education needed more training on creating lessons that would transfer my passion for literature and writing to my students. My education also lack how to help my struggling readers progress. I received no instruction on how one learns to read nor was I required to reflect on how I read. Instead I was taught how to move them through Massachusetts state curriculum. My lack of training in these areas drastically affected the students my first year of teaching. My students were confused and disinterested in reading and writing and did not make much progress. Surprisingly, I am not alone in feeling unprepared because ìonly twenty-nine states required elementary teachers in training to have course-work specific to reading instruction, and even in those states only about twelve hours of graduate training is mandatedî (Birth of Syndrome). Students already battle so many causes of reading failure that it is ludicrous not to train teachers about these factors, how to overcome them if possible, and how not to be a cause for literacy struggles oneself.

CONCLUSION
No one cause can simply explain why any particular child struggles to gain literacy. Students arrive in Kindergarden with varying language skills, which sets some students behind. Others have learning disabilities that affect how their brains process. However, a student can also lose interest in reading and writing when a classroom is void of caring, support, passion, and curiosity. A teacher's lack of connection with her students or harsh district or government mandates that dictate a teacher's practices create these uninspiring classrooms. Students who encounter more than one of these factors have a greater risk of struggling with literacy.

Notes
1. EDU621Understanding Literacy Problems at USM in Lewiston, ME. May 17, 2008.
2. EDU621Understanding Literacy Problems at USM in Lewiston, ME. July 25, 2008.
3. EDU621Understanding Literacy Problems at USM in Lewiston, ME. May 17, 2008.
4. EDU621Understanding Literacy Problems at USM in Lewiston, ME. May 17, 2008.
5. EDU621Understanding Literacy Problems at USM in Lewiston, ME. May 17, 2008.

Works Cited

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