The Poor Reader in Secondary Schools

Abstract

Downloaded from 614 and eighteenth centuries, making only token efforts to adapt to students of widely varied abilities, backgrounds, and interests. The role of the school is now being modified in breadth, depth, and the types of students being served. I n breadth, the schools have become concerned with a great variety of subjects, such as vocational education, sex education, sociology, cosmetology, and driver training. And in depth, they have deeply penetrated into areas such as the sciences of physics, mathematics, microbiology, and cellular biology. Many schools are now serving a greater variety of students, from those with severe handicapping conditions to the gifted.Many efforts have been made to salvage the learning-disabled child. Special classes have been introduced to aid in reading and arithmetic, special materials have been developed, reorganization of teaching models has begun, including team teaching, departmentalized teaching, and open schools; learning resource centers have been initiated; and massive inservice teacher training efforts have been developed. All are innovative and to some degree successful. All have a commonality, however, that compounds the problem: Each relies on reading as the principal means of gathering information. Each works to transform the nonachieving child into a capable reader in order to cope with the existing educational program. Unfortunately, these efforts have had only marginal success, particularly at the secondary level.For the learning-disabled student and other poor readers, acquiring the enriched educational content of the regular program is necessarily restricted. A greater portion of the school day is relegated to basic skill training. Since classroom assignments are largely read, the learning-disabled student is often designated to watered-down programs, running errands, listening to class discussions and lectures whose foundations have been a prior reading assignment, and generally confirming earlier suspicions of inferiority. The junior high and secondary level student, in grade seven through grade twelve, is particularly vulnerable to our present educational offerings. The elementary school is generally selfcontained and better suited to meet the unique needs of the learning-disabled child. Remedial efforts are less obvious, and the curriculum is more easily modified to suit the needy learner. The secondary schools have several unique problems that inhibit successful planning for learning-disabled students.at CARLETON UNIV on June 14, 2015 isc.sagepub.com Downloaded from 615 Secondary schools are generally on the platoon system; subsequently, each teacher may see from 150 to 200 students a day, knowing little of the special needs of the individual student. Also, secondary teachers are hired because of their content specialty. They are not trained to work with handicapped students in their curriculum speciality, in the remedial sense, or in curriculum modification. Perhaps the most obvious difference is the impersonal milieu that is perpetuated by the vast ...