Reading Together: A Summer Family Reading Apprenticeship Program for Delayed and Novice Readers

Abstract

The Reading Apprenticeship is an intervention that has been shown in previous studies to increase struggling readers, tested reading achievement by 8 to 9 months during a 12 week, in-school program. This article reports on the first study of the Reading Apprenticeship method conducted in the summer using parents, rather than supervised volunteers, as reading partners. Participating first through fourth grade novice or struggling readers typically gained from two to five months in tested reading skills during the summer, while parents reported enjoying the intervention and seeing evidence of increased skill and interest in reading in their children. Also discussed are the parents’ suggestions for program improvement and implications for the use of the Reading Apprenticeship method by schools and libraries to prevent the summer setback that affects so many poor readers.

Keywords:

• Elementary
• family literacy
• struggling readers
• summer setback

Notes

¹ Ruth Schoenbach, Cynthia Greenleaf, and colleagues have developed a completely different program that they have also named Reading Apprenticeship. Theirs is a well-known classroom-based instructional program intended to enhance content-area reading strategies in secondary and post-secondary students at all levels. My program is an individual, out-of-classroom intervention program for elementary-aged delayed and novice readers, intended to improve basic reading skills and motivation. As far as I can tell, we each began to use the term independently and at somewhat the same time. My first use was in a paper presented at the National Reading Conference in 1996 (Knapp, Winsor, & Carruthers, 1996), while the first publication I can find in which they use the term is Schoenbach, Greenleaf, Cziko, and Hurwitz (1999). Since our work is in very different fields of literacy, I believe neither was aware of the other’s usage until we had both written about our separate research using the same term for so long, that this dual usage is too well-established to alter at this point, nearly 20 years later. I respect their work and provide this note only to avoid any possible confusion on the part of the reader.