A reading apprenticeship for delayed primary readers

Abstract

Eight second‐ and third‐grade delayed readers participated in a 10‐week cognitive apprenticeship in reading, meeting three times a week to read student‐chosen books with an adult volunteer reading partner, alternating lines or pages as the partner modeled reading strategies and fluent reading, helped with the decoding of difficult words, offered questions and explanations to clarify text meaning, and in other ways scaffolded the reading experience to enable the student to accomplish the authentic task of reading a personally interesting book beyond his or her independent capabilities. Compared to a group of matched controls, apprenticeship students made significantly larger gains in reading comprehension as measured by the KTEA and in classroom reading behaviors as observed by their teachers.