Pat Cunningham

“If They Don't Read Much, How They Ever Gonna Get Good?”

While acknowledging the importance of practice in developing reading competence, the author questions whether incentive programs (such as Accelerated Reader or the Pizza Hut Book It! program) are useful, particularly for struggling readers. She asks, “Do popular incentive programs accomplish their goal—particularly for struggling readers? Do your struggling readers read more and read more willingly because of the incentive programs you have in place?” Her experience makes her believe that the opposite is true, and that such programs are actually “demotivating” most struggling readers.

What if They Can Say the Words but Don't Know What They Mean?

Vocabulary is critical to reading comprehension. Children differ greatly in the size of their meaning vocabularies at school entrance, and those with small vocabularies tend to add fewer words than those with larger vocabularies. Included in this column are some strategies to add more meaning-vocabulary development to classroom instruction.