Scaffolding in Reading Recovery

Abstract

Reading Recovery is a one‐to‐one intervention for children having difficulty reading after one year at school. It consists of daily half‐hour lessons taught by a teacher trained to diagnose and support children's problem‐solving approach to reading. Each lesson is organised so that the pupil, no matter how inexperienced with print, is enabled to ‘act like a reader and writer’. The parts of the lesson remain constant each day although the particular books read, the messages written, and the interactions the teacher has with the pupil are individually crafted for each child. Marie Clay, founder of the programme, claims it is consistent with the principles of Vygotsky's theory on the acquisition of cultural tools. More specifically Clay and Cazden (1990) have shown how the features of Reading Recovery lessons exemplify the scaffolding of learning based on assessment of each child's current reading strategies and techniques for moving the child towards independence in reading and writing. In this study the writing episode in Reading Recovery was studied over the course of several school terms on a sample of 17 children taught by seven trained teachers. Although the Reading Recovery lessons conformed to many aspects of scaffolding (see Wood & Wood, 1996), some reconceptualisation is necessary to take account of pupils acquiring a ‘messy’ set of rules in which there is never complete mastery on the learner's part. Distinctions arc drawn between research on scaffolding within short‐term, experimental tasks where the goal is to solve a unique problem, and long‐term, instructional contexts where the curricular goals are ever‐increasing.

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