Reading Recovery

Reading Recovery

Reading Recovery is a school-based, short-term intervention designed for children aged five or six, who are the lowest literacy achievers after their first year of school. These children are often not able to read the simplest of books or even write their own name before the intervention. The intervention involves intensive one-to-one lessons for 30 minutes a day with a trained literacy teacher, for an average of 20 weeks.

The intervention is different for every child, assessing what the child knows and what s/he needs to learn. The focus of each lesson is to understand messages in reading and construct messages in writing; learning how to attend to detail without losing focus on meaning. A combination of teacher judgment and systematic evaluation procedures identify those lowest-achieving children for whom Reading Recovery was designed. The intervention goal is to bring children up to the level of their peers and to give them the assistance they need to develop independent reading and writing strategies. Once they are reading and writing at a level equivalent to that of their peers, their series of lessons is discontinued.

The intervention is not an alternative to good classroom teaching, but is complementary to enable children to engage in their classroom program. The lowest performing children (the bottom 5-20% depending on the context) are identified using the Observation Survey (Clay, 2002), a multi-faceted series of assessment tools covering early reading and writing. The Observation Survey has been standardized in the UK (http://readingrecovery.ioe.ac.uk) and US (http://www.readingrecovery.org/) to determine its validity and reliability.

"Reading Recovery" is a registered trademark held by the Marie Clay Trust in New Zealand, with The Ohio State University in the US and the Institute of Education in the UK.

Read more about Reading Recovery:  Reading Recovery Lesson, Teacher's Role, Brief History, Reading Recovery Internationally, Research

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