Christine Gillions : Teaching and Enhancing Reading with the Running Record

Christine Gillions : Teaching and Enhancing Reading with the Running Record

One of the biggest influences that has changed and continues to change teachers' attitude to the teaching of reading, is the set of teaching strategies which have emerged from the work of New Zealand researcher Marie Clay. In the early 1980's the New Zealand Education Department adopted Clay's strategies nationwide, dramatically taking New Zealand's literacy levels into the top group on international ranking tables. Today Clay's teaching reading strategies are now being applied across the globe, because of these techniques' powerful positive impact on children's level of reading success.

Spearheading Clay's learning to read approach is the running record. The running record gives a systematic window into a child's reading. It informs the teacher what the child is currently doing as the child reads. This allows the teacher to subsequently take action, so in the future what the child is doing and what he/she should be doing to gain reading comprehension, are the same thing.

The running record is appropriate for all children, from those with a learning difficulty to those who are gifted readers. In the hands of a skilled teacher the running record can shine a spotlight on the strategies a child uses in coping with print. In a quiet one-one setting with a text at the child's assumed reading level, the running record reveals better than any other technique the extent with which a child uses cues of meaning, syntax and/or the grapho-phonic features of text.

As soon as the child has finished a running record session the teacher has a written record of:

The child's rate of accuracy of word reading

The child's awareness of skill of self-correction

The child's reading for meaningful sense within a context (semantically acceptable)

The child's use of grammatical awareness within a sentence (syntactically acceptable)

The child's use of visual cues (letters and words)

The child's use of sound use (letters and words)

With the use of the standardised running record template the teacher not only has a detailed picture of how a child is reading, but by calculating the child's accuracy scores and self-correction rates, the teacher can also ensure that the child is given material at his/her appropriate reading level. This means that the running record is suitable to be regularly administered to all students (in lower primary at least once every three-four months), especially to those young students who are already known to struggle or excel in Literacy.

Christine Gillions: Learning Support and Gifted Education Specialist

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