Chapters 5&6

Kayleigh Scannell
EDU572
Professor Warham
Readings from Diagnostic Teaching of Reading, by Barbra J. Walker

Learning Log # 3 Chapters 5 and 6


“The student’s frustration reading level provides an estimate of the level at which the reader is not fluent and has little recall of textual information.”

During my student teaching as a CT teacher, I was able to observe a reading assessment given by the special education teacher. Here is where she had the students do multiple reading tasks one of which was to find the frustration reading level. She later explained that when this level is found during the student testing, that specific section of the test ends. The frustration level is the level of where the student is most challenged when reading.

“Most informal reading inventories include a word identification assessment, which includes lists of words representing frequent words at a particular grade level.”

For one of my undergraduate classes at Niagara, I was to give part of the Woodcock Johnson Assessment. This assessment was focused on special education students however, I remember that word identification was a big section. It had words that were appropriate for different grade levels. The students were to repeat the word for pronunciation, testing phonemic awareness. I agree that informal and some formal assessments focus on the word identification strategy.


“The diagnostic teacher has the students orally retell the story or has the student write a story summary”.

I used this approach many times. For instance when I was teaching my remedial English class of seventh graders it took too long to have the students write a summary so I would ask the students questions which ultimately had the students summarize the story as a class. The students liked this because they could share with one another their findings.
I also used this method with my ninth graders but I had them write a summary of an article that was history related.


“In a self-report, students are asked which strategies they use and how often they use these strategies to understand and remember information’

I love this idea because it gives awareness and ownership to the students. My first teaching placement used this method to try to get a feel for the students at the beginning of the year and to see where the student thought they were. It was interesting to see how honest the students were about their own abilities to read and practices they used. My teacher told me that she ends the year with the same survey and the students can see how they progressed over the school year. It is an interesting technique they I will steal for my classroom one day.


“To cross-check oral reading behavior with comprehension, the oral reading is followed by an oral retelling. Then he asks the comprehension questions he constructed”

Read-alouds are beneficial to the students in many ways spelling, fluency, and phonemics however; it does not mean the child understands what they are reading. I had a student with just this problem, he could read well but he did not understand a lot of what he read. One way I helped was by asking questions during the read-aloud for the entire class to answer. I did not single him out in front of the other students by asking him what he just read. I made it a volunteer bases.