The author of this school improvement plan is concerned about the poor reading abilities of many of our Virgin Islands public school students. The author decided to conduct an investigation at the John H. Woodson Junior High School in St. Croix, part of the Virgin Islands public school system, in order to devise a school improvement plan that may be implemented at the John H. Woodson Junior High School (and other schools) to help the students become better readers and writers.

    The proposed school-based on-site investigation was approved in writing by Dr. Denis Griffith, the author’s professor in the graduate class known as Fundamentals of Administration, EDU 547, at the St. Croix Campus of the University of the Virgin Islands; and the on-site investigation was approved in writing by the principal of John H. Woodson Junior High School, Vaughn Hewitt, and by Lorraine Gibbs, the St. Croix District Insular Superintendent. The investigation consisted of telephone calls and in-person meetings with Mr. Hewitt; brief personal meetings with the two assistant principals, Gary Molloy and Doris Brodhurst; a joint meeting with all three school counselors; a meeting with Ms Dominique (a reading teacher) and Ms Saddler, an English teacher; a brief meeting with Charles Fisher, a science teacher; four (some extended) meetings with Ms Charlene Matthew, the chairperson of the Reading Department (one attended by Ms Dominique); observation of a reading class conducted by Ms Matthew; an analysis of 1996 7th-grade student Stanford reading test results; a review of a reading class textbook; and participation in the hardwiring of a portion of a computer network on Net Day, which provided some sense of the John H. Woodson, and Virgin Islands public school professional community.

    Mark W. Conley of Michigan State University (Conley, 1995) points out that "[b]eyond the elementary level, reading is most often taught as a separate course" (p.85). Conley states that "[i]t has ... been suggested that every teacher should be a teacher of reading (Karlan, 1984)." But Conley asserts that "content-area teachers don’t have the time or the expertise necessary to meet all of the reading needs of students in their [middle school or junior high school] classrooms" (p.90). Conley notes the "natural reluctance of content-area teachers to participate in reading programs," and claims that "Teachers who participate in any [reading] program should be volunteers. Many middle school and junior high reading programs that fail do so because programs have been thrust on content-area teachers who are not ready for them" (p.93).

    Let’s take Mark Conley’s advice, and propose a voluntary school improvement project. Dr. Conley claims that "content-area" teachers don’t have the time or the expertise necessary to meet all of the reading needs of students in their classrooms. What can we do to fill this gap in reading-improvement expertise? How can we carve out the time needed to make all classrooms reading classrooms, if that is what we want to do? To answer these questions, it is important to understand the elements of reading with understanding.

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    Jacobs (1997) has explained that there are five elements of reading with understanding: (1) the ability to "speak the written word"; (2) possession of vocabulary, including "cultural literacy"; (3) knowledge of grammar; (4) clear thought including logic; and (5) orientation. Jacobs has pointed out that elements 2 through 5 (vocabulary, grammar, clear thinking, and orientation), when it comes to reading, depend upon the first element - the ability to "speak the written word." What is "the ability to ‘speak the written word’"? It means, here, the ability to look at a page of text of written English and to say aloud, understandably to a listener, exactly what the author wrote, word-for-word. To paraphrase Jacobs, if you can’t ‘talk out loud’ the words on the page, your vocabulary, grammar, clear thinking, and orientation do not make you a reader. "A good vocabulary, an understanding of standard English grammar, the ability to think clearly, and a healthy orientation in life will all help a reader to catch the meaning of what he reads, but they all hang on the ability to carry the written word on the page into speech" (Jacobs, 1997, p.2). The informal investigation at the John H. Woodson Junior High School suggests that a principal reason many of the junior high school students cannot read at grade level is that they cannot "speak the written word" of grade-level reading materials. This could be confirmed through testing a sample of students with the Reading Competency Test, an informal reading inventory published by the National Right to Read Foundation. The author of this report suspects that an effective school improvement program will need to develop this ability to speak aloud every single word on the page with precision. A complete program would work on vocabulary, grammar, clear thinking and orientation as well.

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    What instructional techniques should the teachers use in the reading and writing improvement project? For one thing, in this project the participating teachers will be encouraged to learn the technique known as "direct instruction." Direct instruction is explicit, systematic, teacher-directed instruction. It involves getting the students’ attention; describing what is about to be taught; modeling for the students the learning behavior being taught; providing an opportunity for the students to perform the behavior themselves with the teacher; providing an opportunity for the students to perform the behavior on their own with feedback on performance; and providing opportunities for students to practice the behavior being taught and to generalize their use of the new behavior learned. Over the long haul (semester, academic year, grade-to-grade), a coordinated Direct Instruction program will likely systematically teach the subjects to be taught, part-by-part. Its use in this program, however, would largely be stripped of this long-term systematistic element.

    Direct instruction has been found to be an effective teaching method for reading instruction and for teaching other basic skills. For instance, thirteen instructional techniques for teaching reading (Smith, 1994), part of twenty-two instructional models in various basic subjects (Grossen, 1997), were compared in Project Follow Through. Project Follow Through was the largest educational experiment in United States history. It was a $1 billion project sponsored by the Federal government "designed to determine what works best in teaching disadvantaged primary school children. The ... Direct Instruction model was applied to 9,000 children at 20 sites [in the early 1970s]. In 1977, an independent firm tabulated test results and concluded that [the] program had outperformed all others. [The others included "language experience", a forerunner of today’s "whole language." (Grossen , p. 22).] For children who attended kindergarten through third grade, Direct Instruction came first in reading, arithmetic, spelling, language, basic skills, academic cognitive skills and even self-esteem. But it was never widely implemented because its approach contradicted the progressive dogma of the day" (Smith, 1994).

    Bonnie Grossen, a professor at the University of Oregon, and the editor of the journal Effective School Practices, wrote an essay entitled "The Research Base for Reading Mastery, SRA," consisting of 22 pages, plus a supplemental 12 pages entitled "References for Reading Mastery Research Review," and placed them on the World Wide Web. The Grossen quotations found here are from this website. (http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/:adiep/rdgtxt.htm) The website does not indicate when it was posted or revised. Since it is a current website, the Grossen work is referenced as Grossen (1997). Dr. Grossen points out that "focused instruction in decoding (phonics) is superior to instruction that does not provide a decoding focus" (p.2). In other words, students should be taught to "decode" the words on the page. To do this, the children need to be taught the "encoding" and "decoding" rules of written English. These are the rules of phonics - the rules explaining our alphabetic system, where letters and groups of letters symbolize the sounds of our speech. The "sound values" of individual letters (especially vowels) can vary from word to word, so the rules get a little complicated, but not too complicated. Our children are smart enough to learn the rules. If the children are exposed to the rules again and again and again and again, they will learn them. If they do learn the phonics rules well, they can stop hesitantly stumbling and hacking their way through grade-level (and beyond) reading, the way so many of them do now.

    Grossen (1997) makes reference to Jeanne Chall’s famous book Learning to Read: The Great Debate (Chall, 1967), a meta-analysis of reading research, which resulted in Dr. Chall’s conclusion (paraphrased by Dr. Grossen) that "focused instruction in phonics was superior to instruction without this focus in teaching students word recognition, oral reading, and spelling (Chall, 1983). These findings held for both low performers and normally-achieving students" (p.2). Grossen further reports that "Jeffrey and Samuels (1976) and Polloway, Epstein, Polloway, Patton and Ball (1986) found that a phonics program resulted in significantly better reading comprehension than other programs" (p.2). Grossen further reports that "Foorman (1995) reviewed the research on the great debate and concluded, ‘empirical evidence favors explicit instruction in alphabetic coding’ (p.388). Baker and Stahl (1994) emphasized the importance of explicitly teaching alphabetic coding" (pp. 2-3).

    The most famous recent meta-analysis of reading instruction, Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print by Marilyn Jager Adams (Adams, 1990), concluded that direct, explicit phonics instruction is important for the development of skillful readers. Adams emphasizes that to become a good reader, the student must overlearn phonics information, explaining "It is their overlearned knowledge about the sequence of letters comprising frequent words and spelling patterns that enables skillful readers to process the letters of a text so quickly and easily. As the reader fixates each word of text, the individual letters in focus are perceived almost instantly and effortlessly. Yet even as the letters are perceived, they are automatically clustered into familiar spelling patterns by virtue of the learned association among them. Thus it is because of their deep knowledge about orthography that skillful readers look and feel as though they recognize words holistically" (p.410).

    Grossen (1997) further points out that "Pany and McCoy (1988) found that third-grade children with reading disabilities who made a large number of errors during reading (10%-15%) significantly improved their word recognition and comprehension scores when given immediate feedback on every single error. When corrective feedback was provided after every error, the children made significantly fewer errors overall, significantly fewer meaning-change errors during reading of the passage, significantly fewer errors on lists of error words presented on an immediate and delayed bases, and significantly fewer errors on passage-comprehension questions. Simply receiving feedback on errors that altered the meaning of the passages had no effect" (p.10).

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    Grossen (1997) further reports that "Pupils should be taught how to blend sounds together into words. Coleman (1970) noted that blending is a strategy that students can apply to many different words, but direct instruction in the blending strategy using many sounds is necessary before students will acquire the generalized skill. Skailand (1971) and Silberman (1964) reported that if subjects are taught sound-symbol relationships but not blending, they will not use sounding out as a decoding strategy. Bishop (1964), Jeffrey and Samuels (1967), Carnine (1977), and Vandever and Neville (1976) reported that teaching letter-sound correspondences and sounding out resulted in students’ correctly identifying more unfamiliar words than when students were trained on a whole-word strategy. Haddock (1976) and Chapman and Kamm (1974) found that only when blending is directly taught will students successfully use a sounding-out strategy for attacking words" (p.7).

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    Grossen (1997) further reports that "Teaching vocabulary concepts explicitly has a positive effect on comprehension and on the ability to use context to learn new words. Of course, direct instruction of vocabulary can teach no more than a fraction of the words that students need to learn during their K-12 years. However, direct teaching can have significant effects not only on comprehension of passages containing taught words, but also on comprehension in general and on the ability to learn new words in context. Beck, Perfetti, and McKeown (1982) found that students who were given direct instruction in word meanings were better able to discern meanings of untaught words than control subjects. Stahl and Fairbanks (1986) suggest that teaching 350 words each year may augment learning from context by 10 to 30%, a significant amount" (p.14).

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    Grossen (1997) further reports that "Reasoning deductively (logically) is difficult for all populations and can be improved with explicit instruction. Research has documented in all populations that the most common error in reasoning is to form a conclusion without sufficient evidence (Ceraso & Provitera, 1971; Grossen, 1991; Grossen & Carnine, 1990; Grossen, Lee, & Johnston, 1995; Simpson & Johnson, 1966). Direct instruction in syllogistic reasoning can have a positive impact on these error patterns (Grossen & Carnine, 1990; Grossen, Lee & Johnson, 1995). These effects transfer to other critical thinking and reasoning activities (Grossen, 1991; Grossen, Lee & Johnston, 1995)" (p.19).

    Logan (1986) contends that as children learn implicitly our alphabetic system, they learn abstraction, analysis, rationality, and classification "which form the essence of the alphabet effect and the basis for Western abstract scientific and logical thinking" (p. 21).

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    Many people have devised programs for teaching to read and write through phonics. One of those was Samuel T. Orton, M.D. a neuropathologist. He wrote the 1937 book Reading, Writing and Speech Problems in Children (Baltimore: The Orton Society for Dyslexia). Out of his original work the Orton-Gillingham method for teaching slow learners to read well through phonics was developed. He developed the 70 Orton phonograms for correct spelling, which groups written English spellings based upon the sounds they represent.

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    Romalda Spalding was a teacher who worked under Dr. Orton. She developed her own phonics-based reading instruction method, explained in her 1957 (revised 1991) book The Writing Road to Reading, which includes her 28 Spalding spelling rules and additional phonograms. As the title of her book implies, Mrs. Spalding advocated the teaching of reading through writing. Basically, the approach involves the teaching of phonics rules based upon the 70 Orton phonograms and the 28 Spalding spelling rules. Initially, children are given dictation and they write out the letters, syllables, and words based upon the phonics rules they have been taught. This method of teaching reading is promoted by The Riggs Institute of Beaverton, Oregon, which The Riggs Institute reports is highly effective. For instance, on The Riggs Institute website, the Institute presents a bar graph of Arizona pupil achievement testing using the 1985 Iowa test of basic skills, comparing total language scores of schools using the Spalding method, compared to statewide and national scores, demonstrating marked superiority of the the Spalding method over the general statewide and national population. The extensive Riggs Institute website may be accessed through a "phonics" search using Yahoo or Infoseek or other search engines on the Internet.

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    The author of this school improvement plan hypothesizes that a well-structured plan can be devised for use by reading classroom teachers and "content area" teachers, utilizing phonics-based reading instruction, including dictation and correction of oral reading, together with direct instruction in vocabulary, grammar, and logical thinking, which would result in a measurable bettering of the reading abilities of the students who are the subjects of the program.

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    The author of this school improvement project proposal suggests that the John H. Woodson Junior High School contract with The Phonics Institute to find the funding for, to develop, to put in place, and to supervise at the John H. Woodson Junior High School (and other Virgin Islands public schools desiring to participate in the program) the "Every Teacher a Reading Teacher" reading and writing school improvement project. The "Every Teacher a Reading Teacher" program would be developed by The Phonics Institute and would include the following elements:

 The Phonics Institute would develop and design classroom displays (and other            classroom material) that would display phonics rules including a sound chart, the 70 Orton phonograms, the Spalding phonograms, and the 28 Spalding rules of spelling. The Phonics

Institute would also develop and design other displays of various rules of grammar and inflection; principles of logic and clear thinking; the elements of reading with understanding; the system of direct instruction; word roots, prefixes, and suffixes; and vocabulary word lists (which, depending upon the amount of display space available, could include up to perhaps 1,000 or more of the most common words). The smallest classrooms at John H. Woodson Junior High School are approximately 20' x 20' and there is a minimum of 50 to 55 linear horizontal feet for the mounting of displays in the space approximate 2' high from the top of the blackboard to the ceiling.

The basic concept behind the proposal is to make use of phonics, grammar, and other rules, constantly on display in the classroom, to correct errors displayed in student written response to teacher dictation in class and in student oral reading in class. This will allow focusing in on the "decoding" (reading) and "encoding" (spelling) problems that the students have. The display of rules of grammar and logic, in conjunction with dictation and oral reading, will provide many quick opportunities for learning how to better read and write. The program is well grounded in research-based pedagogical principles of teaching reading, writing, vocabulary, grammar, and thinking skills.

There may be some resistance on the part of the teachers - both "reading" teachers and "content area" teachers for a variety of reasons. The author of this proposal, as the director of The Phonics Institute, would do his best to persuade teachers to participate in the program. If there is too much resistance at John H. Woodson Junior High School (and even if there isn’t), the program can be easily instituted in other classrooms at the elementary, junior high school, high school, and university level.

The program should be a good tool for the improvement of reading and writing. The use of explicit, extensive phonics rules, frequently referenced, together with direct instruction in blending and syllabication have proven to be effective means for improving reading. The use of dictation with immediate corrections making reference to explicit displayed rules should help spelling as well. The use of frequent oral reading with immediate corrections and reference to the phonics rules again should help the students to improve their reading abilities.

The use of perpetual displays in the classroom will make the process fairly quick and easy, which will cut down on the problem of carving out time from normal classroom activities. With frequent use of the display, dictation, and oral reading, the need for use of the displays and the procedures should lessen. Ultimately, because the children will be reading better, it is not anticipated that the program will make it significantly more difficult to cover all "content area" subjects. Rather, with the children reading better things should go more quickly and more easily ultimately.

The program has the advantages that the teachers will learn phonics, the rules of grammar, and the rules of logic, and the students will as well. Another advantage of the program is that it is teacher-intensive, with all classroom activities being teacher-directed.

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