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A MIRACULOUS THING: ReadJoy

“I try to make it make sense, but sometimes I just quit.”
“Reading textbooks is hard because the words are big and I don’t understand them,
and it gets boring sometimes.”
“I can't read at home, and we don't have enough time in my classes to read silently.”
“I'm good at reading what I want to read. If I don't like it, it's very hard.”
“When I get to a word I don’t know I try to sound it out, but sometimes I just skip
the word.”
“When the text is hard, sometimes I give up.”

(Brenner, 2015)

         These are the ideas of 14- and 15-year-old middle school students about reading. They generally find reading “hard” and “boring”. As they struggle in reading especially in their content area courses, they simply give up it. Post-elementary students unfortunately suffer from struggling in reading, and as there is no explicit literacy instruction at post-elementary levels, their problem is getting bigger and bigger every day.

            One of the sentences above belongs to a beautiful girl, Jessie. Jessie is a seventh-grade student. She loves math and geography a lot. Her parents are always very supportive and kind to her. She enjoys going to school, having fun with her peers, and playing her violin at the school. She also loves her teachers a lot.

            It has been just three weeks since the school year started. Jessie goes to the school happily every day. For the last one week, she has been feeling bad at the end of the school day. Jessie has always had some reading difficulties since she was a third grader; however, she feels that it is getting worse this year as the content of textbooks is much more difficult than it was in previous years.

            Her math teacher has started to observe that Jessie has recently had some behavioral changes. For instance, she is giving up solving the word problems in the class without reaching the result nowadays. The teacher has also realized that the text of the word problems is too long for Jessie and includes some complex sentence structures. Thus, she has decided to introduce “ReadJoy” to Jessie.

            Taking the ReadJoy MOOC, Jessie’s math teacher is ready to support her in this process. Jessie immediately registers for the after-school program and starts studying with her math teacher. Her math teacher uploads sets of word problems to Jessie’s computer. Every day, they read a set of word problems on ReadJoy at the school. Since Jessie has the problem sets on her computer, she continues reading at home if she wants.

 

            After using ReadJoy regularly for several weeks, Jessie ends up telling her experience to her parents:

 

ReadJoy is my best friend now. Thanks to it, I really enjoy my school days because I can understand everything written in

my course books. My teachers also help me a lot. They upload daily text materials to my computer so that

  • I can check meaning of the words that I don’t know

  • I can listen to their pronunciation

  • I can summarize texts

  • I can highlight important points

  • I can take notes while reading

And, you know what? While doing these, I can also play a great game!

           

Reference:

Brenner, D. (2015). Supporting struggling learners in content area learning. Retrieved from: https://dierulunbbeq7.cloudfront.net/documents/Supporting-Struggling-Readers-in-Content-Area-Learning.pdf

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