Introduction
In thinking about how the response to intervention (RTI) model might be applied to the identification of children with learning disabilities, I will concentrate on how the model might work in the case of children whose primary area of learning difficulty is in reading. I will do this for three reasons. First, this is the area of academic growth that I know the most about, second, reading is the most important academic tool skill that children develop while in school, and third, the highest proportion of children identified as learning disabled have reading difficulties. I will further concentrate on the use of the RTI model with older children, as this is an area less frequently addressed in existing commentary.
As background for my specific remarks about use of the RTI model to identify older children with reading disabilities, it seems important first to discuss a few facts and ideas about reading itself. The first idea is that the most important overall indicator of reading growth is a child's ability to construct meaning from text. In other words, the goal of literacy instruction is to help children acquire the skills that enable learning from, understanding, and enjoyment of written language. Ultimately, it is a child's ability to efficiently interpret the meaning of text that is the surest indicator of proficiency in reading.
The second idea, or rather fact, is that to construct meaning from text, a child must have adequate skills in two broad areas: 1) general language comprehension; and, 2) ability to accurately and fluently identify the individual words in print. Knowledge and active application of specific reading strategies is also helpful to maximize reading comprehension (Snow, Burns, & Griffen, 1998), but most of the variability among children and adults in comprehension of written material can be accounted for by measuring the two broad families of skills identified in Gough's simple view of reading (Gough, 1996; Hoover & Gough, 1990). That is, good general language comprehension and good word reading skills are the most critical skills required for effective comprehension of written material.
The most important challenge that children face when they enter school and begin learning to read is to understand how the oral language they have already learned is represented in print (Beck & Juel, 1995). In other words, the first challenge children face in learning to read is learning how to identify printed words accurately and fluently. The phase of reading development in which the primary emphasis is on acquiring the skills required to read words in print is sometimes referred to as the "learning to read" phase (Chall, 1983), and for most children this extends roughly through the end of second grade.
The next phase of reading growth has been referred to as the "reading to learn" phase (Chall, 1983), and here the challenge of continued reading growth changes somewhat from the earlier period. Children are still faced with challenges in the word-reading domain, but these challenges are primarily in the area of adding to the range of words they can recognize at a single glance. It is important for children to continue adding to the vocabulary of words they can recognize by sight, as this enables them to maintain fluent reading on passages that incorporate an ever-expanding corpus of words (Torgesen, Rashotte, & Alexander, 2001). Another, and equally significant challenge to reading growth beyond third grade is presented by the increasing conceptual complexity of texts children are asked to read, as well as the broader range of words that are used to convey those concepts. For example, individual differences in vocabulary knowledge (knowledge of word meanings) explain an increasingly larger proportion of the variance in reading comprehension as the texts children read employ an ever expanding range of words to convey meaning (Hiebert, in press, 2003; Snow, 2002).
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