School Help: A Teacher and Tutor Guide to Help the Older Student with Limited Word Reading Fluency is a book by Carmen Y. Reyes, The Psycho-Educational Teacher. Older students with limited word pronunciation or limited word fluency require a remediation approach different from remediation approaches used for younger children. One of the most common reading problems for our older students is their lack of knowledge in strategy using, simply put, weak readers do not know that to be able to pronounce longer words both fluently and with comprehension, they need to apply different word attack strategies to different words. Even when they know some strategies, it is common to see these children struggling in the application of the strategy, not knowing when or how to apply a specific strategy to a particular word. In other words, children with low reading fluency are not proficient in strategy using or in using cue systems. To overcome a word-reading problem in an older child, teachers and tutors need to provide remediation that focuses less on the memorization of rules and more on strategy using and cue systems. On this guide, we explore nine cue systems that children need to know to develop reading fluency. With this knowledge, once the child sees a particular word, he or she knows what strategies are available to identify the word. Ranging from phonological knowledge (most basic level)-to-semantic knowledge and syntactic analysis (most sophisticated), children learn how to recognize, combine, and apply different cue systems to read longer words.
About the Author: Carmen Y. Reyes, The Psycho-Educational Teacher has more than twenty years of experience as an educational diagnostician, resource room teacher, and self-contained special education teacher. Her classroom background, in New York City and her native Puerto Rico, includes 10+ years teaching children with emotional and behavioral problems, and 4+ years teaching students with a learning disability or low cognitive functioning. Carmen has a bachelor 's degree in psychology (University of Puerto Rico) and a master 's degree in special education with a specialization in emotional disorders (Long Island University, Brooklyn: NY). She also has extensive graduate training in psychology (30+ credits). Carmen is the author of 60+ books and articles in child guidance and in alternative teaching techniques for struggling learners. All her publications are available on her blog, The Psycho-Educational Teacher.