The Structured Literacy Planner

Louise Spear-Swerling, PhD, is Professor Emerita in the Department of Special Education at Southern Connecticut State University. She helped prepare both general and special educators to teach reading using Structured Literacy approaches for many years, including supervising a public school tutoring program that paired teacher candidates with struggling readers. Her research interests include children's reading development, reading difficulties, and the knowledge and skills needed to teach reading effectively, especially to struggling and at-risk readers. She has presented and published widely on these topics. Dr. Spear-Swerling is author or editor of several books and is an editorial board member for several journals, including Annals of Dyslexia, Teaching Exceptional Children, and Reading Psychology. She consults often for K-12 school districts, mostly on students with severe or persistent literacy difficulties and ways to improve their achievement.

"This book describes a set of explicit approaches to teaching reading that have become known as Structured Literacy and that are especially effective for struggling readers. Chapter 1 explains in detail the two main themes, involving Structured Literacy and poor reader profiles, and why they are important to successful teaching of poor readers. Chapter 2 describes the structure of English at multiple levels - words, sentences, and longer discourse - a grasp of which is essential for SL teaching of both word reading and comprehension. Chapter 3 focuses on assessment of poor readers - specifically, how to determine poor reader profiles and target interventions properly for individual students, as well as how to use diagnostic assessments to further identify specific skills to address in intervention. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on students with a profile of Specific Word Recognition Difficulties, that is, difficulties specific to word reading. Chapters 6 and 7 address students with a profile of Specific Reading Comprehension Difficulties, which involves students who have poor reading comprehension despite good word reading. The topic of Chapters 8 and 9 involves students with a profile of Mixed Reading Difficulties, who have difficulties both in word reading and language comprehension"--

1. How Structured Literacy Interventions Can Help Students with Varied Reading Problems 2. The Structure of Language 3. Assessment for Planning Structured Literacy Interventions 4. Structured Literacy Interventions for SWRD-Early Stages 5. Structured Literacy Interventions for SWRD-Advanced Stages 6. Structured Literacy Interventions for SRCD-Early Stages 7. Structured Literacy Interventions for SRCD-Advanced Stages 8. Structured Literacy Interventions for MRD-Early Stages 9. Structured Literacy Interventions for MRD-Advanced Stages Index