I am a secondary school, business teacher. I have been teaching for the past15 years. I have done teacher training in the primary school and I have taught at all levels of the Secondary school and spent some time lecturing at the tertiary level Through out my time as a teacher I have found students with reading disabilities at all levels of the school system. Some of these students suffered physical set backs such as poor sight or hearing but by and large the poor readers were of sound mind and body physically able to read at their appropriate reading levels. I was curious about the reasons for this growing problem of struggling readers and how I might help them. Having completed part of the programme, I can make some suggestions as to the reasons behind the failing readers. These include:-
1. Students may have early on, been left behind in a class full of mainly emergent readers. They were never allowed to reach the stage of reading readiness on their own.
2. Many of these students have not been exposed to quality children’s reading material
3. They often have many socio-economic issues to deal with taking attention away from school and reading. All of these together make for low self esteem and lack of motivation.
It is my hope to learn from this programme the best techniques to deal with these struggling readers to get them on the path of reading for success, to identify from good readers, strategies which weak ones can use to develop their reading capabilities and most of all to motivate all students to become life long readers.
