Abstract of

Scaffolding Beginning Readers: Micro and Macro Cues Teachers Use During Student Oral Reading

Ardith D. Cole

What do first-grade teachers do and say to scaffold novice readers? To answer that question, this teacher researcher videotaped her own and others' scaffolding behaviors. Analysis of the video transcripts reveals valuable information that can support teachers or tutors as they work with beginning readers.

Video data show how first-grade teachers sustain individual readers with a variety of comments and gestures related to four cueing systems: semantics, syntactics, graphophonics, and pragmatics. The article describes the ways in which gestures support readers; how teachers scaffold novices across contexts; and why primary, rather than secondary, cues more efficiently serve decoding. This study also presents quantitative data related to the differentiated scaffolding of novice and fluent readers and demonstrates that scaffolding behaviors change as development progresses. Compared to fluent readers, novices receive lengthier scaffolding periods, more praise and affirmation, more interruptions during reading, and more gestural marking. This study shows that teachers need to enter the classroom knowing both their students and their craft so that they can offer scaffolded instruction anytime it is needed.

Abstract from Cole, A.D. (2006, February). Scaffolding Beginning Readers: Micro and Macro Cues Teachers Use During Student Oral Reading. The Reading Teacher, 59(5), 450–459. doi: 10.1598/RT.59.5.4