Where to Begin?: Getting to know YOUR Readers & Writers

Interest Inventories

In order to get to know our students and their literacy interests it is helpful to use a questionnaire or survey.  These surveys are easy to administer and can be found for all grade levels.  By having each student fill out a survey it will provide a starting off point to where to direct your lesson plans for reading and writing.  These interest inventories will allow students to express what types of books, genres, and topics they enjoy.  

Attitude Surveys:

These are quick, informal questions that help to discover what the student’s attitude is towards reading and writing.  There are several attitude surveys you can find and print online.  You can also create your own, personalizing it to what you want to know.  You can just create questions and then provide an image that demonstrates different attitudes that can be felt to answer the question: happy, neutral, or sad.

MPR- Motivation to Read Profile

This survey was created by a group of researchers and teacher that consists of two parts; the reading survey and the conversational interview.  Both will help to get to know what students feel about reading and their abilities with it.  The following link will bring you to a full explanation and research behind using the MRP.  It also provides you with the questions for the survey and interview to ask the students.  Of course these questions can be altered if needed to fit any classroom.

http://www.fatih.edu.tr/~hugur/love_to_read/Assessing%20motivation%20to%20read.pdf

ERAS- Elementary Reading Attitude Survey
Students in Elementary school can complete this survey in order to reveal what they like and dislike about reading.  It is easier for them to answer this survey because it provides pictures to demonstrate the feelings.  Teachers should read each question aloud for all students so that struggling readers have the same capability of answering the questions as proficient readers. Use the following link to find the survey and a description of how to use it.  

http://www.professorgarfield.org/parents_teachers/printables/pdfs/reading/readingsurvey.pdf

 Open-Ended Questionnaires:

Find out how students feel about reading by having them complete a questionnaire on the subject.  You can come up with your own questions to ask students, but this is a sample that you can pick and choose from.  This can be administered as a written activity done in a group setting or as an interview one on one with each individual student. 

Interviews

Surveys are a good start to finding out how students feel towards literacy, but you may get more specific information by conducting interviews with each student as well.  If you do not use the interview questions from the MRP, then before sitting down with students come up with a list of questions to ask them that might reveal students interests, fears, strengths, and struggles with literacy.  These questions can ask about how often they read or write at home, what they enjoy reading, how they find things to read, etc.

Pre-assessments

          One last way to find out how your students are progressing in literacy is to assess them on their skills with pre-assessments.  You can use whichever assessment that you are most familiar with that will provide information on the students’ fluency, comprehension, and writing skills.  Fountas and Pinnell would be a good starting point to find reading levels and comprehension abilities.  It helps to pinpoint where the student is making their mistakes while reading, and where they are able to self-correct.  Use an assessment that will be the most practical for you and your students, and it might be easier to administer one that is available at your school.