AREAS OF INSTRUCTION
Reading Plus is the only IT-based program that explicitly teaches silent reading fluency to develop comprehension and vocabulary to levels that meet the reading demands our students face at High School, in Tertiary Education, and in the Workplace.
COMPREHENSION
It’s essential that students have the skills to understand the deeper meaning of texts, not just the ability to recite memorised facts. Reading Plus provides practice with 20 comprehension sub-skills to ensure students develop the ability to understand texts in a deep and meaningful way.
Rigorous, text-dependent questions follow each reading selection. Reading Plus comprehension questions are crafted to ensure students develop a full understanding of both the explicit and implicit details of a text, and assess a student’s ability to use higher-order thinking skills.
Integrated Comprehension tasks are presented in a variety of formats…. read more
WRITING
Reading Plus provides writing tasks that encourage a close and critical analysis of texts. Writing prompts ask evidence-based questions that test students’ deep understanding of what they’ve read.
Students respond to writing prompts by forming and substantiating arguments with relevant evidence from the selection and their own prior knowledge of the topic. Electronic comment threads between teachers and students support students in formulating well-considered positions while developing writing abilities.
a
VOCABULARY
Proprietary Vocabulary List to Help Students Achieve Academic Success
There are about 1 million words in the English language and not enough time to teach them all. But some words do more to help students achieve academic success. Reading Plus uses a proprietary, research-based list of foundational academic vocabulary. These 2,400 words are members of rich morphological families, so learning them provides students with a basis to recognise and understand 10,000 highly frequent, academic words within texts and across curriculum.
For example, a student who learns and masters a word, such as estimate, is empowered to read and understand estimates, estimated, and estimation. One word learned becomes many words known.
Students are introduced to words in the Reading Plus vocabulary activity that they will encounter in the instructional texts, so that they have opportunity to fully engage with and master them. Repeated exposure to newly learned words develops automaticity and increases fluency with vocabulary. As students learn each word, they also develop contextual analysis skills that help them unlock the meaning of other unfamiliar words.
Reading Plus vocabulary lessons include: Word Explanation, Word Family, Word in Use, Audio Cues, and Image Support.
FLUENCY
This is what silent reading fluency looks like for struggling readers. The red dot in the video is an eye movement recording of a struggling reader. Students who labour to read haven’t developed physically efficient eye movement. Instead of easily scanning lines of text, their eyes stop, fixate, and regress. These students fall behind in vocabulary, comprehension and motivation. |  | |
This is what silent reading fluency looks like with Reading Plus. The video shows how the Reading Plus Guided Window develops the physical skills needed for silent reading fluency. The personalised rate at which text is presented is gradually increased to match each student’s reading rate and comprehension level. Physically efficient eye movement increases rate and stamina and makes reading more productive and comfortable. |  | |
Text Segmentation to Increase Stamina Texts are presented in shorter segments to ease stamina demands. As a student’s rate and comprehension increase, the length of the segments increases as well, which progressively builds the student’s reading stamina. |  | |
Visual Skills Development The Reading Plus iBalance activity trains a student’s eyes to read more efficiently and accurately. Flash and Scan activities help with left to right scanning and learning to easily identify and remember groups of letters that appear often in stories and articles (automaticity). |  | |
CAPACITY
Increasing READING CAPACITYReading Plus provide year-appropriate levels of content, vocabulary, sentence length, and word count, ensuring that students encounter ever-increasing levels of text complexity. As a student demonstrates mastery in Reading Plus, the selections presented will have richer academic vocabulary, higher word counts, and deeper examinations of topics and themes. For students who require support, the program provides personalised scaffolds that help students engage with challenging texts rather than avoid them.
Texts that TEACH
The Reading Plus program provides an extensive library of engaging informational and literary selections that support instructional objectives through student-centred learning.
Texts used are written to meet readability and text complexity educational requirements, and include STEM, social science, and literary content that expands a student’s knowledge about the world.
The program’s 18 reading levels include selections that range from year 3 readability through to year 13 texts, as well as five levels of early-content, high-interest texts for intermediate/secondary reading well below year level.
This booklet provides samples of Reading Plus text selections, comprehension tasks, and constructed response tasks from a number of reading levels in the program.
