SCAFFOLDING IN READING RECOVERY

Reading Recovery is a one-to-one intervention for children having diff iculty reading after one year at school. It consists of daily half-hou r lessons taught by a teacher trained to diagnose and support children 's problem-solving approach to reading. Each lesson is organised so th at the pupil, no matter how inexperienced with print, is enabled to 'a ct like a reader and writer'. The parts of the lesson remain constant each day although the particular books read, the messages written, and the interactions the teacher has with the pupil are individually craf ted for each child. Marie Clay, founder of the programme, claims it is consistent with the principles of Vygotsky's theory on the acquisitio n of cultural tools. More specifically Clay and Cazden (1990) have sho wn how the features of Reading Recovery lessons exemplify the scaffold ing of learning based on assessment of each child's current reading st rategies and techniques for moving the child towards independence in r eading and writing. In this study the writing episode in Reading Recov ery was studied over the course of several school terms on a sample of 17 children taught by seven trained teachers. Although the Reading Re covery lessons conformed to many aspects of scaffolding (see Wood & Wo od, 1996), some reconceptualisation is necessary to take account of pu pils acquiring a 'messy' set of rules in which there is never complete mastery on the learner's part. Distinctions are drawn between researc h on scaffolding within short-term, experimental tasks where the goal is to solve a unique problem, and long-term, instructional contexts wh ere the curricular goals are ever-increasing.