Teacher-child oral reading interactions: how do teachers typically tutor?

This paper reports the results of three studies which examine the behaviours of teachers when hearing children read. In the first study, we examine the tutoring behaviour of 55 teachers listening to 8–14-year-old low progress readers. In the second study, we report results on 31 teachers listening to very low progress readers aged 9–16 years and, in the third, we discuss the findings from 55 teachers listening to young average progress readers aged 4–8 years. The results suggest that, for all three groups of readers, most teachers tend to respond immediately most of the time to reader errors, allowing little or no time for readers to self-correct. Teachers tend to respond to errors with a prompt on most occasions but this is more likely with low and very low progress readers than with young, average progress readers. Relatively low rates of praise were apparent in all three groups. We also found that a large number of readers in all groups were inappropriately placed on book levels which were too easy or (less frequently) too difficult, as against an appropriate instructional level.