Reading Resource Spotlight: The New Reading Skills for Today’s Adults!

Submitted by Steve Schmidt on Thu, 09/17/2020 - 10:16
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Hi Everyone,

Reading Skills for Today’s Adults (RSTA) has been around since 2004, and it is part of the LINCS Resource Collection. Written by teachers for teachers, this site provides graded reading passages on a variety of topics that impact our adult learners in their roles as parents, employees, and community members.

In 2016, this resource received a major upgrade under the leadership of professional developer Kristine Kelly and Southwest Adult Basic Education in Marshall, Minnesota. Their efforts birthed a modern website, added audio recordings, and brought supporting activities. Kristine said, “RSTA was working so well for students and teachers that the idea to create CCRS-aligned activities for each reading selection seemed like a great way to support teachers, especially because many adult education teachers have limited planning time."

RSTA provides numerous learning opportunities for our students. We are always on the lookout for grade level specific reading passages, and this site provides over 350. A quick and dirty story level to grade level equivalent chart is shown below. A more comprehensive chart is available here.

Also, developing our students’ fluency skills is an often-overlooked part of reading development. Fluency is made up of:

  • Accuracy – Reading words correctly in text
  • Rate – Reading fast enough to understand text
  • Prosody – Reading in meaningful phrases; pausing to support meaning

To support fluency, each reading passage contains three audio recordings. The first audio is a slow read. The second is a little faster, and the third audio is at normal speed. The developers suggest using a five-part reading process: an unpracticed timed reading, three listening (and read along) sessions using the audio, and a final timed reading. This reading method is described in greater detail in this video. (Note: The admin package described in the video is only available for a fee from a private company that we cannot promote.)

Another treasure found in RSTA is the supporting material. Pre-reading material consists of questions and clearly defined vocabulary words. Post-reading exercises contain text dependent questions and writing samples. Supplemental materials, freely available in a Word document, have cloze activities, fill in the blanks, turn and talk questions, a multiple-choice assessment, and writing prompts. Each story is also available as a pdf for easy distribution to students. Kristine describes how to use the supplements here.

Finally, please remember that CrowdED learning hosted a maker space this summer that created Wakelets using RSTA. This makes them digital delivery friendly and adds features such as Quizlets and Google Docs based comprehension questions.

How are you using Reading Skills for Today’s Adults?

How has this resource helped your students?

Thanks for contributing your thoughts to the community!

 

Steve Schmidt, Moderator

LINCS Reading and Writing CoP

 

Comments

Thank you so much for promoting the revamped and still FREE "Reading Skills for Today's Adults" (RSFTA)! A few things I'd like to highlight:

  • All of the texts have CCRS and Lexile levels.
  • The vocabulary lists and activities have been expanded. Each text includes a list of academic vocabulary, other high-utility vocabulary, important phrasal verbs and words that students may understand in one context but not the context of the text selection.
  • We've updated the many texts that had now-dated information. These updated stories have updated audio as well. Three speeds of audio are available for each story: the first speed is for students to hear the words slowly and accurately; the second speed starts to chunk words and phrases together to help develop rate and prosody; and the third speed is a normal reading speed with expression.
  • If you go to the link Steve includes in his article by the CASAS chart, you will find information on what content to start students on for reading comprehension if they have CASAS Life & Work, TABE 11/12, or CASAS GOALS Reading scores. If you are using RSTFA for fluency, you will want to have some idea of where a student's accuracy and rate and prosody are to place them. 
  • The CCRS-aligned "supplements" included with each text are in Word format, so you can download them and adapt them however you'd like! For example, some teachers want to use only the vocabulary cloze and fill-in-the-blank activities, so they can keep those and delete the other activities, or they want to break up the activities into mutliple handouts or activities. You may also want to add content to what's already there.
  • A big shout-out to Pat Thomas, retired program director from Southwest Adult Basic Education, who found the resources we needed for this project and to my two writers, teachers Stephanie Sommers and Lisa McCallum, for working so hard to help revamp the original curriculum. Also to Jeff Goumas at CrowdED Learning and to the group of educators who took what we had done with the revamp and expanded it into content and tools that teachers and students are going to be able to use with ease.