Week 3 - Thoughts pertaining to Routman Chp 4

Chapter 4 of the “Conversation” book by Regie Routman devoted focus to becoming an effective teacher of reading by understanding research, your students, and your own process of reading. I found the section devoted to understanding research interesting but only partially applicable to my students which have major reading problems.
When Routman covered the section concerned with understanding research, a considerable portion of his work was devoted to teaching reading for understanding in domains such as making inferences, summarizing, explaining, and synthesizing versus phonemic and phonetic awareness. The bulk of Routman’s discourse was more applicable to the population of student readers that are phonemically and phonetically competent.
I am a teacher of students with severe learning disabilities. The vast majority of the students I teach lack the phonemic and phonetic awareness necessary to begin the more complex task of reading for understanding. By his own admission (p. 99 second paragraph), Routman is aware that students with major reading problems need to understand the alphabetic principle of reading that is denoted by phonetic and phonemic awareness.
Despite the lack of immediate applicability of Routman’s discourse for teaching understanding to my students with severe reading problems, his ultimate point was well received; a teacher should be conversant of research regarding art of teaching reading.