In my tutoring sessions, I have one little boy that needs to slow down his oral reading rate. When he reads, he reads really fast in a hushed voice. However, he remembers everything that was read. He has very good comprehension whether he reads it orally or silently or as a read aloud, which I found really surprising. The main thing his mom wants him to learn from the tutoring is to slow down. That is why I found chapter 10 interesting. Chapter ten is based on fluency. The components of fluency listed in this chapter are, rate, automatically/accuracy, prosody, and comprehension. A slow reading rate is a sign of inefficient reading, the book states that slow readers need easier books, and fast readers need harder books. This doesn't make sense to me though because if you give a fast reader a harder book to read, it doesn't mean they will understand it, and that is the whole point of fluency, so that it leads to comprehension. One of the most important facts in this chapter was prosody. It states that teachers can greatly affect fluency by providing feedback to the student after each word the student reads. This will slow down the student's fluency and the teacher is encouraging this flaw in fluency. (example on page 263) For example the teacher will say Mm-hmmm after each word the student reads.
Question, when the students read at a very fast rate, how do you slow the students down? The student thinks it is amazing that he can read that fast. He even says single words fast, such as the Rebecca Sitton list. Don't even get me started on the non sense words, phonics quick test! That was hard to evaluate. So when the student likes the fact that he can read fast, how do I get the student to slow down? All this chapter says to do is give a more advanced level of reading, however, if I go higher he doesn't understand the words he reads.
I really enjoyed your post because of the student in your tutoring session! I have not yet come across a child who reads to fast, so this is a great example to use. If it were me I would explain to the student he needs to slow down so his audience can understand what he is saying. I may state, “I know you’re a very good reader and you enjoy reading, but I am having a hard time following you. Is it okay if we try it this way?” - I would use some kind of method to get him to slow down...since I have not experienced this before I do not have a solution for you but I hope someone else can help out! GREAT QUESTION!
Danielle- I think the best advice I can give to get the student to slow down is to model, model, model. Either go first and have the children echo you. Or, after they read, praise them for their effort and then you show them the correct way that will help listeners hear the story and the reader to slow down. I would also give children examples, without calling out a specific child, and have them pick which reading of yours is the best. I would start by going so slow that it's hard to really listen to the story because you are going so slow you lose the reader. Then I would go fast and make them understand that you can't keep up with the words (especially if they don't have the text in front of them to follow along) and show them that the listener can't hear or keep up with the reader. Then I would read at the proper rate and have them understand that they can hear the words, keep up with the pace, and comprehend. Maybe between these the student will slow down.
Chapter 10 focused on Fluency. When a student or even your own child begins to embark on the ability capture voice, excitement, questions, volume, and exclamations marks…is captivating all on its own. I know as a mother, I was listening to my own 6 year old daughter, read a story tonight, before bed and she captivated me! Everything about this chapter she was bringing brought to life. She held her audience (5 year old and 3 year old siblings), gave voice to the baby bear, questions from the mama bear, and curiosity and excitement to the entire store. The way she read was not choppy yet, smooth and effortless. The audience and reader were able to greatly succeed comprehension of the story and as the reader did not struggle to decode words or interpret punctuations, the audience was able to understand and follow along as well. This experience sums up the entire meaning of what fluency is, in a nut shell. As far as struggling readers, teachers really need to make sure they are able to give that student adequate time and patience. To become a fluent reader Devries says that a teacher needs to focus on four components. 1. Phonological 2. Word identification 3. Word analysis and 4. Semantic. At this point I do not have any questions. This reading really helped me understand again just how awesome and yet tender, the development and learning process of reading fluency can be. Having an IEP student in my tutoring session, I can see that she does not like to read in front of anyone. She is scared of making a mistake. I feel it is part of my job to help lift her confidence, ensure her of her efforts, and slowly prepare her with the knowledge she needs to learn to read.
The reading also helped me understand more about fluency. I feel that after reading the chapter each week and reading some of the blog posts I have a better understanding of each topic. However, hearing you describe your daughter read made me excited for more than just my tutoring session later on today, it makes me excited for the future to hear my own children (2 and 4) read and my students improve over the course of the semester. I can only hope that someday my students are able to reach this benchmark. Also, I did not mention this in my post but I was wondering if as a teacher/student focuses on phonological, word identification, word analysis and semantics and breaks fluency down it might be easier to do the informal assessments that analyze things other than rate and fluency mentioned in the test (expression, automaticity, phrasing, ect).
You're right Jennifer...all of the qualities you described of your own 6 year old daughter sums up what fluency is. I love that even in young children, they can captivate audiences and recognize punctuation as well as give voices to different characters in the story. I know some adults that don't even do this! Seeing it first hand with our own children or students will definitely help us as we do further along in our teaching careers.
I can see, after reading this chapter, how important fluency is to comprehension and how they are tied together. I can also see that if a person is not accurate in their reading, there is no way fluency can be accomplished, therefore making comprehension impossible. The point of fluency I learned in this chapter, and perhaps really shocked me, is that if a reader is disfluent they become self-conscious and soon learn to avoid reading in public. They also read less due to it taking a longer period of time than a proficient reader. The disfluent reader becomes discouraged and will avoid it altogether. Learning about a disfluent reader shows me how important it is to help a child early on (the earlier the better) to get on accuracy and fluency because if this goes unaddressed, the child will eventually dislike reading and will avoid it. How can the reader work on it and get better if they avoid it? I have noticed that one of my students likes to be right and *thinks* she knows what is going to happen in the story…so she guesses the words. She not only did this when she read a sentence on her own, she did this even when echo reading. She listened to what I said, but rather than follow along, she repeated what she *thought* I said without following along while I read or while she echoed back. I had to redirect her to the text several times. The mother even told me that she has admitted to guessing what words are when she reads. I need to get this child to slow down and to pay attention to the words, follow them, and read what is there. If she continues this way, she will never become a fluent reader. Both of my students are very into using their fingers to follow the passage (they are only at the beginning of first grade), but I have to say that they do not point and say each word individually. There is some fluency there, but it definitely is something we will work on. In my session with them last night, I had them echo read the guided reading book a page at a time with me. Then we went back and popcorn read starting with one student and they took turns reading a page. I then had them echo read again, and for a second time we popcorn read, but I started with the other student this time, so they both popcorn read the page they didn’t before. For the first session they did great and I had an opportunity to really see where some of our focus needs to be. I think that the fluency activities at the end of the chapter are going to be great to do with my tutoring students.
Its amazing what we read in this chapter an how surprising it was for us to read. Yet, at the same time it seems to make complete sense. I think as we teach we need to remember everything we have taken from these classes, of course, but also to use our common sense! All of my students are not very fluent readers but it seems to be mostly because they are unsure about the words they are reading. One student is very not confident with reading and tries to avoid it at all costs. Seeing this and knowing what we read makes perfect sense.
Your comments about disfluent readers being self-conscious reminds me of one of my tutees. I was surprised to see that one of the parents wanted help in her confidence in reading. Before this chapter I had no clue where to take that. I now understand that she is quiet because she lacks confidence in her reading. I did an activity having my students help me make a recipe of a good reader and one of them said pointing at the word was one of them. I was surprised to hear this being they are in 4th grade. I feel that these students need to learn to move passed that to aid fluency, but she said her teacher told her this. I don't know how happy their teacher will be with me since I'm having them not do that, feeling they're at the age they shouldn't be.
LeAnn - I too felt that after reading this chapter I had a better understanding about how everything tying together to accomplish good reading habits. I feel that modeling is more important than we realize when we read to our children. Much like the mother you spoke about in your text. When I read I sometimes pretend to sound out words that "I don't know" just to show my son how I do it in hopes that he will pick up on that.
I know that it might just be because it is topical but I LOVED this chapter. My focus with my 5th graders that i am working with is fluency. While this was a hard focus to choose, mostly because my students are so low scoring across the board, I was pleased to read several things in this chapter. The thing that was most startling to read was the opening section/story about Abby and Zach. To have a student who reads fluently but has low comprehension was not really something I had thought about before. One of my students reads very poorly and has ok comprehension and the other reads better but has lower comprehension. I thought after testing that this might just be an anomaly of the testing, a learning disability, or a false reading of the assessments but now see that it might just be that he can read more fluently but has low comprehension. It was great to learn more about the components of fluency (rate, accuracy, phrasing, and comprehension) because before I had really only thought of rate, accuracy, phrasing as the parts of fluency and had thought of comprehension as its own category. Now, knowing that they are so interconnected, it makes more sense to me that I would focus on fluency with my students. My students have good vocabularies with real words but their non-existent phonics skills, low reading levels, slow rate and lack of comprehension all compound to make reading difficult for them. My favorite section of the chapter was the strategies for tutoring sessions and I WISH that I had read this section before beginning my work on lessons 5 and 6. I found all of the activities to be ones that I plan to use with the exception of the flash cards because I already have this built into their lessons weekly. A question from the reading is would the Fluency Development activity meant from 1-3rd grade work with individuals with a 2nd to 3rd grade reading level who are in 5th grade. Reading it over it seemed like something that might me helpful for the twins but I was not sure. Additionally, I was wondering what others thought about doing some of the activities on pages 270-279 with just two students. It seems some of them would be ok, but they also seem to be designed for larger groups.
I agree with you Jessica, I wish I had read this entire book before beginning my tutoring sessions just so they would be more effective. I am very glad we are doing both the tutoring and reading this text before student teaching. I don't know why it the activities wouldn't work for any size group. I think you can make any of them work.
Before this reading this chapter and listening to our lecture this week, I too thought of fluency and comprehension as being their own categories. After reading this chapter it does make total sense for these two to be connected together. In regards to your question about the Fluency Development activity I think that it would be beneficial to your students even though you will only be able to meet with them twice a week. You could send the passage home for the students to read to their family like the author suggests. You could have the parents fill out a fluency log like the one that is pictured on page 274. to show that the student did read the passage.
1. Fluency is the ability to read with automaticity. It is also word recognition, expression and meaning. Students can be fluent without having comprehension. Without comprehension, it really doesn’t matter how fast or accurately they read. The reason we read is for understanding. When recognizing meaning of words, it is helpful to use the word in a sentence. Phrasing is also a helpful tool. I have students in my sessions that read word-by-word, so it was good to read about the phrasing a little bit more in-depth. The next section was on expressive reading. Expressive reading brings the story to life. To teach expressive reading we should model the skill first and then help readers through echo reading and unison reading (264). Punctuation is extremely important also. It gives different meaning to the text. Just inserting a comma or an exclamation changes the entire sentence. When teaching students, an explanation is necessary as to why the punctuation is used. There are eight principles to guide fluency on page 266. As always, I love the strategies and activities in the back of the chapter. 2. I do not have any questions about the reading. 3. Now that I am tutoring students, I am looking for certain things specifically that will make a difference with each student. I have one student that I think would benefit greatly from the activities in this chapter. 4. I have mentioned this before, but I really like Dr. Tim Rasinski’s suggestions for reader’s theater. I hope I have time to do at least one of Margie Palatini’s reader’s theater script with my small group. I am going to check out the other websites listed on pate 276 also.
Patti, I think you made some really good points. The idea of phrasing is something that I at first did not really account before but after reading really see how it has a great amount of importance. Also after thinking about it I recall my own students really struggling with their phrasing. Reading word by word and broken up at times. Great points. Ricky
Chapter 10 was all about fluency. The chapter gave a detailed outline about what fluency was and how it is determined if a student is fluent or dis-fluent. Fluency is based on a lot of things from the rate the student reads, their aromaticity/accuracy, and being able to recognize common words. The root of fluency starts with the phrasing of words, adherence to the author's syntax and expressiveness. The chapter also gave many ideas about how to help students improve their fluency and what types of instruction would be most beneficial for that purpose. This chapter is something that I wish I would have used common sense to look at before I started writing my lesson plans for last week. There were so many ideas about how help improve students fluency which is what the students that I am tutoring struggle with. I had such a hard time coming up with positive appropriate ideas that would be beneficial and truly address the students needs. Though I do feel that by the end of my lesson plans I had started to really understand what methods would be most helpful. Then after reading the chapter only really did I feel I was starting to do the right thing. Some of the activities within the text seem like they are a perfect fit for my students in the upcoming weeks. 1 really like the ideas of the readers theater and then the repeated readings. I think also that poetry will be helpful with the expressiveness in their reading.
Poetry is a great way to work on expressiveness! I read a poem to my students last week and used expression and they LOVED it! This week when the students did their guided reading they used expression!
Chapter 10 is a good chapter on fluency and it's importance to comprehension. There is a lot that goes into to fluency that we may not think about. It is up to the teacher to find out what subskill a student may be lacking to help their fluency. The beginning scenario reminds me of one of my tutees. He did very well with all assessments except comprehension. During this assessment he scored the lowest of the three students. The chapter made it clear what fluency really is and how comprehension is part of it. I have been lucky enough to do a few of the intervention activities in my RLA internship. At least once a week I did echo reading with the 1st grade class, with fluency and comprehension being the main ingredients. I did this as a whole class lesson not in tutoring or groups. The only thing I didn't like about it is it seemed like some students didn't enjoy it that much because the readings were to easy. I feel echo reading may be best in small groups or tutoring. Another good reading strategy I got to use a lot was called "Got ya." It is a form of popcorn reading where you hop from student to student, but in this strategy nobody, but the reader knows when they will end their reading and who they will call on. It made every student follow along closely to not get caught being "Got Ya-ed." The students really seemed to like this game. It always came later in the week after reading the same thing at least a couple times. There were a lot of good strategies that could be used in the chapter. I think the main thing to take from this chapter is that comprehension and expression are large parts of fluency, not just quick reading.
Thanks for sharing those ideas! I liked the "Got Ya" game, and it does make sense to read it after students are more familiar with the text.
I also enjoyed reading about your experiences with echo reading. I think you are right about it possibly working better in tutoring sessions or small groups, like guided reading time? I think I am going to try echo reading next week for my students and see how it goes.
Ryan, I agree with you about the fact that it is up to the teacher to try to find the sub-skill that is effecting the fluency. From my experience I have not see enough of this. I think that they are concentration a lot on the rate. I would much rather see my students read correctly than to try to beat the clock and read fast.
I was a little surprised to hear that about 30% of fluent readers have poor comprehension (at least in that one study). My first thought was that, even though these readers were reading quickly and with high accuracy, they may have poor prosody – meaning that they weren’t pausing for punctuation or had poor expression. I have heard kids do this in my internship class, specifically when reading informational text. But the text said that prosody was evaluated in these students’ fluency scores. The next section discussed 8 research-based guidelines for fluency instruction, but it seemed that none of them had any relation to comprehension. I guess I was hoping for a little more direction on how to work on fluency and comprehension at the same time.
My favorite tutoring strategy from this chapter is the fluency development lesson. This seemed to be a great strategy for students who have such poor fluency that they would be embarrassed to read in front of peers. Hearing the teacher read, then reading in unison and possibly echo reading, gives such exposure to the text that they can become comfortable with the words. By the time they practice with a partner and then read for the class they should be quite familiar will all of the words. My question is: is this an appropriate strategy for guided reading? It seems to be, but I’m not sure. Also, my tutoring focus is phonics, but maybe I can find text that emphasizes the phonics skills we have been practicing. I have been having a lot of difficulty finding guided reading materials at my students’ reading level AND interest level. Since my students struggle so much, the leveled books at their reading level seem very babyish, but if I go up a few levels the words are just too hard. This strategy may help bridge that gap.
The fluency development lesson was also my favorite strategy. I think it can be easily applied to a small group of 1 or 2 to a larger group. I like the lesson because it shows the student what to do and then as a group the students participate together.
Amy and Tammi I agree with both of you on the fluency development lesson being a wonderful strategy. I particularly like it because it can be used in a small setting for more individualized instruction. I felt Chapter 10 had some great activities to add to lessons to aid for improving fluency.
I loved the activities for fluency in this chapter reading. Especially the poetry party and rhythm walks. I like the fact that the poetry has short reading and that the student needs to comprehend before reading. In the rhythm walk I like the fact that it is a fun way to get the children up and moving, yet learning at the same time.
1. Analysis of the reading/issue. Chapter 10 was about Fluency and the different techniques that you can use in helping with fluency in reading. The text defines fluency with three elements. Grouping or phrasing of words as revealed through intonation, stress, and pauses exhibited by readers, adherence to author's syntax and expressiveness. I enjoyed reading this chapter because the text went into detail about fluency and the components. One thing that I have noticed in my Reading and Language Arts Internship was how fast kids read without pausing or understanding what they are saying. A lot of the time it is very chopping and monotone.
2. Questions and/or contradictions about the reading/issue. The text talks about punctuation and one thing I noticed in observing readers is how they just overlook the punctuation and its importance.
3. How did the reading reflect you or allow you to look at an issue differently? The text gave the example of using the activity Fluency Development Lesson and I liked that lesson because I thought it was something that I could use in my tutoring sessions. I was surprised to see how easy I thought the lesson would be and that my students would enjoy it.
Tammi- I have also observed readers overlooking punctuation. I have seen students not pause when there is a period at the end of a sentence and they just keep going. Also I have seen students not use expression when an exclamation mark is used. It is important for students to learn to pay attention to punctuation!
1. Chapter 10 was about fluency. Some important aspects of fluency covers rate, expression, accuracy and comprehension. Students need to be able to read at an appropriate speed and use read accuracy. When I was a paraprofessional I had a student who always tried to read as fast as they could. When they did this they tended to miss a word or pronounce a word wrong. I had to work with student to slow down and pay attention to punctuation.
2. Once part of fluency that I think is over looked by most is punctuation. I have noticed this when working with students. I think it is important that students learn to be aware of punctuation when reading.
3. This chapter made me realize the importance of fluency. I have always known the importance of comprehension and that has seemed to be the main focus for some teachers. However, fluency is an important part of comprehension. If a student isn't reading fluent their comprehension of the text will be hindered. Also, reading with expression is something that I need to work on when I am reading a book out loud. I read to my kids daily and sometimes I am so tired by the end of the day I am reading without expression. I am not doing my kids justice by not reading with expression. Expression enhances the meaning of what I am reading. Plus it keeps my three year old interested in the book I am reading! 4. The experience I have had with fluency is pretty minimal. When I was a paraprofessional I did work with one teacher who worked with her students on using expression. The students did plays or read stories out loud. They practiced their reading fluency when they did this. It was always fun to listen to the students as they put expression into their reading!
I have also noticed that my students in tutoring, one in particular, does not pay attention to punctuation. I initially noticed this during the diagnostic testing. Perhaps I need to say a reminder during guided reading to watch punctuation.
1. Analysis of the reading/issue: Chapter 10 dealt with fluency. Fluency is the “ability to read with automatic word recognition, expression and meaning.” This is very important for students to progress with their reading. As a reader you also depend on your fluency to be able to comprehend what you read. There are many different areas of fluency. Rate is also important when working on fluency. Rate determines how many words you correctly read per minute. A slow reader can also lead to inefficient reading. How accurately one reads is also very important. Students have to be able to read correctly each word and do this with a sense of automaticity. Many areas can be improved upon to improve fluency. Sight word recognition and recognizing phonograms and their sounds within words are both key items that would enhance a student’s fluency. 2. 2. Questions and/or contradictions about the reading/issue – I understand the whole chapter and feel that because my students both struggle with fluency that I have an understanding of what is being stated in the text. When tutoring my students and doing the diagnostics testing everything was pointing to fluency. I thought about how my students read and noticed that their phonics skills were very poor. I believe that with a better foundation of phonics skills this will lead to better fluency for my students. I think that too much emphasis is being put on rate. I understand that students can’t be slow as a turtle when reading but I also feel that I would much rather my student’s get the words correctly than to try to beat the clock by rushing through their reading. 3. 3. How did the reading reflect you or allow you to look at an issue differently? When I first started with my tutoring I kept thinking to myself that these students both needed help with fluency. I knew this because one is my son and we keep hearing it from his teacher and the other student’s parents said the same thing. Fluency is the obvious item to work on but I realized that more work needed to be put on the phonics part of reading. I didn’t know this until this chapter. I always thought a student’s fluency could be improved by just reading and sight word recognition. I feel by doing that we drill and kill them and don’t put it into context. I like putting the vocab or sight words into phrases and then having them highlight their sight words in the phrases and also read they phrases. The students also get to see these words with other words.
On the title page of Chapter 10 there is this quote located at the bottom, "A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on a cold iron." I love this quote because I believe it to be so true. Fluency is my content focus for my tutoring sessions. I read this chapter after deciding my content focus. I enjoyed all the information this chapter provided on fluency. Fluency is the ease or naturalness of reading. Individuals who are fluent readers phrase sentences by stopping at punctuation, adhere to the authors meaning, and use expression while reading aloud. I have learned comprehension and vocabulary are building blocks to fluency. If an individual has word attack strategies when arriving to a word they do not know they are more able to continue to read the text more smoothly. Also they are more like to comprehend the text when the words are read smoothly and with expression. On page 270 of chapter 10 there are some great activities for tutoring students in the area of fluency. I plan to use several of these during my tutoring sessions. I really liked the oral recitation and jokes activity. After getting to know my tutees. I think they would both enjoy these two activities and they would beneficial to them. I do not have any questions regarding fluency because I think at this point I have learned a great deal in regards to this area of the big 5. I look forward to continuing to add to my educational library activities and skill sets I can use to aid students in becoming fluent readers.
Fluency is very important and this chapter did have great activities that you can use! I don't know what age group you have but I think that jokes are a great way for students to really relate to the content and loosen up enough to learn. This ties back to the quote, if they are having fun and enjoying learning, I think that are more likely to be open to focusing and retaining knowledge.
Chapter 10 discusses fluency. When looking at the elements of fluency, I must admit that it had never occurred to me that students reading with expressiveness was a part of fluency. This occurs though when students correctly read punctuation. While this is a good skill to possess and may be shown when in a one-on-one setting, many upper elementary students will simply not show expressiveness besides the basic pause or breath because they do not feel comfortable being expressive in front of their peers. I think that this factor would be hard to assess in the inclusive classroom setting.
One of my students that I am tutoring has decent fluency. However, she does not comprehend the words or use any expression when talking out loud. Rather, her reading is flat and sometimes, it is hard to tell when she is stopping one sentence and moving on to the next. This would be a mark against fluency because of the lack of grouping and expressiveness. In seeing this, I am going to make sure that I am expressive in my read aloud and during the group readings to model how a passage should be read.
When using fluency with ESOL students, I like that they point out the use of recording the students and having them listen to themselves. I agree that this is good for all students. Personally, I am surprised at how I sounded when I heard recordings of myself in the past. I think this would help students see exactly where they should pause and don’t, etc. Fluency is important for many reasons in the professional world. I think that if students can see that and relate it to real life experiences such as giving speeches, holding a staff meeting, or giving a quote, then they will be more willing to work on it.
It really is amazing how the role of expression plays in fluency. I guess the more expression you are able to grasp in reading the more you are comprehending what you are reading. It always amazes me when I am sitting in a reading class as a para and the children are reading with absolutely no expression in their tone. It makes for a lot more interesting reading when expression is added. I also liked the idea of recording ESOL students while reading and letting them listen to it. I am tutoring two ESL students right now and that is definitely an instructing strategy that I will use. I also think it is a great idea for you to use modeling when teaching fluency skills. This shows the students how much better and more interesting reading can be when read with expression.
Chapter 10 reading stressed the importance of fluency in reading. Fluency is the ease or naturalness of reading. It requires key elements such as phrasing, syntax, and expression. Without the skill of fluency there is little to no comprehension in the reading. The reading suggests a need to establish short term attainable goals for those readers who struggle with slow pace reading. The text also suggests easy level reading at first when working with struggling readers. I thought it was a great tool to use slow reading when the passage is too difficult to understand for the reader, and speed up as the text is easy for the reader to comprehend. When a reader lacks in fluency they are very self-conscious about it and will avoid reading in public to avoid any humiliation. It is important that the teacher encourage the reader to practice certain strategies that will help them in their fluency. I know that even as an adult if there is reading material that I am having trouble comprehending, I will slow down and often times read out loud in order to grasp that comprehension that is needed. An educator never wants to see a child give up on reading or dislike reading because they lack in certain skills, such as fluency. I work with a student as a Para in fourth grade reading. I have noticed that this child tends to looks at the pictures in order to replace the words. I also noticed that he uses his finger to guide his reading. The chapter discusses the importance of replacing the finger with a bookmark. After reading this chapter I got a bookmark from the Library at school and encourage him to use that as placement instead of his finger. Then eventually he won’t need the bookmark. I always encourage the student to read the words that are there, instead of going by the picture, or the beginning sounding of the words. In my tutoring sessions I have been using popcorn reading so that the students get turns oral reading. I also enjoy using the echo reading strategy with them as well. I really liked the activities for fluency at the end of the chapter. Although I am focusing on phonemic awareness in my tutoring sessions, I am also adding some fluency skills in also. My question then would be, is it too overwhelming to add both phonemic awareness and fluency into my reading sessions? In my opinion they go hand in hand and one in a sense feeds off of the other.
I work with a student that tends to use pictures to word bust as well. This skills comes in handy before she begins reading a book, because I find that she does picture walks before beginning the reading. However, when it comes to actually reading the pages, her eyes immediately dart to the pictures to help her with words. I always redirect her to looking at the word to figure it out, but she is so used to using the pictures to guide her in reading that it is a hard habit to break.
This chapter was about fluency. According to the text, fluency is the "ability to read with automatic word recognition, expression, and meaning." It is also a crucial component of reading comprehension. Fluency and comprehension go hand in hand. One is needed for the other. One statement in the text caught my attention, "comprehension is the main purpose of reading, and fluency is important for comprehension." There are four subskills needed to be a fluent reader: phonological, word identification, word analysis and semantic subskills. The text indicates that most student/readers who have reading difficulties are lacking in one of these areas.
One tutoring student is not as fluent as the other student. His wpm score on the diagnostic test was about 25 wpm slower than his peer. I am wondering if I should be including some short passages for the students to read and record or other fluency exercises in my lesson plans. My content focus is comprehension because both student need improvement in that area.
When creating my lesson plans, I have been looking down the tunnel toward helping the students increase comprehension, which is my content focus. However, this chapter has made me see that fluency practice is also something that I need to fit into my lesson plans. One student reads fairly fast (103 wpm) and the other reads slower (79wpm). The benchmark is 94 wpm. However, comprehension is very low for both, 50%. The faster reader actually provided less correct information than the slower reader on the diagnostic testing.
One piece of information in the text that stood out to me was on page 260, where it was discussing how to calculate oral reading rate. Having completed the DIBELS diagnostic testing in the first week, this explanation made me think, "Hey, that is how I did the DIBELS assessment!" Being a mother and avid reader (when not having to read textbooks), I tend be a very expressive reader when reading to children, much like Dr. Walizer.
Kim, I liked that statement about comprehension as well. I think fluency skills would be great to add to your lesson plans. I agree with Mrs. Stoppel and the text that good fluency will lead to good comprehension,without good fluency it is hard to have good comprehension. Maybe you could do the fluency and accuracy data sheet that was uploaded to week six on the BB. I know that your group is small so don't do the bottom portion just the top. We are gaining so much knowledge from this book. I wished we could have read it in RLA so that we would have had all the information before tutoring.
When I first started reading this chapter I thought I knew a lot about fluency, but I was wrong. There is more to fluency than I realized. For instance, the components of fluency are rate, automaticity, accuracy, prosody, and comprehension. However, within automaticity readers should acquire sub skills such as phonological awareness, semantic, word identification and analysis. Fluency is to me one of the most important elements of reading because it does play such a large role in comprehension. I thought that the figure 10.1 was a very good break down of levels and helps me to see where my tutoring students would fall. I modeled just the other day to my sixth graders how to read fluently. They had to listen to me when I paused and used voice expression. When they read after me they focused on what I had modeled to them and they did a better job of reading fluently. I have seen many of my Title readers sound out the /sh/ as described in the book. I think they were talking about me on page 262 when they were describing teachers just telling the reader the word and not giving them any strategies to figure it out as well as giving confirmation. I will have to work on the confirmation part because that is hard for me not to do that but now I see how that can make a student become dependent on that confirmation. I have not done a readers theater, but after watching the fluency video and reading this chapter I really want to try it. I thought the researched-based guidelines for fluency instruction was informational and helpful as well. There was a student in the 2nd grade class that I interned in last year that was not a very good fluent reader. The teacher thought that the only way he would get better was to have him read all the time to the class. It was a nightmare! I wanted so bad to take the student to the back table and work one-on-one with him. I think it is important that they pointed out that repeat readings need to have a goal. I wonder why they did not discuss DIBELS in the formal assessment section. I have been doing Running Records with my Title students (Reading a-z) I think this is a great assessment tool, but they are not timed. I loved the strategies section! I can’t wait to try some in tutoring.
I was also not aware of how important fluency is to readers and what components make up fluency skills. I agree that fluency is one of the most important elements in reading. I include a read aloud in every tutoring session because fluency is so important. I also wondered why DIBELS was not included in the formal assessment section, possibly because the authors are from a different state and they do not use DIBELS. The classroom example you shared is a great example of what not to do, I wish you could have helped this student more but you will when you are in your own classroom!
Christine, this chapter also opened my eyes to the world of fluency. I definitely wasn't aware of all the components and how they work together. Modeling is a wonderful way to teach students fluency and I'm glad it worked out well for your sixth graders. I tried modeling expression and fluent reading with my second graders this past week and it did not go so well. I think it is primarily due to the fact that I have one student who needs stronger phonics and decoding skills before she can read fluently. But I tried none the less, and I got no expression at all. She said she only has one voice to read, and that was that. I would love to try some of the different strategies and activities with them and in the future! There were some wonderful ideas! I also had to do a little head shake at myself, because I am guilty of giving the word to a student rather than giving them decoding strategies. But, I guess that is what this course is for, helping us become better teachers and giving us strategies to help our students become better readers. I am constantly telling my students that I am learning too, and that they are helping me learn. They love when I tell them that and I think it helps us work together as a team.
NAEP defines fluency as the ease or naturalness of reading. The key elements are grouping or phrasing of words, syntax, and expressiveness. Fluency is important and can lead to comprehension. The chapter broke down the components of literacy so as a reader I could see what subskills need to be master prior to working on fluency. I was not aware of the importance of fluency when it comes to comprehending the material being read. The section on recognizing meaning of words reminded me of how much focus I was giving to vocabulary words during guided reading. Once the students have an understanding of the vocabulary words then they will be able to read more fluency and also comprehend what they are reading. I know look at how important background knowledge and vocabulary work is to a reader. I really appreciated that the chapter presented assessment strategies for formal and informal assessments. This will help with my future lesson plans for tutoring. I have been using checklists for skill assessment during tutoring and found the examples gave me more ideas on how to asses students. The section containing activities is a great resource. I am working on flashcard work with vowel sounds and phonograms in my tutoring group and found the chapter gave more strategies I can use.
Zoe, I liked how you mentioned that there are subskills that must be mastered before sudents focus on their fluency. This is so important when thinking about fluncy because to be a fluent reader you must understand the letters and words. In the adobe connect meeeting Mrs. Stoppel discussed how she thought fluency should be down in second grade and I toally agree because it is a subject that has steps to master in a way.
We have discussed fluency quite a bit between this course and the Reading and Language Arts methods, so I had a pretty good knowledge of what a fluent reader would be like. This chapter summarized the different factors that contribute to becoming a fluent reader, which include reading rate, automaticity, prosody and comprehension. After seeing these 4 components I found that I was not 100% sure what two of these four meant. After reading on I found that automaticity is the ability to engage and coordinate a number of complex subskills and strategies with little cognitive effort. In simpler terms, it is the ability to recognize words and punctuation with accuracy in combination with a good reading rate. The other word that I did not recognize is prosody, which is I found out is the ability to recognize phrases instead of seeing each word in isolation. I was not aware of this component of reading fluency, so learned a lot about it's importance in the fluency equation. To help students with prosody, it was recommended to have them practice "parsing" phrases, which means grouping phrases in to meaningful parts. The remaining portion of the chapter discussed assessment procedures such as miscue analysis and times readings, and shared a variety of activities to help with reading fluency. Two of the activities that I found to be useful are readers theater and choral reading, which really aid the student in showing expression and comprehension.
2. Questions and/or contradictions about the reading/issue. One thing that I have wondered about in regards to reading fluency is how to get a student to slow down their reading rate to increase comprehension. It would appear that the reader is fluent, as they are recognizing words and have a good reading rate, however the comprehension is not present. I have a student like this in my tutoring group. He is a fast reader and has all the phonics skills necessary, but he reads too fast and does not comprehend what he is reading.
3. How did the reading reflect you or allow you to look at an issue differently? The biggest thing I gained from this chapter was more knowledge about all 4 components of fluency. I knew quite a bit about reading rate and comprehension, but was not aware of prosody in relation to reading fluency. After reading the chapter, I see the importance of prosody in a student reading selections more fluently. Also, I find that I come across many great assessment methods and enhancement activities as I read these chapters.
You ask a very good question! I am not sure I have the right answer, but I did have an idea. One thing you could try to do is let your student understand that they are reading to try and grasp what the author is telling them. You simply need to let them know there is a message in the text for them to know. This might help them to understand why they are reading, and it could slow them down enough to help them with comprehension. Hope this helps!
Carissa, I have found that having the student read to themselves first then read to me helps greatly with slowing down for comprehension. Another thing I do is have older kids read to younger students. Most of the time these younger students ask questions and stop the reader and the natural pauses in the reading. I am however talking about the younger grades although it makes work for older students depending on their reading level. I liked you breakdown of the four components of fluency. Fluency affects all of the other big five areas and as teachers we need to give our student all of the tools we can to be successful at this step in the reading ladder.
Again, this was a very informative and wonderful chapter. It gave me a better understanding of all the components of fluency and how to pinpoint where your students may be struggling. There is a very strong connection between fluency and comprehension, and at times I find myself struggling to distinguish activities that would be more suitable for one over the other. I am hoping that after I read through the comprehension chapter of the text, I will have a very good grasp on how to target the differences. I do feel very good about how to assess fluency and how to calculate wpm and accuracy rate, and after reading the chapter I understand the importance of using informal assessments to analyze all four components of fluency. I did have a question over the fluency norms, or benchmarks. After looking at figure 10.3, with the fall, winter, and spring benchmarks listed for each grade level, I want to know why the spring benchmark of one grade is higher than the fall benchmark of the next grade. For example second grade spring benchmark is 142 wpm, but the next semester in the fall of third grade the benchmark is 128 wpm. Shouldn’t the spring benchmark be 142 wpm to match where they left off? One answer that I came up with is that it’s making up for what the students lose over the summer. However, I’m not sure if that is the correct explanation or not and was just curious as to the real reason. Both of my students could use some fluency instruction; however, I still believe that a stronger foundation of phonics skills will help address fluency. Last week during our sessions, we attempted to do a radio read for the second day of our guided reading. My students practiced their favorite passages of the story, said they were ready, and I was very disappointed with the outcome of the activity. One student told me she only had one voice to read in, in other words it was lacking automaticity, prosody, and most definitely the expression that I was hoping for. After reflecting on the activity I realize I may have set my students up for failure with the passage I selected. It was more of an informative text, but had rhythm and rhyming words, so I was hoping it would work well. I would really like to try this activity again, and the text gave me some fantastic ideas on how to better incorporate this activity. There were also a lot of other great intervention strategies and activities that I would love to incorporate, but for the tutoring sessions I will have to figure out a way to tie them into phonics instruction since that is my unit focus. One thing I will do for sure is use the instructor strategies when my students are reading aloud, such as waiting for the student to complete the sentence and have them go back and try to figure out the missing word before I tell them the word. I think these are just good teaching skills that I will be able to use all the time.
I really enjoyed looking over chapter ten which was about fluency. This chapter recalled a lot of information I have seen before, while it also taught me a lot. It also taught me just how extremely important fluency is when reading. It does not matter how fast a child reads if they are unable to comprehend the information. Also, I really liked the section over punctuation. This section made me think back to Dr. Walizers class when we did a letter to a person and we were to put punctuation in the correct portion of the letter. I thought this was kind of a silly activity until we did it out loud. Basically, there was two ways to comprehend the letter. It was either mean or it was nice, depending on how you used exclamation marks. This made it aware to me how important it is for children to develop a good sense of punctuation. I do not have a lot of questions about the reading. However, I did want to get some more ideas about a topic. When the book was talking about punctuation, it mentioned that you can use “echo reading” to help students with punctuation. But, what if students still do not grasp the concept after practicing this? What else can we do to help students understand punctuation and how important it is to pay close attention to it. One more thing I can relate to from this chapter is the section over recognizing common words. In fact, I gave a site word test, as I am sure many of you did, when giving our assessments a couple of weeks ago. Also, Dr. Walizer talked to our Reading and Language Arts class a lot about sight words. I can remember listening to recordings of children and grading them. I think it helped get me prepared for this class!
Jarett, I agree with you that it doesn't matter how fast a student reads if they can't comprehend the information. I noticed this when I was testing my group of kiddos. They all read great however, they couldn't retell many of the key details of the story. As far as your question on what else we can do to help children grasp the concept of punctuation and how to read it, I think it simply takes a lot of repitition. I think the echo reading is a great strategy to use and that it just takes time for children to understand the meaning. Try simply modeling this for children. Read things differently and see which one they think fits the situation of the story and so on.
Chapter 10 was all about fluency and the definition for me really hit home. Fluency is the ease or naturalness of reading. As a child I had all the components of a great reader. I had great rate, and accuracy, I could recongnize words I didn't know, and had wonderful phrazing. However, what this chapter talks about that I had issues with as a child is comprehension. I could read all day long but for me I could never tell you what I just finished reading. I unfortunatelly still have to deal with this because I never had a teacher recognize my problems. Now, I read a chapter, reread and highlight key phrases and definitions, and then I try and answer questions at the end of the chapter. Becoming a future educator I'm not willing to let a student like myself squeek by such as my tutoring group. Each of the three children I'm working with read beautifully but when it comes to retelling they can only give me one or two details. That's why I'm committed to helping these students understand how important it is to pick out the important events and key details and make note of them while they are reading. I've searched several different activites to help them succeed and practice this. This chapter also talked about assessments and how you assess a student on each of these components which I like because its reinforcement for us since we've already gotten to test our students. At the end of the chapter there were some great examples of how to engage students and assist them with their harder areas. I really liked the flash word card of key details in the story example. Students are tested on flash cards daily so this is a relatable way to assist them. I've seen choral reading done before and I LOVE this activitiy. The students really get into it because it's fun and personally I think that learing should be fun no matter how hard it is. Students need to want to work therefore it's got to be interesting and fun.
Chapter 10 is about fluency. Fluency is a very important component of teaching students to read. Fluency and comprehension are very closely related. Fluency is composed of four pars and they are rate, automaticity/accuracy, prosody and comprehension. I was not real familiar with prosody and it explained it to be the ability to recognize phrase s instead of seeing each word in isolation. Expressive reading is another part of prosody and I remember from the lecture that Mrs. Stoppel recommended Mo Willems books to help students with expressive reading. I actually read a couple of his books in the first week of tutoring and the students enjoyed the book and it was a good way to read expressively. I like that the author included general guidelines for fluency instruction, as well as for teaching students that are English learners. . I think this will be very beneficial. This chapter also lists several strategies and activities to use to help students both individually and in small groups with fluency.
Chapter 10 covers fluency and its importance in continuing the bridge to being a successful reader. Figure 10.3 of this chapter of the text shows the norms for reading WCPM in grades 1st through 8th. It I is clear by looking at this table that student progress through grade levels to be able to read at a greater rate each year but how does this happen? Automaticity is one area that is looked at on page 260 of the text and tells us that this is when the complex skills that are taken to decode a word happen with little cognitive effort. The student simply knows what to do without even thinking about it. The section under intervention staring on page 270 tells us what to do when this fluency is not just reached within the norm ranges. There are many useful strategies and one that I really liked because I have done it with my own struggling reader is DYAD reading. First I read the story or passage to him and then he reads it with me at the same time finally he reads the section alone. This helps him build both his confidence and his fluency. Fluency is a big area in the big five and student must be able to master this in order to succeed in comprehension. I learned a great deal about the different warning signs when it comes to fluency and how I can work to correct these areas that may be weak. I know for my “at risk reader” getting the fluency step was the largest ego jump he could ever have gotten. He went from pain staking sounding out to for the most part just knowing the word. That automaticity was a great leap in his reading and his academic attitude.
Chapter ten 1. Analysis of the reading/issue. Chapter ten of the textbook Literacy Assessment & Intervention by B. Devries discusses the aspects of fluency including what it is, what the components are, how to instruct it, the assessment process and technology that can be used (Devries, 258-279). Fluency is not just about how fast you read but when students really take in what they are reading while they are reading. This means reading at a good pace, hearing punctuation in their voice. According to the textbook fluency includes three key elements which are “phrasing, syntax, and expressiveness” (Devries, 258). The textbook also state that there are four “subskills” that people must master when it comes to fluency and they are “phonological, word identification, word analysis and semantic” (Devries, 259).
2. Questions and/or contradictions about the reading/issue. I did not have any questions for this chapter.
3. How did the reading reflect you or allow you to look at an issue differently? This made me think about what I can do to help the students know that just because they are a fast reader does not mean they are understand material. I want students to find their own strategies that they can use while they are reading to help them retain the information and make sure they comprehend the material they are reading. I also liked looking at figure 10.3 in the textbook that stated where the students should be in their word fluency.
4. Connecting the reading to you. Examples of your own experience. When I was younger I would always envy people that could read quickly. I was always the slow reader so when we would do popcorn reading no one would ever pick me because I would always go to slow (not that I wanted to be picked anyways). I wanted to be one of the readers that would go very quickly because I always assumed that they were the best readers. Now I know that that is not always the case. Some students can read very quickly, but are they retaining the information that they read? I would have to take my time when I read because of my low comprehension skills, but my fluency may have been better than some of the students that read quickly through the passage.
References: DeVries, B. A. (2011). Literacy assessment and intervention for elementary classroom (3rd Ed.). Scottsdale, AR: Holcolm Hathaway, Publishers.
In my tutoring sessions, I have one little boy that needs to slow down his oral reading rate. When he reads, he reads really fast in a hushed voice. However, he remembers everything that was read. He has very good comprehension whether he reads it orally or silently or as a read aloud, which I found really surprising. The main thing his mom wants him to learn from the tutoring is to slow down. That is why I found chapter 10 interesting. Chapter ten is based on fluency. The components of fluency listed in this chapter are, rate, automatically/accuracy, prosody, and comprehension. A slow reading rate is a sign of inefficient reading, the book states that slow readers need easier books, and fast readers need harder books. This doesn't make sense to me though because if you give a fast reader a harder book to read, it doesn't mean they will understand it, and that is the whole point of fluency, so that it leads to comprehension. One of the most important facts in this chapter was prosody. It states that teachers can greatly affect fluency by providing feedback to the student after each word the student reads. This will slow down the student's fluency and the teacher is encouraging this flaw in fluency. (example on page 263) For example the teacher will say Mm-hmmm after each word the student reads.
ReplyDeleteQuestion, when the students read at a very fast rate, how do you slow the students down? The student thinks it is amazing that he can read that fast. He even says single words fast, such as the Rebecca Sitton list. Don't even get me started on the non sense words, phonics quick test! That was hard to evaluate. So when the student likes the fact that he can read fast, how do I get the student to slow down? All this chapter says to do is give a more advanced level of reading, however, if I go higher he doesn't understand the words he reads.
I really enjoyed your post because of the student in your tutoring session! I have not yet come across a child who reads to fast, so this is a great example to use. If it were me I would explain to the student he needs to slow down so his audience can understand what he is saying. I may state, “I know you’re a very good reader and you enjoy reading, but I am having a hard time following you. Is it okay if we try it this way?” - I would use some kind of method to get him to slow down...since I have not experienced this before I do not have a solution for you but I hope someone else can help out! GREAT QUESTION!
DeleteDanielle- I think the best advice I can give to get the student to slow down is to model, model, model. Either go first and have the children echo you. Or, after they read, praise them for their effort and then you show them the correct way that will help listeners hear the story and the reader to slow down. I would also give children examples, without calling out a specific child, and have them pick which reading of yours is the best. I would start by going so slow that it's hard to really listen to the story because you are going so slow you lose the reader. Then I would go fast and make them understand that you can't keep up with the words (especially if they don't have the text in front of them to follow along) and show them that the listener can't hear or keep up with the reader. Then I would read at the proper rate and have them understand that they can hear the words, keep up with the pace, and comprehend. Maybe between these the student will slow down.
DeleteChapter 10 focused on Fluency. When a student or even your own child begins to embark on the ability capture voice, excitement, questions, volume, and exclamations marks…is captivating all on its own. I know as a mother, I was listening to my own 6 year old daughter, read a story tonight, before bed and she captivated me! Everything about this chapter she was bringing brought to life. She held her audience (5 year old and 3 year old siblings), gave voice to the baby bear, questions from the mama bear, and curiosity and excitement to the entire store. The way she read was not choppy yet, smooth and effortless. The audience and reader were able to greatly succeed comprehension of the story and as the reader did not struggle to decode words or interpret punctuations, the audience was able to understand and follow along as well. This experience sums up the entire meaning of what fluency is, in a nut shell.
ReplyDeleteAs far as struggling readers, teachers really need to make sure they are able to give that student adequate time and patience. To become a fluent reader Devries says that a teacher needs to focus on four components. 1. Phonological 2. Word identification 3. Word analysis and 4. Semantic.
At this point I do not have any questions.
This reading really helped me understand again just how awesome and yet tender, the development and learning process of reading fluency can be. Having an IEP student in my tutoring session, I can see that she does not like to read in front of anyone. She is scared of making a mistake. I feel it is part of my job to help lift her confidence, ensure her of her efforts, and slowly prepare her with the knowledge she needs to learn to read.
The reading also helped me understand more about fluency. I feel that after reading the chapter each week and reading some of the blog posts I have a better understanding of each topic. However, hearing you describe your daughter read made me excited for more than just my tutoring session later on today, it makes me excited for the future to hear my own children (2 and 4) read and my students improve over the course of the semester. I can only hope that someday my students are able to reach this benchmark.
DeleteAlso, I did not mention this in my post but I was wondering if as a teacher/student focuses on phonological, word identification, word analysis and semantics and breaks fluency down it might be easier to do the informal assessments that analyze things other than rate and fluency mentioned in the test (expression, automaticity, phrasing, ect).
You're right Jennifer...all of the qualities you described of your own 6 year old daughter sums up what fluency is. I love that even in young children, they can captivate audiences and recognize punctuation as well as give voices to different characters in the story. I know some adults that don't even do this! Seeing it first hand with our own children or students will definitely help us as we do further along in our teaching careers.
ReplyDeleteI can see, after reading this chapter, how important fluency is to comprehension and how they are tied together. I can also see that if a person is not accurate in their reading, there is no way fluency can be accomplished, therefore making comprehension impossible. The point of fluency I learned in this chapter, and perhaps really shocked me, is that if a reader is disfluent they become self-conscious and soon learn to avoid reading in public. They also read less due to it taking a longer period of time than a proficient reader. The disfluent reader becomes discouraged and will avoid it altogether. Learning about a disfluent reader shows me how important it is to help a child early on (the earlier the better) to get on accuracy and fluency because if this goes unaddressed, the child will eventually dislike reading and will avoid it. How can the reader work on it and get better if they avoid it? I have noticed that one of my students likes to be right and *thinks* she knows what is going to happen in the story…so she guesses the words. She not only did this when she read a sentence on her own, she did this even when echo reading. She listened to what I said, but rather than follow along, she repeated what she *thought* I said without following along while I read or while she echoed back. I had to redirect her to the text several times. The mother even told me that she has admitted to guessing what words are when she reads. I need to get this child to slow down and to pay attention to the words, follow them, and read what is there. If she continues this way, she will never become a fluent reader. Both of my students are very into using their fingers to follow the passage (they are only at the beginning of first grade), but I have to say that they do not point and say each word individually. There is some fluency there, but it definitely is something we will work on. In my session with them last night, I had them echo read the guided reading book a page at a time with me. Then we went back and popcorn read starting with one student and they took turns reading a page. I then had them echo read again, and for a second time we popcorn read, but I started with the other student this time, so they both popcorn read the page they didn’t before. For the first session they did great and I had an opportunity to really see where some of our focus needs to be. I think that the fluency activities at the end of the chapter are going to be great to do with my tutoring students.
ReplyDeleteIts amazing what we read in this chapter an how surprising it was for us to read. Yet, at the same time it seems to make complete sense. I think as we teach we need to remember everything we have taken from these classes, of course, but also to use our common sense! All of my students are not very fluent readers but it seems to be mostly because they are unsure about the words they are reading. One student is very not confident with reading and tries to avoid it at all costs. Seeing this and knowing what we read makes perfect sense.
DeleteYour comments about disfluent readers being self-conscious reminds me of one of my tutees. I was surprised to see that one of the parents wanted help in her confidence in reading. Before this chapter I had no clue where to take that. I now understand that she is quiet because she lacks confidence in her reading. I did an activity having my students help me make a recipe of a good reader and one of them said pointing at the word was one of them. I was surprised to hear this being they are in 4th grade. I feel that these students need to learn to move passed that to aid fluency, but she said her teacher told her this. I don't know how happy their teacher will be with me since I'm having them not do that, feeling they're at the age they shouldn't be.
DeleteLeAnn -
DeleteI too felt that after reading this chapter I had a better understanding about how everything tying together to accomplish good reading habits. I feel that modeling is more important than we realize when we read to our children. Much like the mother you spoke about in your text. When I read I sometimes pretend to sound out words that "I don't know" just to show my son how I do it in hopes that he will pick up on that.
I know that it might just be because it is topical but I LOVED this chapter. My focus with my 5th graders that i am working with is fluency. While this was a hard focus to choose, mostly because my students are so low scoring across the board, I was pleased to read several things in this chapter. The thing that was most startling to read was the opening section/story about Abby and Zach. To have a student who reads fluently but has low comprehension was not really something I had thought about before. One of my students reads very poorly and has ok comprehension and the other reads better but has lower comprehension. I thought after testing that this might just be an anomaly of the testing, a learning disability, or a false reading of the assessments but now see that it might just be that he can read more fluently but has low comprehension.
ReplyDeleteIt was great to learn more about the components of fluency (rate, accuracy, phrasing, and comprehension) because before I had really only thought of rate, accuracy, phrasing as the parts of fluency and had thought of comprehension as its own category. Now, knowing that they are so interconnected, it makes more sense to me that I would focus on fluency with my students. My students have good vocabularies with real words but their non-existent phonics skills, low reading levels, slow rate and lack of comprehension all compound to make reading difficult for them.
My favorite section of the chapter was the strategies for tutoring sessions and I WISH that I had read this section before beginning my work on lessons 5 and 6. I found all of the activities to be ones that I plan to use with the exception of the flash cards because I already have this built into their lessons weekly.
A question from the reading is would the Fluency Development activity meant from 1-3rd grade work with individuals with a 2nd to 3rd grade reading level who are in 5th grade. Reading it over it seemed like something that might me helpful for the twins but I was not sure. Additionally, I was wondering what others thought about doing some of the activities on pages 270-279 with just two students. It seems some of them would be ok, but they also seem to be designed for larger groups.
I agree with you Jessica, I wish I had read this entire book before beginning my tutoring sessions just so they would be more effective. I am very glad we are doing both the tutoring and reading this text before student teaching. I don't know why it the activities wouldn't work for any size group. I think you can make any of them work.
DeleteBefore this reading this chapter and listening to our lecture this week, I too thought of fluency and comprehension as being their own categories. After reading this chapter it does make total sense for these two to be connected together. In regards to your question about the Fluency Development activity I think that it would be beneficial to your students even though you will only be able to meet with them twice a week. You could send the passage home for the students to read to their family like the author suggests. You could have the parents fill out a fluency log like the one that is pictured on page 274. to show that the student did read the passage.
Delete1. Fluency is the ability to read with automaticity. It is also word recognition, expression and meaning. Students can be fluent without having comprehension. Without comprehension, it really doesn’t matter how fast or accurately they read. The reason we read is for understanding. When recognizing meaning of words, it is helpful to use the word in a sentence. Phrasing is also a helpful tool. I have students in my sessions that read word-by-word, so it was good to read about the phrasing a little bit more in-depth. The next section was on expressive reading. Expressive reading brings the story to life. To teach expressive reading we should model the skill first and then help readers through echo reading and unison reading (264). Punctuation is extremely important also. It gives different meaning to the text. Just inserting a comma or an exclamation changes the entire sentence. When teaching students, an explanation is necessary as to why the punctuation is used. There are eight principles to guide fluency on page 266. As always, I love the strategies and activities in the back of the chapter. 2. I do not have any questions about the reading. 3. Now that I am tutoring students, I am looking for certain things specifically that will make a difference with each student. I have one student that I think would benefit greatly from the activities in this chapter. 4. I have mentioned this before, but I really like Dr. Tim Rasinski’s suggestions for reader’s theater. I hope I have time to do at least one of Margie Palatini’s reader’s theater script with my small group. I am going to check out the other websites listed on pate 276 also.
ReplyDeletePatti, I think you made some really good points. The idea of phrasing is something that I at first did not really account before but after reading really see how it has a great amount of importance. Also after thinking about it I recall my own students really struggling with their phrasing. Reading word by word and broken up at times. Great points.
DeleteRicky
Literacy
ReplyDeleteChapter 10
Chapter 10 was all about fluency. The chapter gave a detailed outline about what fluency was and how it is determined if a student is fluent or dis-fluent. Fluency is based on a lot of things from the rate the student reads, their aromaticity/accuracy, and being able to recognize common words. The root of fluency starts with the phrasing of words, adherence to the author's syntax and expressiveness. The chapter also gave many ideas about how to help students improve their fluency and what types of instruction would be most beneficial for that purpose.
This chapter is something that I wish I would have used common sense to look at before I started writing my lesson plans for last week. There were so many ideas about how help improve students fluency which is what the students that I am tutoring struggle with. I had such a hard time coming up with positive appropriate ideas that would be beneficial and truly address the students needs. Though I do feel that by the end of my lesson plans I had started to really understand what methods would be most helpful. Then after reading the chapter only really did I feel I was starting to do the right thing. Some of the activities within the text seem like they are a perfect fit for my students in the upcoming weeks. 1 really like the ideas of the readers theater and then the repeated readings. I think also that poetry will be helpful with the expressiveness in their reading.
Poetry is a great way to work on expressiveness! I read a poem to my students last week and used expression and they LOVED it! This week when the students did their guided reading they used expression!
DeleteChapter 10 is a good chapter on fluency and it's importance to comprehension. There is a lot that goes into to fluency that we may not think about. It is up to the teacher to find out what subskill a student may be lacking to help their fluency. The beginning scenario reminds me of one of my tutees. He did very well with all assessments except comprehension. During this assessment he scored the lowest of the three students. The chapter made it clear what fluency really is and how comprehension is part of it.
ReplyDeleteI have been lucky enough to do a few of the intervention activities in my RLA internship. At least once a week I did echo reading with the 1st grade class, with fluency and comprehension being the main ingredients. I did this as a whole class lesson not in tutoring or groups. The only thing I didn't like about it is it seemed like some students didn't enjoy it that much because the readings were to easy. I feel echo reading may be best in small groups or tutoring. Another good reading strategy I got to use a lot was called "Got ya." It is a form of popcorn reading where you hop from student to student, but in this strategy nobody, but the reader knows when they will end their reading and who they will call on. It made every student follow along closely to not get caught being "Got Ya-ed." The students really seemed to like this game. It always came later in the week after reading the same thing at least a couple times. There were a lot of good strategies that could be used in the chapter. I think the main thing to take from this chapter is that comprehension and expression are large parts of fluency, not just quick reading.
Ryan,
DeleteThanks for sharing those ideas! I liked the "Got Ya" game, and it does make sense to read it after students are more familiar with the text.
I also enjoyed reading about your experiences with echo reading. I think you are right about it possibly working better in tutoring sessions or small groups, like guided reading time? I think I am going to try echo reading next week for my students and see how it goes.
Amy
Ryan,
DeleteI agree with you about the fact that it is up to the teacher to try to find the sub-skill that is effecting the fluency. From my experience I have not see enough of this. I think that they are concentration a lot on the rate. I would much rather see my students read correctly than to try to beat the clock and read fast.
Ryan,
DeleteThanks for sharing the Got-Ya verison of popcorn reading. I really like that idea and I can see where the students would as well.
I was a little surprised to hear that about 30% of fluent readers have poor comprehension (at least in that one study). My first thought was that, even though these readers were reading quickly and with high accuracy, they may have poor prosody – meaning that they weren’t pausing for punctuation or had poor expression. I have heard kids do this in my internship class, specifically when reading informational text. But the text said that prosody was evaluated in these students’ fluency scores. The next section discussed 8 research-based guidelines for fluency instruction, but it seemed that none of them had any relation to comprehension. I guess I was hoping for a little more direction on how to work on fluency and comprehension at the same time.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite tutoring strategy from this chapter is the fluency development lesson. This seemed to be a great strategy for students who have such poor fluency that they would be embarrassed to read in front of peers. Hearing the teacher read, then reading in unison and possibly echo reading, gives such exposure to the text that they can become comfortable with the words. By the time they practice with a partner and then read for the class they should be quite familiar will all of the words. My question is: is this an appropriate strategy for guided reading? It seems to be, but I’m not sure. Also, my tutoring focus is phonics, but maybe I can find text that emphasizes the phonics skills we have been practicing. I have been having a lot of difficulty finding guided reading materials at my students’ reading level AND interest level. Since my students struggle so much, the leveled books at their reading level seem very babyish, but if I go up a few levels the words are just too hard. This strategy may help bridge that gap.
The fluency development lesson was also my favorite strategy. I think it can be easily applied to a small group of 1 or 2 to a larger group. I like the lesson because it shows the student what to do and then as a group the students participate together.
DeleteAmy and Tammi I agree with both of you on the fluency development lesson being a wonderful strategy. I particularly like it because it can be used in a small setting for more individualized instruction. I felt Chapter 10 had some great activities to add to lessons to aid for improving fluency.
DeleteHi Amy,
DeleteI loved the activities for fluency in this chapter reading. Especially the poetry party and rhythm walks. I like the fact that the poetry has short reading and that the student needs to comprehend before reading. In the rhythm walk I like the fact that it is a fun way to get the children up and moving, yet learning at the same time.
1. Analysis of the reading/issue. Chapter 10 was about Fluency and the different techniques that you can use in helping with fluency in reading. The text defines fluency with three elements. Grouping or phrasing of words as revealed through intonation, stress, and pauses exhibited by readers, adherence to author's syntax and expressiveness. I enjoyed reading this chapter because the text went into detail about fluency and the components. One thing that I have noticed in my Reading and Language Arts Internship was how fast kids read without pausing or understanding what they are saying. A lot of the time it is very chopping and monotone.
ReplyDelete2. Questions and/or contradictions about the reading/issue. The text talks about punctuation and one thing I noticed in observing readers is how they just overlook the punctuation and its importance.
3. How did the reading reflect you or allow you to look at an issue differently? The text gave the example of using the activity Fluency Development Lesson and I liked that lesson because I thought it was something that I could use in my tutoring sessions. I was surprised to see how easy I thought the lesson would be and that my students would enjoy it.
Tammi- I have also observed readers overlooking punctuation. I have seen students not pause when there is a period at the end of a sentence and they just keep going. Also I have seen students not use expression when an exclamation mark is used. It is important for students to learn to pay attention to punctuation!
DeleteChapter 10 Blog
ReplyDelete1. Chapter 10 was about fluency. Some important aspects of fluency covers rate, expression, accuracy and comprehension. Students need to be able to read at an appropriate speed and use read accuracy. When I was a paraprofessional I had a student who always tried to read as fast as they could. When they did this they tended to miss a word or pronounce a word wrong. I had to work with student to slow down and pay attention to punctuation.
2. Once part of fluency that I think is over looked by most is punctuation. I have noticed this when working with students. I think it is important that students learn to be aware of punctuation when reading.
3. This chapter made me realize the importance of fluency. I have always known the importance of comprehension and that has seemed to be the main focus for some teachers. However, fluency is an important part of comprehension. If a student isn't reading fluent their comprehension of the text will be hindered. Also, reading with expression is something that I need to work on when I am reading a book out loud. I read to my kids daily and sometimes I am so tired by the end of the day I am reading without expression. I am not doing my kids justice by not reading with expression. Expression enhances the meaning of what I am reading. Plus it keeps my three year old interested in the book I am reading!
4. The experience I have had with fluency is pretty minimal. When I was a paraprofessional I did work with one teacher who worked with her students on using expression. The students did plays or read stories out loud. They practiced their reading fluency when they did this. It was always fun to listen to the students as they put expression into their reading!
I have also noticed that my students in tutoring, one in particular, does not pay attention to punctuation. I initially noticed this during the diagnostic testing. Perhaps I need to say a reminder during guided reading to watch punctuation.
Delete1. Analysis of the reading/issue: Chapter 10 dealt with fluency. Fluency is the “ability to read with automatic word recognition, expression and meaning.” This is very important for students to progress with their reading. As a reader you also depend on your fluency to be able to comprehend what you read. There are many different areas of fluency. Rate is also important when working on fluency. Rate determines how many words you correctly read per minute. A slow reader can also lead to inefficient reading. How accurately one reads is also very important. Students have to be able to read correctly each word and do this with a sense of automaticity. Many areas can be improved upon to improve fluency. Sight word recognition and recognizing phonograms and their sounds within words are both key items that would enhance a student’s fluency.
ReplyDelete2. 2. Questions and/or contradictions about the reading/issue – I understand the whole chapter and feel that because my students both struggle with fluency that I have an understanding of what is being stated in the text. When tutoring my students and doing the diagnostics testing everything was pointing to fluency. I thought about how my students read and noticed that their phonics skills were very poor. I believe that with a better foundation of phonics skills this will lead to better fluency for my students. I think that too much emphasis is being put on rate. I understand that students can’t be slow as a turtle when reading but I also feel that I would much rather my student’s get the words correctly than to try to beat the clock by rushing through their reading.
3. 3. How did the reading reflect you or allow you to look at an issue differently? When I first started with my tutoring I kept thinking to myself that these students both needed help with fluency. I knew this because one is my son and we keep hearing it from his teacher and the other student’s parents said the same thing. Fluency is the obvious item to work on but I realized that more work needed to be put on the phonics part of reading. I didn’t know this until this chapter. I always thought a student’s fluency could be improved by just reading and sight word recognition. I feel by doing that we drill and kill them and don’t put it into context. I like putting the vocab or sight words into phrases and then having them highlight their sight words in the phrases and also read they phrases. The students also get to see these words with other words.
On the title page of Chapter 10 there is this quote located at the bottom, "A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on a cold iron." I love this quote because I believe it to be so true. Fluency is my content focus for my tutoring sessions. I read this chapter after deciding my content focus. I enjoyed all the information this chapter provided on fluency. Fluency is the ease or naturalness of reading. Individuals who are fluent readers phrase sentences by stopping at punctuation, adhere to the authors meaning, and use expression while reading aloud. I have learned comprehension and vocabulary are building blocks to fluency. If an individual has word attack strategies when arriving to a word they do not know they are more able to continue to read the text more smoothly. Also they are more like to comprehend the text when the words are read smoothly and with expression. On page 270 of chapter 10 there are some great activities for tutoring students in the area of fluency. I plan to use several of these during my tutoring sessions. I really liked the oral recitation and jokes activity. After getting to know my tutees. I think they would both enjoy these two activities and they would beneficial to them. I do not have any questions regarding fluency because I think at this point I have learned a great deal in regards to this area of the big 5. I look forward to continuing to add to my educational library activities and skill sets I can use to aid students in becoming fluent readers.
ReplyDeleteFluency is very important and this chapter did have great activities that you can use! I don't know what age group you have but I think that jokes are a great way for students to really relate to the content and loosen up enough to learn. This ties back to the quote, if they are having fun and enjoying learning, I think that are more likely to be open to focusing and retaining knowledge.
DeleteChapter 10 discusses fluency. When looking at the elements of fluency, I must admit that it had never occurred to me that students reading with expressiveness was a part of fluency. This occurs though when students correctly read punctuation. While this is a good skill to possess and may be shown when in a one-on-one setting, many upper elementary students will simply not show expressiveness besides the basic pause or breath because they do not feel comfortable being expressive in front of their peers. I think that this factor would be hard to assess in the inclusive classroom setting.
ReplyDeleteOne of my students that I am tutoring has decent fluency. However, she does not comprehend the words or use any expression when talking out loud. Rather, her reading is flat and sometimes, it is hard to tell when she is stopping one sentence and moving on to the next. This would be a mark against fluency because of the lack of grouping and expressiveness. In seeing this, I am going to make sure that I am expressive in my read aloud and during the group readings to model how a passage should be read.
When using fluency with ESOL students, I like that they point out the use of recording the students and having them listen to themselves. I agree that this is good for all students. Personally, I am surprised at how I sounded when I heard recordings of myself in the past. I think this would help students see exactly where they should pause and don’t, etc. Fluency is important for many reasons in the professional world. I think that if students can see that and relate it to real life experiences such as giving speeches, holding a staff meeting, or giving a quote, then they will be more willing to work on it.
Hi Hannah,
DeleteIt really is amazing how the role of expression plays in fluency. I guess the more expression you are able to grasp in reading the more you are comprehending what you are reading. It always amazes me when I am sitting in a reading class as a para and the children are reading with absolutely no expression in their tone. It makes for a lot more interesting reading when expression is added. I also liked the idea of recording ESOL students while reading and letting them listen to it. I am tutoring two ESL students right now and that is definitely an instructing strategy that I will use. I also think it is a great idea for you to use modeling when teaching fluency skills. This shows the students how much better and more interesting reading can be when read with expression.
Chapter 10 reading stressed the importance of fluency in reading. Fluency is the ease or naturalness of reading. It requires key elements such as phrasing, syntax, and expression. Without the skill of fluency there is little to no comprehension in the reading. The reading suggests a need to establish short term attainable goals for those readers who struggle with slow pace reading. The text also suggests easy level reading at first when working with struggling readers. I thought it was a great tool to use slow reading when the passage is too difficult to understand for the reader, and speed up as the text is easy for the reader to comprehend. When a reader lacks in fluency they are very self-conscious about it and will avoid reading in public to avoid any humiliation. It is important that the teacher encourage the reader to practice certain strategies that will help them in their fluency. I know that even as an adult if there is reading material that I am having trouble comprehending, I will slow down and often times read out loud in order to grasp that comprehension that is needed. An educator never wants to see a child give up on reading or dislike reading because they lack in certain skills, such as fluency. I work with a student as a Para in fourth grade reading. I have noticed that this child tends to looks at the pictures in order to replace the words. I also noticed that he uses his finger to guide his reading. The chapter discusses the importance of replacing the finger with a bookmark. After reading this chapter I got a bookmark from the Library at school and encourage him to use that as placement instead of his finger. Then eventually he won’t need the bookmark. I always encourage the student to read the words that are there, instead of going by the picture, or the beginning sounding of the words. In my tutoring sessions I have been using popcorn reading so that the students get turns oral reading. I also enjoy using the echo reading strategy with them as well. I really liked the activities for fluency at the end of the chapter. Although I am focusing on phonemic awareness in my tutoring sessions, I am also adding some fluency skills in also. My question then would be, is it too overwhelming to add both phonemic awareness and fluency into my reading sessions? In my opinion they go hand in hand and one in a sense feeds off of the other.
ReplyDeleteCharelle,
DeleteI work with a student that tends to use pictures to word bust as well. This skills comes in handy before she begins reading a book, because I find that she does picture walks before beginning the reading. However, when it comes to actually reading the pages, her eyes immediately dart to the pictures to help her with words. I always redirect her to looking at the word to figure it out, but she is so used to using the pictures to guide her in reading that it is a hard habit to break.
Carissa
This chapter was about fluency. According to the text, fluency is the "ability to read with automatic word recognition, expression, and meaning." It is also a crucial component of reading comprehension. Fluency and comprehension go hand in hand. One is needed for the other. One statement in the text caught my attention, "comprehension is the main purpose of reading, and fluency is important for comprehension." There are four subskills needed to be a fluent reader: phonological, word identification, word analysis and semantic subskills. The text indicates that most student/readers who have reading difficulties are lacking in one of these areas.
ReplyDeleteOne tutoring student is not as fluent as the other student. His wpm score on the diagnostic test was about 25 wpm slower than his peer. I am wondering if I should be including some short passages for the students to read and record or other fluency exercises in my lesson plans. My content focus is comprehension because both student need improvement in that area.
When creating my lesson plans, I have been looking down the tunnel toward helping the students increase comprehension, which is my content focus. However, this chapter has made me see that fluency practice is also something that I need to fit into my lesson plans. One student reads fairly fast (103 wpm) and the other reads slower (79wpm). The benchmark is 94 wpm. However, comprehension is very low for both, 50%. The faster reader actually provided less correct information than the slower reader on the diagnostic testing.
One piece of information in the text that stood out to me was on page 260, where it was discussing how to calculate oral reading rate. Having completed the DIBELS diagnostic testing in the first week, this explanation made me think, "Hey, that is how I did the DIBELS assessment!" Being a mother and avid reader (when not having to read textbooks), I tend be a very expressive reader when reading to children, much like Dr. Walizer.
Kim, I liked that statement about comprehension as well. I think fluency skills would be great to add to your lesson plans. I agree with Mrs. Stoppel and the text that good fluency will lead to good comprehension,without good fluency it is hard to have good comprehension. Maybe you could do the fluency and accuracy data sheet that was uploaded to week six on the BB. I know that your group is small so don't do the bottom portion just the top. We are gaining so much knowledge from this book. I wished we could have read it in RLA so that we would have had all the information before tutoring.
DeleteWhen I first started reading this chapter I thought I knew a lot about fluency, but I was wrong. There is more to fluency than I realized. For instance, the components of fluency are rate, automaticity, accuracy, prosody, and comprehension. However, within automaticity readers should acquire sub skills such as phonological awareness, semantic, word identification and analysis. Fluency is to me one of the most important elements of reading because it does play such a large role in comprehension. I thought that the figure 10.1 was a very good break down of levels and helps me to see where my tutoring students would fall. I modeled just the other day to my sixth graders how to read fluently. They had to listen to me when I paused and used voice expression. When they read after me they focused on what I had modeled to them and they did a better job of reading fluently. I have seen many of my Title readers sound out the /sh/ as described in the book. I think they were talking about me on page 262 when they were describing teachers just telling the reader the word and not giving them any strategies to figure it out as well as giving confirmation. I will have to work on the confirmation part because that is hard for me not to do that but now I see how that can make a student become dependent on that confirmation.
ReplyDeleteI have not done a readers theater, but after watching the fluency video and reading this chapter I really want to try it. I thought the researched-based guidelines for fluency instruction was informational and helpful as well. There was a student in the 2nd grade class that I interned in last year that was not a very good fluent reader. The teacher thought that the only way he would get better was to have him read all the time to the class. It was a nightmare! I wanted so bad to take the student to the back table and work one-on-one with him. I think it is important that they pointed out that repeat readings need to have a goal.
I wonder why they did not discuss DIBELS in the formal assessment section. I have been doing Running Records with my Title students (Reading a-z) I think this is a great assessment tool, but they are not timed. I loved the strategies section! I can’t wait to try some in tutoring.
I was also not aware of how important fluency is to readers and what components make up fluency skills. I agree that fluency is one of the most important elements in reading. I include a read aloud in every tutoring session because fluency is so important. I also wondered why DIBELS was not included in the formal assessment section, possibly because the authors are from a different state and they do not use DIBELS. The classroom example you shared is a great example of what not to do, I wish you could have helped this student more but you will when you are in your own classroom!
DeleteChristine, this chapter also opened my eyes to the world of fluency. I definitely wasn't aware of all the components and how they work together. Modeling is a wonderful way to teach students fluency and I'm glad it worked out well for your sixth graders. I tried modeling expression and fluent reading with my second graders this past week and it did not go so well. I think it is primarily due to the fact that I have one student who needs stronger phonics and decoding skills before she can read fluently. But I tried none the less, and I got no expression at all. She said she only has one voice to read, and that was that. I would love to try some of the different strategies and activities with them and in the future! There were some wonderful ideas! I also had to do a little head shake at myself, because I am guilty of giving the word to a student rather than giving them decoding strategies. But, I guess that is what this course is for, helping us become better teachers and giving us strategies to help our students become better readers. I am constantly telling my students that I am learning too, and that they are helping me learn. They love when I tell them that and I think it helps us work together as a team.
DeleteCH. 10 Blog
ReplyDeleteZoë Greenemeyer
NAEP defines fluency as the ease or naturalness of reading. The key elements are grouping or phrasing of words, syntax, and expressiveness. Fluency is important and can lead to comprehension. The chapter broke down the components of literacy so as a reader I could see what subskills need to be master prior to working on fluency. I was not aware of the importance of fluency when it comes to comprehending the material being read. The section on recognizing meaning of words reminded me of how much focus I was giving to vocabulary words during guided reading. Once the students have an understanding of the vocabulary words then they will be able to read more fluency and also comprehend what they are reading. I know look at how important background knowledge and vocabulary work is to a reader.
I really appreciated that the chapter presented assessment strategies for formal and informal assessments. This will help with my future lesson plans for tutoring. I have been using checklists for skill assessment during tutoring and found the examples gave me more ideas on how to asses students. The section containing activities is a great resource. I am working on flashcard work with vowel sounds and phonograms in my tutoring group and found the chapter gave more strategies I can use.
Zoe,
DeleteI liked how you mentioned that there are subskills that must be mastered before sudents focus on their fluency. This is so important when thinking about fluncy because to be a fluent reader you must understand the letters and words. In the adobe connect meeeting Mrs. Stoppel discussed how she thought fluency should be down in second grade and I toally agree because it is a subject that has steps to master in a way.
1. Analysis of the reading/issue.
ReplyDeleteWe have discussed fluency quite a bit between this course and the Reading and Language Arts methods, so I had a pretty good knowledge of what a fluent reader would be like. This chapter summarized the different factors that contribute to becoming a fluent reader, which include reading rate, automaticity, prosody and comprehension. After seeing these 4 components I found that I was not 100% sure what two of these four meant. After reading on I found that automaticity is the ability to engage and coordinate a number of complex subskills and strategies with little cognitive effort. In simpler terms, it is the ability to recognize words and punctuation with accuracy in combination with a good reading rate. The other word that I did not recognize is prosody, which is I found out is the ability to recognize phrases instead of seeing each word in isolation. I was not aware of this component of reading fluency, so learned a lot about it's importance in the fluency equation. To help students with prosody, it was recommended to have them practice "parsing" phrases, which means grouping phrases in to meaningful parts. The remaining portion of the chapter discussed assessment procedures such as miscue analysis and times readings, and shared a variety of activities to help with reading fluency. Two of the activities that I found to be useful are readers theater and choral reading, which really aid the student in showing expression and comprehension.
2. Questions and/or contradictions about the reading/issue. One thing that I have wondered about in regards to reading fluency is how to get a student to slow down their reading rate to increase comprehension. It would appear that the reader is fluent, as they are recognizing words and have a good reading rate, however the comprehension is not present. I have a student like this in my tutoring group. He is a fast reader and has all the phonics skills necessary, but he reads too fast and does not comprehend what he is reading.
3. How did the reading reflect you or allow you to look at an issue differently? The biggest thing I gained from this chapter was more knowledge about all 4 components of fluency. I knew quite a bit about reading rate and comprehension, but was not aware of prosody in relation to reading fluency. After reading the chapter, I see the importance of prosody in a student reading selections more fluently. Also, I find that I come across many great assessment methods and enhancement activities as I read these chapters.
You ask a very good question! I am not sure I have the right answer, but I did have an idea. One thing you could try to do is let your student understand that they are reading to try and grasp what the author is telling them. You simply need to let them know there is a message in the text for them to know. This might help them to understand why they are reading, and it could slow them down enough to help them with comprehension. Hope this helps!
DeleteCarissa, I have found that having the student read to themselves first then read to me helps greatly with slowing down for comprehension. Another thing I do is have older kids read to younger students. Most of the time these younger students ask questions and stop the reader and the natural pauses in the reading. I am however talking about the younger grades although it makes work for older students depending on their reading level. I liked you breakdown of the four components of fluency. Fluency affects all of the other big five areas and as teachers we need to give our student all of the tools we can to be successful at this step in the reading ladder.
DeleteAgain, this was a very informative and wonderful chapter. It gave me a better understanding of all the components of fluency and how to pinpoint where your students may be struggling. There is a very strong connection between fluency and comprehension, and at times I find myself struggling to distinguish activities that would be more suitable for one over the other. I am hoping that after I read through the comprehension chapter of the text, I will have a very good grasp on how to target the differences. I do feel very good about how to assess fluency and how to calculate wpm and accuracy rate, and after reading the chapter I understand the importance of using informal assessments to analyze all four components of fluency. I did have a question over the fluency norms, or benchmarks. After looking at figure 10.3, with the fall, winter, and spring benchmarks listed for each grade level, I want to know why the spring benchmark of one grade is higher than the fall benchmark of the next grade. For example second grade spring benchmark is 142 wpm, but the next semester in the fall of third grade the benchmark is 128 wpm. Shouldn’t the spring benchmark be 142 wpm to match where they left off? One answer that I came up with is that it’s making up for what the students lose over the summer. However, I’m not sure if that is the correct explanation or not and was just curious as to the real reason.
ReplyDeleteBoth of my students could use some fluency instruction; however, I still believe that a stronger foundation of phonics skills will help address fluency. Last week during our sessions, we attempted to do a radio read for the second day of our guided reading. My students practiced their favorite passages of the story, said they were ready, and I was very disappointed with the outcome of the activity. One student told me she only had one voice to read in, in other words it was lacking automaticity, prosody, and most definitely the expression that I was hoping for. After reflecting on the activity I realize I may have set my students up for failure with the passage I selected. It was more of an informative text, but had rhythm and rhyming words, so I was hoping it would work well. I would really like to try this activity again, and the text gave me some fantastic ideas on how to better incorporate this activity. There were also a lot of other great intervention strategies and activities that I would love to incorporate, but for the tutoring sessions I will have to figure out a way to tie them into phonics instruction since that is my unit focus. One thing I will do for sure is use the instructor strategies when my students are reading aloud, such as waiting for the student to complete the sentence and have them go back and try to figure out the missing word before I tell them the word. I think these are just good teaching skills that I will be able to use all the time.
I really enjoyed looking over chapter ten which was about fluency. This chapter recalled a lot of information I have seen before, while it also taught me a lot. It also taught me just how extremely important fluency is when reading. It does not matter how fast a child reads if they are unable to comprehend the information. Also, I really liked the section over punctuation. This section made me think back to Dr. Walizers class when we did a letter to a person and we were to put punctuation in the correct portion of the letter. I thought this was kind of a silly activity until we did it out loud. Basically, there was two ways to comprehend the letter. It was either mean or it was nice, depending on how you used exclamation marks. This made it aware to me how important it is for children to develop a good sense of punctuation.
ReplyDeleteI do not have a lot of questions about the reading. However, I did want to get some more ideas about a topic. When the book was talking about punctuation, it mentioned that you can use “echo reading” to help students with punctuation. But, what if students still do not grasp the concept after practicing this? What else can we do to help students understand punctuation and how important it is to pay close attention to it.
One more thing I can relate to from this chapter is the section over recognizing common words. In fact, I gave a site word test, as I am sure many of you did, when giving our assessments a couple of weeks ago. Also, Dr. Walizer talked to our Reading and Language Arts class a lot about sight words. I can remember listening to recordings of children and grading them. I think it helped get me prepared for this class!
Jarett, I agree with you that it doesn't matter how fast a student reads if they can't comprehend the information. I noticed this when I was testing my group of kiddos. They all read great however, they couldn't retell many of the key details of the story. As far as your question on what else we can do to help children grasp the concept of punctuation and how to read it, I think it simply takes a lot of repitition. I think the echo reading is a great strategy to use and that it just takes time for children to understand the meaning. Try simply modeling this for children. Read things differently and see which one they think fits the situation of the story and so on.
DeleteChapter 10 was all about fluency and the definition for me really hit home. Fluency is the ease or naturalness of reading. As a child I had all the components of a great reader. I had great rate, and accuracy, I could recongnize words I didn't know, and had wonderful phrazing. However, what this chapter talks about that I had issues with as a child is comprehension. I could read all day long but for me I could never tell you what I just finished reading. I unfortunatelly still have to deal with this because I never had a teacher recognize my problems. Now, I read a chapter, reread and highlight key phrases and definitions, and then I try and answer questions at the end of the chapter. Becoming a future educator I'm not willing to let a student like myself squeek by such as my tutoring group. Each of the three children I'm working with read beautifully but when it comes to retelling they can only give me one or two details. That's why I'm committed to helping these students understand how important it is to pick out the important events and key details and make note of them while they are reading. I've searched several different activites to help them succeed and practice this. This chapter also talked about assessments and how you assess a student on each of these components which I like because its reinforcement for us since we've already gotten to test our students. At the end of the chapter there were some great examples of how to engage students and assist them with their harder areas. I really liked the flash word card of key details in the story example. Students are tested on flash cards daily so this is a relatable way to assist them. I've seen choral reading done before and I LOVE this activitiy. The students really get into it because it's fun and personally I think that learing should be fun no matter how hard it is. Students need to want to work therefore it's got to be interesting and fun.
ReplyDeleteChapter 10 is about fluency. Fluency is a very important component of teaching students to read. Fluency and comprehension are very closely related. Fluency is composed of four pars and they are rate, automaticity/accuracy, prosody and comprehension. I was not real familiar with prosody and it explained it to be the ability to recognize phrase s instead of seeing each word in isolation. Expressive reading is another part of prosody and I remember from the lecture that Mrs. Stoppel recommended Mo Willems books to help students with expressive reading. I actually read a couple of his books in the first week of tutoring and the students enjoyed the book and it was a good way to read expressively. I like that the author included general guidelines for fluency instruction, as well as for teaching students that are English learners. . I think this will be very beneficial. This chapter also lists several strategies and activities to use to help students both individually and in small groups with fluency.
ReplyDeleteChapter 10 covers fluency and its importance in continuing the bridge to being a successful reader. Figure 10.3 of this chapter of the text shows the norms for reading WCPM in grades 1st through 8th. It I is clear by looking at this table that student progress through grade levels to be able to read at a greater rate each year but how does this happen? Automaticity is one area that is looked at on page 260 of the text and tells us that this is when the complex skills that are taken to decode a word happen with little cognitive effort. The student simply knows what to do without even thinking about it. The section under intervention staring on page 270 tells us what to do when this fluency is not just reached within the norm ranges. There are many useful strategies and one that I really liked because I have done it with my own struggling reader is DYAD reading. First I read the story or passage to him and then he reads it with me at the same time finally he reads the section alone. This helps him build both his confidence and his fluency. Fluency is a big area in the big five and student must be able to master this in order to succeed in comprehension. I learned a great deal about the different warning signs when it comes to fluency and how I can work to correct these areas that may be weak. I know for my “at risk reader” getting the fluency step was the largest ego jump he could ever have gotten. He went from pain staking sounding out to for the most part just knowing the word. That automaticity was a great leap in his reading and his academic attitude.
ReplyDeleteChapter ten
ReplyDelete1. Analysis of the reading/issue.
Chapter ten of the textbook Literacy Assessment & Intervention by B. Devries discusses the aspects of fluency including what it is, what the components are, how to instruct it, the assessment process and technology that can be used (Devries, 258-279). Fluency is not just about how fast you read but when students really take in what they are reading while they are reading. This means reading at a good pace, hearing punctuation in their voice. According to the textbook fluency includes three key elements which are “phrasing, syntax, and expressiveness” (Devries, 258). The textbook also state that there are four “subskills” that people must master when it comes to fluency and they are “phonological, word identification, word analysis and semantic” (Devries, 259).
2. Questions and/or contradictions about the reading/issue.
I did not have any questions for this chapter.
3. How did the reading reflect you or allow you to look at an issue differently?
This made me think about what I can do to help the students know that just because they are a fast reader does not mean they are understand material. I want students to find their own strategies that they can use while they are reading to help them retain the information and make sure they comprehend the material they are reading. I also liked looking at figure 10.3 in the textbook that stated where the students should be in their word fluency.
4. Connecting the reading to you. Examples of your own experience.
When I was younger I would always envy people that could read quickly. I was always the slow reader so when we would do popcorn reading no one would ever pick me because I would always go to slow (not that I wanted to be picked anyways). I wanted to be one of the readers that would go very quickly because I always assumed that they were the best readers. Now I know that that is not always the case. Some students can read very quickly, but are they retaining the information that they read? I would have to take my time when I read because of my low comprehension skills, but my fluency may have been better than some of the students that read quickly through the passage.
References:
DeVries, B. A. (2011). Literacy assessment and intervention for elementary classroom (3rd Ed.). Scottsdale, AR: Holcolm Hathaway, Publishers.