Hi Everyone,
I am a graduate student at Syracuse University in the Literacy
Education program. I have been following the listerv for a couple of
weeks and appreciated the helpful advice. I read Rosie?s concerns
about fluency and wanted to share what I?ve found to be helpful.
I do agree with you Rosie ? it does seem natural that when the
text becomes more sophisticated and the vocabulary gets tougher, kids
may not read as fluently. However, when children given a lot of
attention to decoding or word recognition, they use valuable cognitive
resources necessary to make meaning of the text, which is why it is so
important. When I taught third grade, I found fluency to be one of the
greatest needs among my students.
With that in mind, I searched for researched-based methods that
were proven to be effective. Repeated reading is an example of one
technique. You could also use choral reading and echo reading and can
vary the pace so that it can be loud and fast or slow and soft. Some
teachers have students listen to books on tape, but if it?s going to
be effective your students have to be held accountable for what they
are reading. I was wondering if you or any one else had heard of the
Read Naturally program? It?s a program in which readers hear a passage
read by a fluent reading model (either an adult or a tape), they do a
cold reading to determine how many words they read per minute, then
practice repeated readings of the text and monitor their progress
along the way, which I think is essential for them feeling successful
and everyone seeing fluency growth. I know of a teacher who used this
in her self-contained classroom and was very impressed with it. It
might be worth checking out!
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