I am at Hoffstra University this week, studying Miscue. Allan Flurkey has been sharing his research on fluency, in which he actually takes the notion of rate and WPM to paragraph and sentence level, showing that readers modulate their rate--reading some sentences slowly and some more quickly. He likened fluency to a river that flows at different rates depending upon the topography. Readers will slow for emphasis or in response to challenges. That makes such sense to me and when thinking about Tim's comments regarding Martin Luther King's I Have A Dream speech, added a different perspective on fluency. He shared data from both proficient and less proficient readers and while overall rate remains higher with the proficient child (no surprise there, right?), the less proficient child attained very high rates in portions of the text that were less challenging. I suppose I would postulate that these two children were responding to different purposes when adjusting rate, the more able reader perhaps more conscious and more deliberate of the modulations. Both of these children demonstrated comprehenion through unaided retells. More food for thought, don't you think? I know that it has me nodding as I recently administered the DRA2 4-8 to a young reader who was largely fluent to my ear. His phrasing was natural, he was responsive to punctuation and he maintained what seemed to me a very conversational tone. He was reading very much above his grade level and encountered vocuabulary that was unknown to him. He pronounced all of these words correctly, but paused always in reflection in these parts of the text. He is a very reflective young man and luckily for me, one to verbalize his thinking strategies and he was clearly thinking through these words, stretching himself for meaning. These places slowed him down, interferring with the flow but clearly not with the comprehension. His accuracy level was 99% and I ignored the admonition to discontinue the assessment due to his fluency levels. My reasoning at the time was that his rate was acceptable, even strong, by grade/age level expectations. I would now justify that decision differently. His comprehension score was one point from perfect!! Obviously, those places in which he had lost 'fluency' by strict WPM ratings (he scored well on other aspects of the fluency rubric) had served him very well. There are lots of layers to this onion, and the more we know, the more we know!!
Lori _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list Mosaic@literacyworkshop.org To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive.
