Re: [MOSAIC] Repeated Readings for Fluency - Question for Tim
Hi Heather - I know that you are writing to Elainebut I had a student like this one time. I had success when I chose a different genre of writing...say riddles or jokes...things with high emotionI also had more success when I had the student write and read his own writing aloud to me and to his peers. He was able to put more emotion and feeling into his reading I have mixed feelings about the relationship between fluency and comprehension. But, I have strong feelings about being able to identify with the material...have an emotional response...I think it is critical to making meaning...and certainly to inferring. Christine - Original Message - From: Heather Wall [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Mosaic: A Reading Comprehension Strategies Email Group mosaic@literacyworkshop.org Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2007 8:53 PM Subject: Re: [MOSAIC] Repeated Readings for Fluency - Question for Tim Elaine, I have a question about your statement below. I'm tutoring a little boy (LD, ADHD) who reads with fair fluency but absolutely no prosody. It's robot reading with no expression, no stopping for periods, commas, etc. Could that be having an effect on his comprehension (which is suffering when it comes to details and higher-level stuff such as inferring)? I'm thinking I read that somewhere, and it makes sense that without expression the story is just a list of words to be gotten through. He comprehends even worse on the sections he reads silently, so I'm thinking he's still robot reading in his head also. Heather Wall/ 3rd grade/ Georgia NBCT 2005 Literacy: Reading - Language Arts - Original Message From: elaine garan [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Mosaic: A Reading Comprehension Strategies Email Group mosaic@literacyworkshop.org Sent: Saturday, July 7, 2007 10:10:37 PM Subject: Re: [MOSAIC] Repeated Readings for Fluency - Question for Tim Beyond beginning reading, beyond first grade, there is a zero correlation between fluency and comprehension. In fact, fluency (in terms of a focus on wpm and even prosody) can actually interfere with comprehension because the reader is thinking about that performance aspect instead of meaning, especially if he or she is being timed. . ___ 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. ___ 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.
[MOSAIC] (no subject)
At our school we are revamping our ELA assessments. I am looking for ideas that would be good for K-4 writing and K-2 reading that do not include Dibbels. Does anyone have suggestions that would be good for some of our staff members that feel that we need to have hard data? Thanks- Christine ___ 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.
Re: [MOSAIC] wAndering minds
It sounds like a need for character ed rather that a reading lessonmaybe you could combine them somehow. Christine - Original Message - From: Bill Roberts [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Mosaic: A Reading Comprehension Strategies Email Group mosaic@literacyworkshop.org Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2007 4:52 PM Subject: Re: [MOSAIC] wAndering minds I have found lit circles to be unsuccessful. In the past, over half the students had not read the pages they agreed to read within their group. Many students did not read the book at all, but asked the other students in their circle to tell them what happened in the book. I don't have the same success either. I was just giving out ideasI find the 8th graders don't care about helping each other and are very self-centered. Had a pair working on a project this last grading period, and one dropped the ball and left the other hanging. I warned them about picking friends for partners and how they should work with someone who will help, but it was her BEST Friend.that changed. It seems to happening more and more the last few years Bill Personally, I think they work better when picking for themselves. If they like a book, they'll recommend it to other students. ___ 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. ___ 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.
Re: [MOSAIC] From Elaine Re-replies to my fluency v. comprehension
Hi Elaine - the Amy and Christine Rebera...address...is really Christine Rebera there are two of us at the address...FYI... Thank you for your comments. I would be very interested in reading your book...because my school is pushing for DIBELS and we have a reading teacher - newly teaching Title One who is a big pusher of Wilson...not to say anything negative about either programbut...againwe always have to look at best practices based on research...which people claim supports DIBELS and Wilson...among others, I am sure. We also have a thing going on with something called Acuity (sp?) Does anyone run this reading comp testing...thing that I know little aboutI am wondering because many of the teachers who were told the had to do it are very frustrated with the amount of time it takes. Does anyone know of any research about it? I am working on a committee to align and tighten our ELA assessments. It is a BIG JOB!!! We have a lot of gaps...especially with writing assessment. If anyone knows a good K-4 writing assessment tool...besides parallel tasks for the ELA..and Peel...which we have information about...I would like to hear about them. Chrisitne - Original Message - From: elaine garan [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Mosaic: A Reading Comprehension Strategies Email Group mosaic@literacyworkshop.org Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2007 12:10 PM Subject: [MOSAIC] From Elaine Re-replies to my fluency v. comprehension Hello, All-- I feel like an interloper because I've been reading your thread on fluency but I'm only now responding. I'm amazed at how insightful you all are. I'm just going to offer a few observations here. first, as a teacher for almost 30 years, I totally agree with most of you. I want to offer not just my opinion, but how the research backs up what you are saying. I also want to speculate as to why fluency, as Readinglady notes-- is suddenly such a hot topic. You are right. Bill is right on. I think this big hoopla over fluency does indeed come down to what you see as the ultimate goal of reading. What research shows (and I can give you the federal research to back this up--it's in my book) is that there is a CORRELATION between fluency and comprehension very early on in first grade, and to an extent in second grade when kids are first learning to read. Let me just clutter this with a little statistical truth: Correlation does not mean CAUSATION-- in other words, just because there is a relationship between fluency and comprehension, it doesn't mean that fluency CAUSES comprehension. In fact, the reverse may well be true and as Amy and Christine Rebera noted in their post-- comprehension impacts fluency. The research also fits then, with what Readinglady says about emphasizing punctuation, phrasing etc. What the research shows-- and what my book explains in more detail is that if you focus on fluency-- alone--- you will lose comprehension. In fact, the federal researchers note that after first grade and early reading instruction- the correlation between fluency and comprehension drops to near zero! That is not me-- that is the data from the federal research. Furthermore, past the point when kids are first learning to read, too much focus on fluency is actually counterproductive! This also fits with what you all have noted on here. If you time kids with a stopwatch and force them to read nonsense syllables or even text, faster, faster faster-- then what we do is give them the message that reading is about speed-- not about thinking and interacting with the text. Good readers vary their reading rate. You do it. I do it. You may well have slowed down when you came to the sentence where I talked about statistics because maybe you needed to think about it a little harder. So logically and as is supported by the research-- we are way off by putting the focus on speed. Again, this is supported by the federal research. This is too long already but I want to give you an example from the kids we work with here at Fresno State. We work with kids with reading problems and the problems we see are often direct results of the methods being used in the schools. For example, when schools started using a lot of decodable texts, our kids would look at the first letter or two and toss in any old word whether it made sense or not because they were reading nonsensical books and had no expectation that print was supposed to make sense. Now, we have THAT heartbreaking phenomenon and on top of it---now that districts are using DIBELS or other methods that focus on reading fast-- we have kids who just rattle off text at a mile a minute and look up at us with a big grin, so proud of themselves-- but they cannot tell you what they've read. On top of that, we see the affects of AR compounding the speed/don't think issue-- because so many of our kids can rattle off every single detail in story-- the color of someone's dress etc
