 | Building Reading Fluency in your Students |
|
This information has been adapted from Putting Reading First: Kindergarten Through Grade 3 The Research Building Block For Teaching Children to Read Third Edition by the National Institute for Literacy. The full document can be found at http://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/pubs/upload/PRFbooklet.pdf Fluency Instruction: How to identify fluency issues: -Readers who have not yet developed fluency read slowly, word by word. -Their oral reading is choppy. To read with expression, readers must be able to divide the text into meaningful chunks. These chunks include phrases and clauses. *Be careful even skilled readers may read in a slow manner when reading texts with many unfamiliar words or topics. -Less fluent readers must focus their attention primarily on decoding individual words. Therefore, they have little attention left for comprehending the text. How Can I Help my Students? - Providing them with models of fluent reading. By listening to good models of fluent reading, students learn how a reader's voice can help written text make sense. Read aloud daily to your students. By reading effortlessly and with expression, you are modeling for your students how a fluent reader sounds during reading. After you model how to read the text, you must have the students reread it. By doing this, the students are engaging in repeated reading. Usually, having students read a text four times is enough to improve fluency. It is the actual time that students are engaged in reading that produces reading gains. Have other adults read aloud to students. Encourage parents or other family members to read aloud to their children at home. The more models of fluent reading the children hear, the better. Hearing a model of fluent reading is not the only benefit of reading aloud to children. Reading to children also increases their knowledge of the world, their vocabulary, and their familiarity with written language, and their interest in reading. -Have students repeatedly read passages aloud with guidance. Avoid Round Robin Reading allow students to read aloud in a stress free small group environment (Guided reading is a great opportunity for this to take place) -What students should read. Fluency develops as a result of many opportunities to practice reading with a high degree of success. Text containing mostly words that they know or can decode easily. The text should be at the students' independent reading level. A text is at students' independent reading leve if they can read it with about 95% accuracy, or misread only about 1 or every 20 words. If the text is more difficult, students will focus so much on word recognition that they will not have an opportunity to build fluency. I hope this was helpful. If you have any questions feel free to contact me. 807-737-7373 Ext 32 |