Journal, 93(5), 77-81.
This article discusses how many high school content-area teachers, including those outside of the language arts, believe that they are not and should not be responsible for teaching reading. Despite this widespread opinion, many students begin to struggle reading more in middle and high school than in elementary school, due to the onslaught of diverse and dense texts at the middle and high school levels. Despite the many shortcomings of current high school institutions in regards to teaching reading, Howerton and Thomas present Jeff, a student who struggles decoding written text, causing him to lose focus on comprehension and ultimately possess a hatred for reading. Both authors recommend that in order to improve students’ decoding skills teachers must make a point to correct the words students read incorrectly while reading aloud immediately; students should be introduced to vocabulary that contains common roots, prefixes, and suffixes; and teachers should direct students to play traditional board games like Scrabble often. Howerton and Thomas also introduce Samantha. Samantha does not struggle decoding individual words, but does often skip words, reread the same words multiple times, and even misses whole lines while reading. Samantha struggles with fluency. Some recommended strategies to improve students’ fluency skills include timed silent reading, in which the students read silently, count how many words they read, and track their progress over time; rereading new and complex passages and materials; partner reading, wherein more fluent readers are paired with less fluent readers, the fluent reader reads aloud to the less fluent reader first, and then the less fluent reader reads; and teacher read-alouds while students follow along in the printed texts.
Neumann, V. S., Ross, D. K., & Slaboch, A. F. (2008). Increasing reading comprehension of
elementary students through fluency-based interventions. (Masters dissertation). Retrieved
from ERIC.
This action research project executed oral reading fluency-based interventions with the intention of improving students’ reading comprehension. The study consisted of six students in grade three, six students in grade five, and six students in grade six. In the groups observed, students had a lack of various elements in oral reading fluency. Therefore, students had difficulty in comprehending their reading. Interventions included reading and rereading, teachers modeling fluent reading, repeated oral reading, and reading along silently while listening to oral reading. These interventions were set up for these groups in order to improve students’ fluency and aid in their comprehension. Results indicate that students demonstrated an increased awareness of accuracy, rate, and prosody, the three elements of oral reading fluency. Students also changed their attitudes about oral reading after the interventions and were more confident and excited about reading.
Nichols, W., Rupley, W. H., & Rasinski, T. (2009). Fluency in Learning to Read for Meaning:
Going beyond Repeated Readings. Literacy Research And Instruction, 48(1), 1-13.
According to the authors (2009), “a student demonstrates fluency by recognizing words accurately and automatically while at the same time reading orally with appropriate expression and phrasing.” In this article,they talk about other methods of fluency instruction than repeated readings. Although repeated readings have proven to be successful and are recommended the most for teacher use, in order to best aid all students, educators need more resources to improve fluency. Students should be taught to apply their fluency skills to connect with actual text and not to use the skills in isolated tasks. New research has confirmed that modeling has shown to greatly improve fluency instruction in the classroom. Fluency is more than simply the ability to identify the words in print, but also to be able to read them with expression and full understanding or comprehension.
Rasinski, T. (2004). Creating fluent readers. Educational Leadership, 61(6), 46-51.
In this article Rasinski defines reading fluency, talks about the three dimensions of reading fluency, and discusses how fluency affects a students reading success. According to Rasinski, reading fluency is, “The reader’s ability to develop control over surface level text processing so that he or she can focus on understanding the deeper levels of meaning embedded in the text” (46). Three important dimensions of fluency are accuracy in word decoding, automatic processing, and prosodic reading. Rasinski suggests using assisted readings and repeated readings to improve reading fluency. Passages are meant to be read aloud, such as poetry, scripts, speeches, dialogues, jokes, and riddles, are ideal texts to use.
Rasinski, T. V., Padak, N. D., McKeon, C. A., Wilfong, L. G., Friedauer, J. A., & Heim, P. (2005).
Is reading fluency a key for successful high school reading? Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 48(1), 22-27.
This article discusses the findings of a study that advocates for the teaching of reading, most importantly fluency, to secondary students. The article suggests that doing so will allow student’s reading to get better, therefore improving their overall academic achievement. The National Reading Panel has listed fluency as a key element in successful reading in the primary grades, however recent research suggests that the issue of reading fluency goes beyond primary grades and continues into middle school and high school. The article conducted a study of 303 9th grade students at the end of the school year. The students were asked to read a grade level passage for one minute. After the reading the students were asked to do a quick retell to ensure students were reading for understanding not speed. After the reading tests were conducted the researchers determined each students word-recognition level, or percentage of words read correctly, and their reading fluency score, number of words read correctly in the one minute time period. The study found that these students had average word-recognition accuracy rates, meaning that students could decode the words accurately. Their fluency was another story. Finding established norms for 9th grade fluency was difficult for the researches so they used 8th grade scores and interpreted their data based on how students should look compared to a lower grade level. Once the data was all put together the study showed that the fluency levels for this group of 9th graders were, on average, below the 25th percentile of what is expected of 8th graders. The study concluded that improvements in a students fluency could account for great gains in the students reading comprehension. These students who do not get help with fluency are put at a disadvantage. They have to spend all their effort on decoding words and have limited cognitive energy to comprehend what they are reading, theory of automaticity. The article then listed a few ways to teach fluency at the high school level. Such ideas included, repeated readings and assisted reading.
Rasinski, T. V., Rikli, A., & Johnston, S. (2009). Reading fluency: more than automaticity? More
than a concern for the primary grades? Literacy Research and Instruction, 48, 350-361.
This article serves as an extension to the research presented in the article from the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy (Rasinski, T. V., Padak, N. D., McKeon, C. A., Wilfong, L. G., Friedauer, J. A., & Heim, P., 2005). Rasinski, Rikli, and Johnston (2009) argue that since fluency is one of the foundational skills of reading, fluency must be mastered as early in one’s life as possible. Additionally, Rasinski et al. (2009) cite LaBerge and Samuel’s theory of automaticity in reading that states, “Readers who have not yet achieved automaticity in word recognition must apply a significant amount of their finite cognitive energies to consciously decode the words they encounter while reading,” ultimately causing disfluent readers to struggle in comprehending written text. The authors also point out that while fluency does refer to reading rate, it also refers to prosody, or the ability to make written language sound like spoken language. To conduct this study, researchers provided narrative passages, that were taken from grade-appropriate trade books, to students in grades three, five, and seven in an urban school district in Omaha, Nebraska. The students were asked to read the passages silently for practice, and then orally. The first minute of the oral readings were digitally recorded. Trained raters then rated the readings based on a rubric that assessed phrasing and expression, accuracy and smoothness, and pacing. It was determined that at all three levels, prosodic reading was “significantly associated with silent reading comprehension.” Rasinski et al. (2009) identified that reading fluency is extremely important, especially in relation to reading comprehension, both oral and silent. Rasinski et al. (2009) recommended that instruction that is intended to improve expressive oral reading may have a greater impact on comprehension than instruction that is intended to improve reading rate and decoding. Additionally, the study of oral interpretation of poetry, scripts, dialogues, monologues, and oratory will improve comprehension by creating more “meaning-filled interpretations of texts.”
Rasinski, T., Rupley, W.H., & Nichols, W. D. (2008). Two essential ingredients: Phonics and
fluency getting to know each other. The Reading Teacher, 62(3), 257-260.
This article begins by using a spice and recipe analogy to help the reader understand the importance of teaching both phonics and fluency together. The authors talk about phonics and fluency as essential spices in reading. The article states, “Just as leaving out essential ingredients in a recipe can result in a less than desirable culinary product, readers who have difficulties in word decoding and fluency will experience problems in reading comprehension” (257). They continue the analogy throughout the article as they talk about teaching these two elements together, it would be like mixing spices to create a secret ingredient. The article suggest one way to teach both of these reading elements, rhyming poetry. The article gives three steps in using rhyming poetry to teach phonics and fluency. Step one talks about word families. Using word families to teach students groups of words can help them read more than just the words taught. Learning word endings, for example, -at can help students decode and spell one syllable words such as hat, and chat, by adding consonants, blends, and digraphs. It can also help students with multi-syllabic words like aristocrat. Step two talks about working with the word family and moving the words from isolation into the context of a poem. These poems can be teacher created or in books, existing poems, songs, etc. Step three talks about follow-up activities. These include rereading the poems in a variety of ways. This might include choral reading as a class, reading to a partner, reading silently, or performing the poem. Using rhyming poetry can help students with both their word recognition and their reading fluency, both of which are key reading goals for elementary reading programs.
Theurer, J. (2011). Does accuracy make a difference? Examining the miscues of proficient and
less than proficient adult readers. Literacy Research And Instruction, 50(3), 173-182.
According to Theurer (2011), “proficient readers read with a great deal of accuracy; however proficient reading is not characterized by how rapidly and accurately readers read.” In this research study, they looked at two groups of adult readers with different reading proficiencies using Reading Miscue Analysis. They set out to the different number of miscues and corrections, as well as the percentage of different miscues and corrections for each group of readers. They discovered evidence supporting that the more proficient readers, although they read with less miscues had the same percent of corrections as the less proficient readers. Even though the less proficient readers corrected more miscues than the more proficient readers, in relation to the number of miscues, they had almost the same percent of corrections. These findings are supportive of the new ideas of students’ ability to correct their miscues being a topic for discussion involving accuracy assessment. With new research, educators are starting to bring into account that a child’s reading accuracy is connected with their ability to correct their miscues.
