Fluency
Before we “dive” into how teachers can enhance students’ comprehension ability while they are reading expository text, we must first take into consideration what fluency consist of, and its impact on comprehension. When one thinks about fluency, his/her first thought may be, “students reading as fast as they can in one minute.” Well, at least for me that is what I considered it to be before taking ECI 544 (Remediation of Reading Disabilities). Fluency is not all about rate. It also includes how accurately a student reads, at an appropriate rate, while using expression/prosody. And it also affects how well a student comprehends while reading (Young & Rasinski, 2009; Deeney, 2010). LaBerge and Samuel’s Automaticy Theory, “… suggested that there is a limited capacity of attention and working memory in cognitive processing and that learning one aspect of reading (word identification) to a criterion of automaticity frees the processing space for higher order thinking (comprehension)” (Hudson, Lane, Pullen, 2005, p. 703). Therefore, I must first recognize how fluent my students are in reading text.
Instructional Strategies and Resources
Resources obtained through my course work in ECI 543 (Diagnosis of Reading Disabilities) and ECI 544:
- Choral Reading
- Echo Reading
- Readers Theatre
- Timed Reading with Leveled Text (readina-z.com is a great source)
- Language Experience Approach (LEA): Have students read something that they wrote (or dictated and written for them). This can even be recorded using Voki or VoiceThread, and they can self-assess their own fluency.
- Fluency Poster: http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/sites/default/files/images/blogs/83/6a00e54faaf86b88330148c81513d6970c
- Silly Sentences: Create "silly" sentences with a student(s) and have them practice reading them with accuracy and expression.
- http://www.fcrr.org/Curriculum/pdf/GK-1/F_Final.pdf: This is a great resource from the Florida Center of Reading Research. It has a variety of fluency activities that focus on different aspects of fluency, such as, speed, accuracy, and phrasing.