Fluency Boot Camp : Week One, Pace, Your Reading Speed And Reading Rate

Fluency in reading and writing involves many steps that can be taught at home or in the classroom; however, when a teacher and/or parent focus is primarily on the preparation of a variety of activities that include practice in one particular area, such as a popular activity called Scoop the Pelican. This activity involves cut-up sentences. Scoop the Pelican is a productive activity for children who are having difficulty learning about letters, sounds, and words. When reading continuous print, children seem to forget what they know. When we test in isolation, most students seem to know letter-sound relationships, phonograms, or high-frequency words; however the reader uses both pauses and intonation to parse sentences into meaningful phrases.

Ayden was given the Basic Reading Inventory Performance assessment during session two. The assessment tests sight word recognition, oral reading, and comprehension. Ayden was only able to get through the first two, sight words and oral reading, before becoming extremely frustrated. He recognized 3 out of the 20 pre-primer sight words and was able to get through about half of the pre-primer passage before he became too frustrated to continue. Pre-primer is late Kindergarten, early first grade reading level.

The RtI process is made up of three Tiers: Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3. Tier 1 is whole class instruction taught from a research-based curriculum. In this Tier, at least seventy percent of students will reach expected performance levels. For English learners, this goal means that they gain, at minimum, a year of English proficiency for each year they are in school. It also means that they are making progress on state assessments (Fisher, D., & Frey, N. & Rothenberg, C. 2010). When students are not making any improvements or progress in Tier 1, teachers come together to discuss other options. More than likely they will be moved into Tier 2. In Tier 2, the students are in small groups which the teacher often focuses on the skills they are needing. To catch up to the rest of the class. These small groups are taught by general teachers and/or reading specialist. These small groups range from 6 to 10 weeks for about 20 minutes, 3 days a week. During which the students are being progress monitored to make sure they are making adequate progress in reading fluency. Many schools currently use brief curriculum-based measures, such as oral reading fluency, to screen students to determine their level of performance relative to classmates and to monitor students’ ongoing performance and progress to evaluate the effectiveness of their reading instruction. Oral reading fluency is assessed by asking students to read a previously unseen

As mentioned before, The National Reading Panel in 2000 and the No Child Left Behind Act signed in 2001 defined there five components as the most important to teach in reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension and fluency. Phonemic awareness is defined as the knowledge that spoken words can be broken apart into smaller segments of sound known as phonemes. Phonics is defined as the knowledge that letters of the alphabet represent phonemes, and that these sounds are blended together to form written words. The component three, fluency, which is the ability to recognize words easily, read with greater speed, accuracy, and expression, and to better understand what is read. The fourth component, vocabulary, is defined as teaching new words, either as they appear in the text, or by introducing new words separately. The fifth component is comprehension, comprehension is defined as understanding what

To become a strong reader, the students must develop skills in all six components of the reading - phonological awareness, phonics, oral language, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Now, let see how interdependent they are. First, fluency is considered to be bridge recognition and comprehension. Fluency readers have the ability to read at a suitable rate of speed for their grade level. This ability will them to focus on students can focus on the meaning of the words rather than on decoding the words. With the background knowledge, the students have the ability to manipulate sound of the language. This called phonological awareness skills which help the student to make a connection between sounds and the words. Also, learning to make a

Fluency is the ability to read a text accurately, quickly, and with expression. Fluency is important because it provides a bridge between word recognition and comprehension. Struggling readers often have a hard time reading because they see unfamiliar words, they may lack comprehension skills or the motivation to read. The study I proposed inspects whether or not students reading fluency will improve due to an increase of sight word recognition activities, motivation and participating in the Accelerated Reader program. This study will include fifteen second grade students within a general education classroom. All twenty-five students within the classroom will receive the intervention, but data will be collected on two small groups with

Fluency: the ability to read and write effortlessly and efficiently; becoming fluent readers and writers in a developmental milestone.

Upon reaching the end of summer Observation Survey training, most commonly known as Assessment Week, the question “what’s next?” was asked by a teacher in training who was eager to learn more. The answer wasn’t obvious to this experienced teacher, but yet new to the program because the Reading Recovery program’s components have a unique, systematic approach. You see, after the Reading Recovery teachers in training learn the concepts of the Systematic Observation Survey, how to administer the six batteries of useful tools which are used to capture a student’s literacy ability, and reflect on questions to carefully analyze and synthesize the results for a complete understanding of what the child can control, partially control, and not yet

Based on the reading inventory that P.C. completed, I chose passages of text based on the interest she showed in various topics. The majority of the passages chosen involved nature or animals in assorted situations. During the 1st Fluency Test, P.C. read a fifth grade reading passage and scored an accuracy rate of 98%. She was consistent in her reading, and was able to read aloud a longer passage during her retelling, but received a rate of 98% accuracy again during her second try. However, the amount of words read was still low with her high score being 94 correctly read. This puts P.C. in the 25-percentile of the Oral Reading Fluency Norms, for Grades 2-5 as shown in Figure 1. After completing the second fluency test, P.C. received an accuracy rating of 94% with a retell, or second try, accuracy rate of 98%. During the retell P.C. was able to accurately read 115 words with 2 errors, this can be seen in Graph 1 below. While P.C.’s words correctly read score is still below the Fluency Norms for the 50-percentile, P.C. still showed improvement above the 25-percentile range for

Hudson, R. F., Lane, H. B., & Pullen, P. C. (2005). Reading Fluency Assessment and Instruction: What, Why, and How? The Reading Teacher, 58 (8), 702-714

Comprehension is the reason people read (Reading Rockets, n.d.). If a student cannot understand what they have just read, it becomes just words on a piece of paper. Comprehension strategies begin before a child reads a book (PDST, n.d.), by an educator asking questions about what they think the book is about from the title and the pictures on the front cover, using their prior knowledge of the words in their vocabulary through to when they have finished the book discussing if their prediction was right and any extra information they have found when they completed reading the book. Continually asking questions before during and after a child had read a book would help develop their comprehension of books they are reading. Fluency comes when all elements are met competently. A student is assessed as a fluent reader when they are able to read a book with speed, using correct letter

I am taking classes on reading instruction on the content areas in pursuit of a K-12 Reading Specialist endorsement. This will benefit my students because I will be trained underlying reading challenges as well as additional strategies to help the to improve on the target

Fluency is the ability to read with automatic word recognition, expression and meaning. For this assessment the teacher scored the student on word recognition accuracy, fluency- automaticity meaning how many words the student read a minute. Word recognition accuracy is scored by taking the words the student read correctly and dividing it by the total number of words the student read orally. Fluency automaticity was taking by counting the number of total words the student read. The student was also scored on a multidimensional fluency scale has several different subcomponents such as expression, and volume, phrasing and intonation, smoothness, and pace. All of these subcomponents add up to give the student a total score. For this assessment

Experts in the field of Education consider reading fluency as directly correlated to reading comprehension. Within the discipline of Special Education, educators recognize that students with learning disabilities show significant acquisition delays in these areas. However, throughout history, the field has dedicated numerous studies on what methods are the most effective form of fluency intervention. Repeated Reading is one of these

Fluency is another key component of reading, because fluency has often been referred to as the “bridge” between phonics (decoding) and comprehension. According to Hudson, Lane and Pullen (2005) fluency is “one of the defining characteristics of good readers, and lack of fluency is a common characteristic of poor readers” (Hudson, Lane & Pullen, 2005, p. 702). Fluency is made up three different components accuracy, rate and prosody. Rate refers to the speed or pace at which a student reads. Students should be reading at “just right pace” not too fast or too slow. This helps students free “processing space” for students to determine the meaning of a text. If student spends the whole time reading struggling to decode the text, their brain does not have enough “processing space” for comprehension. If students read too fast or too slow they are concentrating more on the words than the actual meaning of the text. Accuracy is reading the passage with little to no errors in text or meaning, this one reason why students must be able to decode words accurately. Lastly, prosody refers to the student’s ability to read with expression. Students must pay attention to punctuation in a text and taking pauses, and influcation when appropriate (Hudson, Lane & Pullen, 2005 & Rasinski, 2004). According to Rasinski (2004) fluency is an important factor contributing to student’s reading success.