Reading & Other Learning Disabilities

From Reading and Other Learning Disabilities

A Blog by Dr. Gary G. Brannigan & Dr. Howard Margolis

Reading Fluency: Part II – Helping Daniel

A Guest Post by

Lorraine Griffith, M.A.Ed

www.singreadlearn.com

West Buncombe Elementary School, Asheville NC

I have been thinking about reading fluency since 1999 when I heard Dr. Tim Rasinski from Kent State University speak at a small, summer workshop in Asheville NC. Having taught for about 9 years in kindergarten and fourth grade, I was seeing firsthand how reading was more than simply having children decode words. When I taught kindergarten, decoding was my goal. When I arrived in fourth grade, comprehending was my goal and my decoders were simply not cutting it with any depth of understanding. Fluency was the missing link between the phonics and the comprehension. This was made clear to me by a the three year study Tim and I did with my fourth graders; in this study, my at-risk readers made average yearly gains of 2.83 years (Griffith & Rasinski (2004).

As this school year began, I assessed my students as usual and was very surprised to find one of my academically gifted students, Daniel, hovering around the “2 year below” range in reading. I immediately held a conference with his parents. I told them what I found. Daniel had some serious speech issues and was not able to decode many of the words at a fifth grade level. This contradicted what they had been told for years—that he was simply “a lazy reader.” They quickly jumped on the issue and took him to a private speech therapist.

In the meantime, to fill the gaps, we began working on decoding carefully and reading phrases. We used a program that focused on precision with phonics. After a few months, Daniel was able to read the passage at grade level. As I listened to him read, I was struck by how monotone he was reading. His focus was still on EACH word. Consequently he still could not pass the comprehension section of the leveled reading testing.

Daniel is symbolic of the reading stages I have seen in my 21 years of teaching. The students must have the decoding skills to read on grade level. But they DO NOT comprehend the passages until they can interpret the text with appropriate phrasing and expressive voicing. This seems to be especially true for children who missed steps in their phonemic awareness and phonics development. These children desperately need coaching for their fluency development to bridge the gap between phonics and comprehension.

So what will I now do to improve Daniel’s fluency? We will read together and I will model the phrasing of a passage. I will teach him what to do between commas and how to “arc” a phrase as he reads. He will have plenty of opportunities to perform reader’s theater in class and to eventually perform poetry as a “soloist.” I will use Building Fluency with Practice and Performance, a series of traditional poems, songs, reader’s theater, and monologues for different grades. And when Daniel leaves my class, he will be on grade level. He will be reading books because he chooses to read them. He might even read them quickly. But his speed will come from a love of reading, not because he thinks fluent reading is reading fast.

Resources

Griffith L.W. and T. Rasinski (2004), A Focus on Fluency: How one teacher incorporated fluency with her reading curriculum, The Reading Teacher, 58 (2), 126-137.

Rasinski, T., & L. Griffith (2008) Building fluency through practice and performance: Grades 1 – 6. Huntington Beach: Shell Educational Publishing. Available at http://www.teachercreatedmaterials.com/reading/buildingFluency.

Rasinski, T., & Griffith, L. (Coming May 2010). Building Fluency with Practice and Performance.

Edited by Howard Margolis, Ed.D.  www.reading2008.com