Targeting adolescents' literacy skills using one-to-one instrruction

My search for research related to fluency turned up an interesting article by Timothy T. Houge, Constance Geier and David Peyton titled Targeting adolescents' literacy skills using one-to-one instruction with research-based practices from the May 2008 edition of the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. They begin wondering if schools can obtain the success of one-to-one tutoring clinics and what are the aspects of such settings that contribute to success. They assert that adolescent literacy deficiencies can be addressed at if "systematic fluency, vocabulary and comprehension" (p 640) instruction are utilized. Further, they highlight the importance of three components of tutoring programs that contribute to success: a well trained coordinator who supervises, trains and intervenes as necessary; planning and structure of lessons; and training of tutors.

Interestingly they neglect to examine the impact of the extra time component of tutoring programs and the intensive nature of such successful programs. When we provide reading interventions it is rarely one-to-one in a school. Usually it involves small groups. We often find the time either very limited or contaminated by a need for support in other areas; reading is not the sole focus. We find the tutoring programs often not only include on-site work, they also include homework, a factor that many struggling readers are reluctant to participate in. They also fail to recognize the difference between someone attending a tutoring session afterschool, at the parent's general inconvenience and the increased motivation this entails when compared with the general population at school. While the analyzed components are necessary to literacy improvement in a school setting, we also need to consider these factors.

I found it interesting that the authors note the importance of using contemporary young adult literature as essential for "engagement, influencing comprehension and reading achievement" (p. 648). When I use Wilson with my students, they tend to find it boring and babyish. As a result I am forced to look outside the program to literature to obtain engagement. Although the decoding skills are critical for improving some of their skills, they need it balanced with reading material that they find of interest. Articles from Newsela.com, books from Orca publishing, low reading level textbooks and picture books have all made it into my instruction. I find such inclusion critical to developing the required engagement for learning.

The article does provide a nice sample lesson plan that incorporates the following components:
 

plan component		how I will implement
reading for fluency/comprehension questions from the book ___________________  (5-8 min.)		- Read a selected limited word count 3 times with instruction in elements of fluency as needed -retell homework reading -comprehension questions on homework reading
20 min.	phonetic instruction: (list topic)	practice word work on a particular phonetic concept
	sentence dictation	Write 3 sentences, make corrections, read back
guided oral reading with the book _______________ [same as above] (20 min.)		read and ask comprehension and vocabulary questions
writing exercise (10 min.)		write a response to a question, read back, make corrections
Adult read aloud form a different text (5 min.)		student listens and answers comprehension questions- model fluency and interaction with the text

I highlighted the areas of literacy instruction that each component addresses.

An important piece of this instruction is that the plan is completed with all the questions the teacher will ask spelled out. This level of thought enables the creation of not just literal questions, but of deeper, higher level questions and for data collecting. This particular chart would make a good lesson plan guideline when working in a one-to-one setting. When working with a mixed ability group, this plan would be less helpful, but could be adapted. This plan is clearly designed for the student with broad-based reading deficiencies. If a student needed more support in a particular area, the plan would need to be modified to provide for such focus.

Building reading fluency in a learning disabled Middle Schooler

Darrel Morris and Meghan Gaffney's article, Building Reading Fluency in a Learning Disabled Middle School Reader, from the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy in February 2011, describes a fluency based intervention with an eighth grader with significant reading delays. The young man was reading at a third grade level, had been through the Wilson Reading System to learn phonics and had received reading support at an university clinic over the summer and after school. The case study reports on progress made using a single tutor over a summer and school year during which the intensive focus was on fluency development. The student received 47 hours of reading tutoring. The format of the lessons was:

• Check of tape-recorded reading (homework)- discussion and timed reading (10 min.)
• Guided reading- instructional level text (30 min)
• 2 repeated readings trials on familiar material (10 min)
• Tutor read aloud (10 min)

This format involved several components of fluency instruction: repeated reading, listening while reading, comprehension emphasis and self-selection of reading material. During the course of the year the student increased his words per minute on third grade material by 27 wpm. This represents a year of fluency growth (Hasbrouck and Tindal). Some might think this is not significant growth, but for an eighth grade who had made only 3 wpm growth the previous year, this represents an especially significant improvement. Yes, the student continues to read significantly below grade level, but remarkable improvement has been made.

The authors caution that the high school environment might present an added challenge to reading development since often supports become more content than process driven. It becomes more about using audiobooks than improving reading with focused reading instruction. While in middle school the student received reading intervention in school and out of it. This combined to create a critical mass of instructional time devoted to reading. Without this sort of commitment to reading instruction, growth might stagnate again.

What this brings home is the importance of time. Over the course of the year he received 47 hours of instruction outside of school. This represents a significant investment. It also illustrates how important extending the instructional opportunities is. After school and summer work all played a large role in the progress this student made.

It also reinforces the idea that for students with significant reading disabilities, progress should not be measured based on how far you are from age peers. If a student averages 6 months of growth a school year, within three years they are a year behind their average peers. If progress can be made at a rate greater than that which has occurred in the past, then the teacher is being highly effective. The idea that all students will read at grade level is ridiculous. The idea that all students can make significant progress is not only realistic it is imperative. Our definition of significant, however, is critical. I believe that significant is based on previous rate of progress. If you move that 6 month progress student six months over a school year, you made average growth. That is good. If you moved that same student seven months of progress, it is significant growth. The child is still falling further behind, but at a slower rate than before.

That does not mean we can be happy with status quo progress. Students who are disabled, however, are unlikely to be able to a year's progress in a year without intensive interventions. The traditional school day does not have sufficient time to provide this level of intensiveness without substantially sacrificing other content material. We need to think about providing high quality interventions beyond the school day and school year. We need to think about reading growth as something that does not stop at the end of public school. Reading instruction and growth can continue far beyond school.

One of the points made by the authors is that a critical component of reading growth and success is the "minimum reading rate... that encourages independent, self-selected reading" (p. 341). There is little research on this rate. I suspect it is highly variable based on an individual's grit, desire to read selected material, perceived access to personally interesting material, age, time constraints and environmental emphasis on reading. It would be an interesting area of research, but the general low levels of outside reading in the general public might make this particularly challenging to research. It does highlight the importance of fluency. If you read too slowly, you are less likely to read. Improving speed is important. What level is necessary to support independent reading, however, remains unknown.

The effects of listening while reading and repeated reading on the reading fluency of adult learners

Working with high school struggling learners, it quickly becomes apparent that although some are very much like children, others are far more like adults. This is seen in their individual maturity, compliance, individuality and outlook. Therefore, in looking at research related to fluency and my students, I have also pooled adult literacy materials. Beth D. Winn, Christopher H. Skinner, Renee Oliver, Andrea D. Hale and Mary Ziegler's research article, The effects of listening while reading and repeated reading on the reading fluency of adult learners for the November 2006 edition of the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, was an interesting read. It describes a research study in which a dozen adults seeking support for weak reading skills were provided with listening while reading (LWR) and repeated reading(RR) opportunities and the effects of this intervention were analyzed. As one might expect both LWR and RR were effective in increasing reading fluency on the passage in which they were used. No research was completed to see if this instructional technique had impact beyond the article in question.

I want to comment on the author's rationale for looking at reading fluency. Fluency has been demonstrated to be related comprehension. People who read more quickly utilize less working memory than those who read more quickly. This enables them to maintain the information in their heads for longer. It also facilitates ability to synthesize material with past learned material because there is available working memory for this activity. Reading fluency also impacts motivation. People who find reading easier, find it more enjoyable and are more likely to read. When you read faster the rate of reinforcement related to reading is higher and the likelihood of choosing reading over other activities increases. Further, when individuals read, their fluency, vocabulary and comprehension increase. Thus there is a spiral that works up and down. Fluency increases motivation to read which increases reading which increases fluency. Conversely there is a negative relationship as well. Low levels of fluency decrease motivation which decreases reading which increases the gap between the high and low proficiency levels which decreases relative fluency. This is the first time I have seen researchers really appreciate this cycle of motivation and reading success. Although others comment on the link between reading and increased reading skills, rarely do they pull in the motivational impact. I think that this is important in understanding why people do not choose to read.

In my practice it is easily and quickly apparent that both LWR and RR impact fluency on the particular passage. When I want student to read something more smoothly, I will use one of these techniques to do so. It inevitably increases reading rate, phrasing and comprehension. I operate on the basis that using these strategies increases fluency on other tasks as well. It makes sense that more frequent exposure to words increases the brains familiarity with them which in turn increases links that lead to proficient reading. After all, we know that neurons that fire together wire together. If we get students to create neurological links between words, their physical representation, their verbal representation and their meaning, it can only improve reading.

It appears, however, that the critical link may be motivation. How do we motivate students to read more? Simply requiring reading does not work. Students have lots of practice fake reading, reading simple books they read before, and avoiding required work. We need to show them the joy in reading. LWR is a great way to demonstrate that... if we have material to read that is interesting to the individual reader rather than interested to the adult in charge. For my son, this meant reading antique bottle buying guides. Unfortunately these are not on the AR list, do not have a plot to describe in a review and is absent of characters. He was lucky to have teachers willing to create individualized tasks for demonstrating his comprehension and reading. I know this is not always the case. We know that students who read graphic novels read more non graphic novels than struggling readers who do not read graphic novels. Why then do so many teachers disallow them in for independent reading choices? We need to give them a reason to read. Otherwise they will not. If they don't read, they won't get better at it and they won't choose to read in the future.

Evaluating the interventions for struggling adolescent readers

I am currently providing remedial reading instruction for a group of adolescents. As such I am trying to research programs that make significant impact on reading skills for adolescent struggling readers. Douglas Fisher and Gay Ivey's article, Evaluating the interventions for struggling adolescent readers, was published in the November 2006 edition of the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. In this article they describe key components for interventions related to secondary students.

They describe two key features to any literacy program: opportunities for wide reading and instruction in strategies across the school day. For those people thinking about Response to Intervention, this could be considered the tier one program. Reading in the content area strategies, school-wide sustained silent reading (SSR or Drop everything and read (DEAR) programs would be components of this sort of program as would classroom libraries that have materials at a multitude of reading levels and topics. It would be especially important to have trade books that reflect the content area. For example during a unit on the Civil War books such as James McPherson's Fields of Fury, Patricia Polacco's Pink and Say, Paul Fleischman's Bull Run, John Jakes' North and South, Allan Gurganus' The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage, and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass could all be available to students to read and/or for snippets to be read to the class. For a geometry class or a geometry unit books like Area by Jane Jonas Srivastava, Speghetti and Meatballs for All by Marilyn Burns, The Great Pyramids of Gisa by Janey Levy, the Sir Cumference series by Cindy Neuschwander, and Perimeter and Area at the Amusement Park by  Dianne Irving are all possible choices. Amazon provides an excellent tool for locating books related to content areas. NSTA provides a fantastic science based resource list as well. Then the school librarian or local librarian can be utilized to provide access to materials that teachers are unable to own for their individual classroom libraries. While the Common Core emphasizes reading passages that are challenging, it is also important that reading motivate and intrigue students. Providing well-read examples of readings can also improve reading by helping expand vocabulary, increase positive relationships with reading and modeling appropriate fluency.

After the foundation has been developed, the authors present five key features of adolescent literacy interventions. First is an expert teacher. While computers may be motivating, they generally do not pinpoint needs and adjust instruction the way a human can. Further, computer responses can often be found merely by process of elimination. In a computer program students are often to start at the beginning of the program and move through every lesson set. All students go through each module regardless of whether they need instruction in that area or not. While some programs are improving in this area, many have this limitation. Teachers are critical in assessment and instructional delivery. That is not to say that computers cannot play a role in instruction, but computer programs alone are inadequate to meet the needs of students.

Second, the authors propose that a comprehensive approach to literacy instruction is essential. This means addressing reading AND writing not just skill development. Expert teachers need to identify where the reading process breaks down and intervene there. Very rarely are high school students that have had quality alphabetics (phonemic awareness and phonics) instruction in elementary school going to benefit from training in alphabetics. This means that much of the rote phonics instruction that I am asked to provide is not likely to increase reading skills in secondary students. Comprehension breakdowns due to limited fluency, poor background knowledge and limited vocabularies certainly plays a role in reading difficulties as do weaknesses in other comprehension skills. Further, memory related issues can reduce reading performance. The authors, however, note that presenting isolated skill and strategy instruction is rarely useful for this age group. They propose using a comprehensive approach integrating the skills with the reading of real texts, potentially those the students are being asked to read in other subject areas.

Third, the authors note that reading instruction should be engaging. "Babyish" passages need to be avoided. Many reading intervention programs use short inane passages that high schoolers are uncomfortable reading. Student interests need to play a role in text selection. This could be self selected novels or assigned texts the individual needs to cover. In one on one settings where the material is very easy, students may be compliant but not engaged. This is a careful line a teacher must consider regularly.

The fourth component they describe is instruction driven by useful and relevant assessments. This is unlikely to be the state tests in reading or ELA or standardized tests that students take. The authors advise obtaining good baseline data about student performance from a variety of sources such as writing samples, informal reading inventories, interviews and observations. This must be in a variety of contexts, in a variety of formats for a variety of purposes. A nonfiction sports story from the newspaper may reveal very different information from a passage from a history textbook or an on-line celebrity blog. All bring important information to the table. Interestingly, the authors do not point out that on-going formative assessment is essential as well. Having read many of Fisher's writing, I believe that he would contend that such data collection is also essential to understanding progress and creating responsive instruction.

The last component is significant opportunities for authentic reading and writing. If we want students to get better at reading, they need to read. Lots of reading means lots of time. According to Mary Dorinda Allard's study on how teenagers use their time, young people spend an average of less than fifteen minutes a day reading. If we just rely on outside reading to get the job done, we will fail to support struggling readers. This means we need to create time in our school days for reading, especially for our struggling readers. This creates an interesting logistic problem. Struggling readers tend to be struggling students. Typical freshman in New York have full schedules with ELA, math, science, social studies, fine art elective, PE, and foreign language. If they are language exempt or are satisfied with a single language credit they earned in middle school, they have some room for an alternate elective. Rarely is reading remediation provided as an "elective." If it is, it is rarely more than twice a week/rotation. Further, it tends to be more of a general cross content remediation or class specific intervention (i.e. social studies AIS). As such, students are not provided with significant dedicated time to develop reading skill in school. I read one study that indicated three hours a day for six weeks was successful at improving reading instruction, but most schools do not have such flexibility. If a student attends summer school at the high school level, it is for a particular content area rather than reading. Because we are culturally bound by a four year high school, we are willing to allow our struggling learners to squeak by or fail rather than receive the interventions they need to become more capable students. The irony of this is that as a result of poor performance and frustration, many will drop out anyway. Without a true commitment to reading intervention our half-hearted attempts are unlikely to lead to any significant growth. The authors recommend that over half of the intervention time be spent on reading and writing activities rather than skill instruction. They imply that this must happen on a daily basis.

The authors discuss two case studies. One student has a computer based intervention which does not generate significant growth. The other has a multidimensional program that bridges both in and after school care, incorporates SSR of self selected work, guided reading of more challenging content, small group and center based reading activities and daily individualized instruction. The authors suggest that the later program will be far superior to the former.

Clearly the implication is that a school wide intervention in reading instruction is essential to meet the needs of struggling learners. Potentially this means either an extended school day or extended school year where reading as a program can occur on a daily basis for a block of time (ex. an hour). If we are not willing to systematically adjust programs to meet the needs of these struggling learners, we may be providing interventions, but the research shows they will have limited impact.

One interesting piece of this article is the inclusion of a rubric for evaluating intervention programs. If someone were to be influencing decision makers about selecting or designing a reading intervention program, it would be a useful tool for analyzing the approach.

The Fluent Reader

Timothy Rasinski's The Fluent Reader: Oral and Silent Reading Strategies for Building Fluency, Word Recognition & Comprehension is a book and DVD package that reiterates how interrelated the elements of reading are. If you do not have word recognition, fluency and comprehension suffer. If your fluency is impaired because you take too long to read, ignore punctuation or do not use any emphasis in your reading, comprehension suffers. If you do not comprehend the material, you cannot read with prosody. Strategies that address any component affect the others.

The forward of the book by D. Ray Reutzel is exceptionally well written. Even someone who has extensive background in fluency approaches will appreciate it. He highlights some of the challenges of common fluency instruction:

1. reading purely for the sake of increasing speed AKA DIBELS side effect
2. providing attention to the idea that different reading tasks require different types of reading- "reader's executive or metacognitive control of accuracy, rate, and expression for a variety of purposes and across a variety of text difficulty levels and types."
3. reading uninteresting, isolated passages as practice
4. measurement of fluency by oral reading rate using grade level texts read for a single minute

                                                                                                                             p. 8-9
This book discusses ways to deal with these challenges.

First, Rasinski emphasizes the role of comprehension and prosody. This voids the speed for the sake of speed. Techniques such as choral reading of poetry, radio reading and readers theater provide fluency practice while incorporating good oral reading skills.

Second he suggests intensive use of read alouds to demonstrate the importance of different types of reading for different tasks. Other authors have suggested that if a student is assigned to read passage and answer questions at the end, skimming might be the appropriate approach to "reading" but when a summary is required, a more careful read is required. Rasinski supports teachers demonstrating both good and bad models of reading and having students discuss the pros and cons of each. This is not a task that is done once, but many times with different types of readings. Poetry, for example, can be read with lots of rhythm and a sing song manner, but if you try doing that with prose, meaning suffers.

Third, rather than reading isolated passage selections, Rasinski supports integrating instruction into content area materials. He proposes a one minute check in during which a teacher listens to a student read whatever content area material they are working on. Students have the background material available, are not feeling like this is a step out of instructional reality and hopefully have some motivation to read the passage because it complements what they are responsible for learning. This is a quick method that could be done once a month for every student in a class to monitor progress. Notes on correct words per minute, prosody and errors would lead to instructional choice for both the individual and the entire class.

Lastly, he proposes using a large variety of reading material to assess fluency. Poetry; student, teacher and commercially available scripts; textbooks; picture books and more are used to practice and assess progress. If students are involved in the creation of such passages, they could reflect the content being taught at the time so this is not a wholly separate activity that teachers must carve time out for in their busy days.

Two strategies that he proposes for developing fluency are often neglected: silent reading and being read to. As students get older, an increasing amount of material must be read silently. Practice at this skill is a must. Devoting class time to silent reading is a valuable use of class time, but teachers must be sure that actual reading is taking place. Students, especially struggling readers, are experts at fake reading. Checking in at the beginning, setting goals, circulating and asking students what they have read about, paired reading and student generated book-talks are all possible activities to reduce the fake reading. Students also love to be read to, regardless of their age or reading level. (I know that my very literate 17 and 14 year olds still love it when I break out a book to read to them.) I have found that picture books can be great ways to introduce new content to older students. Modeling good prosody, highlighting great phrases, exposing students to rich vocabulary are all benefits of reading aloud to students. Just last week I was reading a book, Zee's Way by Kristin Butcher, with a group of kids and the author described dawn as night leaking away. I had to stop and share my joy at this description with the students who, when prompted, visualized it and agreed with my delight at the wording.

Rasinski offers suggestions for developing sight word vocabulary. One of these suggestions is to use Fry's list of sight phrases. I have begun doing this and have noticed that it encourages reading in phrases rather than word by word, a symptom of disfluent reading. This is a resource that will certainly be utilized in my instruction with students who need support to read in phrases.

Rasinski's style of writing is very friendly. He incorporated lots of references for where to locate material to use with the various strategies and lots of sample forms for taking data. This book targets reading instruction at the elementary and intermediate levels, but offers suggestions that can be utilized at the secondary level. Further, this book would be a great resource for a teacher just beginning to focus on fluency. It offers lots of classroom specific ways to integrate fluency instruction into the school day. The DVD has both the forms that he prepared and classroom video of activities in action. It is a great support to the book itself.

Phonics and Fluency Practice with Poetry

Timothy Rasinski, William H. Rupley and William Dee Nichols's short book Phonics & Fluency Practice with Poetry: Tapping the Power of Rhyming Verse to Improve Student's Word Recognition, Automaticity, and Prosody-- and Help Them Become Successful Readers is intended for an elementary market. I picked it up because a) most fluency materials are intended for that market, b) Rasinski is an expert in fluency, and c) I am looking for ways to improve my secondary student's fluency.

The authors see poetry as a unique and motivating way to focus on fluency and poetry. Poems contain word families and rimes which are integral to phonics instruction. Capitalizing on the high incidence of rimes in poetry provides a natural way to demonstrate to young readers the power of word families. Poems also contain rhythm and often predictable language which assists with fluency reading as well. I worked with one student for whom, poetry enabled him to demonstrate prosody in a way that he was rarely ever able to do with prose text.

Within the reading lab at Kent State where Raskinski works, poetry based fluency lessons are a daily occurrence which has helped dramatically increase reading skills. Fluency lessons need not be long- 15 minutes is sufficient, but they do need to be consistently employed. The authors present four separate examples of fluency lessons:

• daily poem
• three day phonics and poetry routine
• five day fluency poetry party routine
• fluency development lesson

The daily poem is as it sounds, introducing a poem on a daily basis that gets read repeatedly over  the day. This would be a struggle to implement in a secondary environment where students switch teachers many times a day. The three day routine involves presenting a poem and identifying word families both within it and within the students' vocabulary. The second day involves using those word families to read other rhymes and possibly create some themselves. The third day involves multiple re-readings in a variety of contexts. The five day routine involves groups or individuals preparing to present poems. Both the three and five day routines could be adapted to an ELA class at the secondary level.

The fluency development lesson (FDL) is more complex. It is designed for struggling readers. It starts with the teacher explaining fluency and modeling it with a poem. After students chorally read the poem, they practice in small groups so that each child reads it three times while their partner listens and provides encouragement. Students are encouraged to perform the poem for the class. Then the vocabulary is examined and word study is engaged in. Copies of the poem go home for practice with a new audience and the following day the poem is read again. Clearly this is not something that could be done on a daily basis in a regular classroom. It might be possible during a unit on poetry where a whole class would be expected to perform a poem. In a supplemental setting, however, there is opportunity. In my current setting where some of the students I work with I see once every four days, I would need to very carefully select poems that incorporated the phonics concepts we are also working on. Since nursery rhymes, a favorite source, might be considered too childish, alternate materials would need to be searched out. The authors provide some sources for seeking out materials, but overall, this is an area that could consume extensive time.

I am working with the Wilson Reading System. This stepped program has a section that works on closed syllable words that are an exception to the short vowel sound. One such example is -old. The poem "Black and Gold" by Nancy Byrd Turner uses -old repeatedly and then also reinforces the previously learned family, -ink. I can see using this with my students who are working at this level. The poem is short, entertaining and reinforces the target word sounds. While elementary students might enjoy illustrating the poem or creating pumpkin crafts with it, at the high school level, simply focusing on the meaning might be enough. We could also talk about imagery, rhyme schemes and parallelism.

While the authors include a chapter on writing poem parodies as an extension, this might be an area where older kids thrive. Getting students to focus on the rhyme scheme and rhythm of the poem would be helpful in their understanding and analysis of other works. Since analysis is a common thread of the Common Core, this could easily be incorporated into the mainstream curriculum. Adding the creative element could be very reinforcing as well.

What's Hot & What's not

Every year IRA (International Reading Association) conducts a What's Hot in Literacy survey. This month's (September/October 2014) Reading Today contains the report authored by Jack Cassidy and Stephanie Grote-Garcia. Unsurprisingly, according the survey Common Core related topics such as close reading/deep reading, college and career readiness, informational/nonfiction texts and text complexity are hot. The trend of the survey is that the participants rated the vast majority to the topics as should be hot.

What surprised me was that fluency was rated by at least 75% of the respondents as not hot and 50% said it should not be hot. The authors postulate that this could be the case because they were hot during the Reading First/NCLB years and yielded negligible results in student achievement (p. 10). Indeed overall reading achievement scores have changed only slightly despite the attention to the big five that Reading First provided.

Timothy Rasinski has been a leading proponent of fluency. He has published multiple articles on the subject in a variety of journals, written several books, and given countless presentations on the matter. He certainly believes that fluency should be an integral part of the reading program, especially for struggling learners. Fast ForWord, a computer based intervention program, has a strong fluency component. Both Rasinski's and Fast ForWord studies have demonstrated significant improvement in reading achievement. Perhaps the reason the impact is perceived as minimal is that little attention was truly paid to fluency, in spite of the "attention" it was supposed to be receiving.

Perhaps another reason for decreased or stagnant reading performance is the reduction in the amount of reading children do. According to a Common Sense Media 2014 report, in 1999 approximately 45 minutes were spent a day reading or being read to for 2-7 year olds. In 2013 that number dropped to be 29 minutes per day for 2-4 year olds and 32 minutes per day for 5-8 year olds. Children who do not read and are not read to will have great difficulty improving their reading skills. Just having students read more increases reading performance. Merely reading and rereading material improves fluency. Targeted interventions are more effective, but simply promoting reading time is effective. This is something easy to accomplish, requires no training, and can be done in virtually any environment.

To me, not only does fluency impact comprehension, it also greatly impacts a student's willingness to read and ability to complete work in a timely manner. Without appropriate fluency, students are left in the dust as their peers read and learn on. Although our attention to complex texts and deep reading entail slowing down reading, think of the child who spends all of their mental energy on just getting through the text. If they cannot read it with some amount of speed, they often will not bother to read it. They will skim, look for key words, and learn to cheat and copy convincingly. This is not the goal. We need to empower our struggling readers to access the reading. This includes fluency.