Helping Students Become Accurate, Expressive Readers

Melanie Kuhn's article, Helping Students Become Accurate, Expressive Readers: Fluency Instruction for Small Groups, from the December 2004/January 2005 edition of The Reading Teacher, describes a comparison study examining ways to improve fluency in struggling second graders. She set up four groups:

1. a repeated reading strategy  (FOOR)
2. wide reading
3. listening 
4. control

Over six weeks groups of 6 students met three times a week for 15-20 minutes. Students in the control group were not removed from class while the other students were pulled for instruction.

She found that both wide reading and  FOOR improved in their ability to identify words in isolation. They also showed greater gains in reading rate in context than the other two groups. The wide reading group showed gains in comprehension that the others did not. The author speculated that this might be attributed to the focus during the wide reading sessions was both expressive reading and comprehension whereas the focus of the FOOR sessions was on prosody. Perhaps, as the authors observes, if there had been more focus on comprehension, gains could have been achieved there as well. Since the listening group did not make either of these gains the author commented that, "while reading aloud is important in fostering a love of reading, learners must actively engage in the reading of connected text if they are to become skilled readers" (p. 342).

The author points out implications for the classroom. First that grouping flexibly by ability, needs and/or interests is essential in meeting the needs of the students. Second the needs of the students need to point to instructional strategies: FOOR for students who need to work on the mechanics of reading, automaticity and prosody but wide reading for those who need support in word recognition, prosody and comprehension.

Overall her approach could be considered a Tier 2 intervention in a response to intervention framework. If her research can be applied to older students who have not yet mastered reading with fluency is unknown and deserves further research. Other authors have certainly supported using a multipronged intervention for older students: direct instruction in phonics and vocabulary, wide reading, repeated reading and listening. Understanding what each student's unique profile would best benefit from is where art and science have not yet met. Clearly students who have not made significant progress under one approach should have the nature of their instruction altered in a timely manner so as to maximize learning time. The six week time frame seems adequate to determine if an intervention is going to be effective with a particular student at that time.

Why Reading Fluency Should be Hot!

Timothy V. Rasinski's article, Why Reading Fluency Should be Hot!, from The Reading Teacher, 65(8), takes an interesting approach to understanding the challenge of fluency instruction. He points out three reasons ways fluency instruction is often flawed:

1. Fluency instruction focused solely on reading quickly, minimizes comprehension in favor of speed and consequently does not improve reading.
2. Fluency instruction is limited to the early elementary grades based on the theories that it should be in place early in the process of learning to read and that silent reading replaces oral reading as students move up in grades so oral fluency-based instruction is unnecessary.
3. Fluency instruction often does not focus on reading for meaning and enjoyment.

Unfortunately, these characterizations of fluency instruction reflect the worst not the best of the instruction.

Research has, however, repeatedly reflected the link between fluency and comprehension. Research has also demonstrated that students who read orally with good speed, automaticity and prosody read better silently as well. Further, research proves that struggling readers may read at half the speed as their average reader peers, reducing the probability of these students actually reading.

Good fluency instruction does include speed as a component, but also includes prosody and automaticity. It uses fluency as a bridge to comprehension. Building these skills is accomplished through two major approaches- wide reading and deep reading. Wide reading, reading many different things, builds background knowledge and allows for exposure to many words thus increasing word recognition and automaticity. Deep reading links fluency to comprehension. Interestingly, Rasinski does not use the term close reading. Close reading generally refers to strategies used to comprehend challenging reading material. Deep reading, however, refers to rereading in order to improve prosody. "...[T]hrough repeated reading, readers become more adept and efficient at employing prosodic features into new passages not previously read" (p. 519). Everyone has been lucky enough to hear a gifted storytelling reader. He uses his voice to effectively communicate the message of the text. This is the goal of repeated reading.  In order to read with prosody, one must understand the material. Rereading, as the proponents of close reading know, enhances comprehension. The trap that close reading often falls into, however, is the third flaw of fluency instruction- it often minimizes enjoyment of reading, whereas Rasinski's deep reading emphasizes this.

Rasinski proposes that fluency instruction should be hot, but that it needs to be done in an effective manner that utilizes wide reading and deep reading. Performance activities are a great way to meaningfully encourage rereading, not merely for speed or to answer text dependent questions, but for prosody as well. Building these tasks into remedial reading tasks can be a wonderful way to get students to read and reread. It does, however, require that they be taught how to read with prosody. Teachers need to become gifted oral readers to demonstrate skills and then they need to highlight what makes reading more interesting to the listener-- things like using volume and speed to reflect meaning, pausing for punctuation, matching expression to meaning and carefully enunciating words.

Building Fluency, Word Recognition Ability, and Confidence in Struggling Readers

Lori G. Wilfong's article, Building Fluency, Word Recognition Ability, and Confidence in Struggling Readers: The Poetry Academy, published in 2008 in The Reading Teacher 62(1), discusses a reading intervention for third grade readers with fluency levels more than 20% below the national norms. In her research, students were provided with a weekly one-on-one 5-10 minute intervention delivered by trained volunteers. Volunteer readers read a poem to the students, read the poem with the student and then the student read the poem (repeated reading and assisted reading interventions). Students then took the poem home and read it to as many adults as possible over the course of the week. When they returned the next week, they reread the poem to their volunteer partner and then began the cycle over again. The students receiving the intervention over the course of 11 weeks, made better progress in fluency than their average performing peers. They also improved their attitudes toward reading.

Two critical components of the Poetry Academy were in providing intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. The author selected poems that were fun; they had elements of humor, crudeness and rudeness that elementary students find enjoyable. The volunteers provided stickers and small pieces of candy to students who participated brought their Poetry Academy materials to the sessions. At the end of the intervention the students were promised a poetry café experience in which they each read a favorite poem to their parents and ate pizza and snacks.

It seems to me that one of the essential parts of this intervention was that students practiced at home. At the elementary level this component of the intervention is relatively easy. Parents of younger students often expect to have to help with homework. At the high school level, students are more likely to isolate their homework from their parents. Getting older students to practice with other adults or peers could be challenging.

This research strongly suggests that simple and quick interventions centered around fluency in the elementary classrooms is an effective method to remediate struggling reading interventions. Whether such an intervention could be effective with older students remains to be seen.

Using Empirically Validated Reading Strategies

Amy C. Scarborough's (2012) dissertation, Using Empirically Validated Reading Strategies to Improve Middle School Students' Reading Fluency of Classroom Textbooks, is a two-part writing that examines current research on reading fluency and follows it up with the presentation of her research with four students.

Her research centered on case studies. She was able to document that repeated reading, listening passage preview, corrective feedback, self-graphing and contingent reinforcement were all effective for improving fluency. Using this information she designed an intervention for four middle school students reading 1 to 2 years below grade level. Interventions were one-on-one models that included these components. Her model was effective in improving reading fluency of her subjects.

First, if one considers that approximately one third of eighth graders are non-proficient readers (based on their standardized assessment scores), this represents a sampling of students commonly found in a middle school classroom. It does not represent the readers who are significantly below grade level, often served by special education classes or English language learners. As such caution with applying this research to these populations is important. It does, however, represent an intervention model that might work with the "average" below-level reader.

Second, as much as we might understand that one-on-one instruction is the most student responsive and effective, it is not logistically viable for many schools, even if the intervention can be implemented by teaching assistants, paraprofessionals or volunteers. Also, pull out programs are receiving increasing pressure both from people who want students in the classrooms with their peers all the time (full inclusion) and from people who schedule students without any down time in which to provide remedial instruction.

Ms. Scarborough should be praised for working to implement an intervention using classroom materials. She did, however, use materials that were not congruent with current instruction of her students, but rather with material they would cover later in the school year. It might have been more relevant to the students if the remediation utilized content that students were currently being asked to learn.  Reinforcing content area work while implementing reading interventions would be killing two birds with one stone. For students reading significantly below grade level, alternative low reading level texts might be found to supplement and support general classroom instruction. This would be in line with the research that supports providing interventions on material at the individual's instructional reading level.

Oral Reading Fluency as an Indicator of Reading Competence

Lynn S. Fuchs, Douglas Fuchs, Michelle K. Hosp and Joseph R. Jenkins' article, Oral Reading Fluency as an Indicator of Reading Competence: A Theoretical, Empirical, and Historical Analysis, from Scientific Studies of Reading, 5(3), 2001, has been referenced in several of the articles I have recently read about fluency so I worked to dig up a copy of it. This article examines if oral reading fluency as defined by correct words per minute (CWPM) read predicts reading competence. The short answer is yes.

The authors discuss the theoretical foundation of this concept. Although researchers have different theories on how they arrived at the idea, they concur that being able to read fluently frees up mental processing capacity for comprehension skills. They refer to couple of 1975 studies by Posner and Snyder which claims two independent processes are at work during reading- one automatic and one optional- 1) memory location is accessed and related semantic memories are triggered and 2) context is allowed to trigger prediction about the upcoming word. Good readers rely on the automatic process whereas poor readers rely on a balance of the two. This could explain why our struggling readers use clues to the word such as initial consonant to "read" the word and make a mistake and then go on to fabricate the rest of the sentence in a meaningful manner. The poor readers do not have effective mechanisms for automatically accessing semantic information and consequently create mental predictions that lead to misreading and/or misunderstanding.

The authors note that text fluency and list fluency account for 70% of the variance on Iowa test scores. Since oral fluency so accurately reflects reading comprehension, it is odd that we do not focus more on it. I think part of the challenge is how complex and interrelated it with other aspects of reading fluency is. You will not be fluent if you do not have phonemic awareness and phonetic decoding skills. Furthermore reading fluently is extremely difficult if your vocabulary skills do not match the vocabulary of the passage. When this is added to the emphasis that without comprehension there is no reading, it may appear that if you attend to these other skills, fluency will automatically follow. This is not true. I have worked with language delayed students who can read beautifully; they have excellent decoding and good awareness of punctuation during reading- but they do not understand what they read. More often however, I have worked with students for whom reading is a word by word process. If they are read the material they get it, but if they need to process the printed word they are at a loss. We need to address the entire Parthenon of reading components in order to produce successful readers.

One interesting thing the authors note is that oral reading had far better correlations with reading comprehension than silent reading. The authors postulate that perhaps the self-recording of progress in silent reading is overstated. I wonder if reading aloud offers more comprehension clues. Listening to yourself read could help you understand. It might lessen the likelihood that skipped words or lines occur and it might increase the recognition of vocabulary. In some ways it is easier to self-monitor oral reading than silent reading. We suggest sub-vocalization for struggling readers and for proofreading. We do this because it supports comprehension on some level.

While the authors recommend that fluency be a part of every reading lesson, they do not endorse reading for prosody. This is because there is tremendous variation in prosody assessments to the point of their being mostly unreliable and invalid. In light of the indications that prosody reflects some comprehension I am curious regarding this restriction. I have heard very competent readers read dreadfully (my Shakespeare professor with a stutter who read in a monotone) and mediocre readers read with wonderful emphasis (my struggling reader who read a favorite Silverstein poem). I believe that prosody has a role in fluency, but perhaps we overemphasize this component when it comes to documenting student reading success.

Understanding oral reading fluency among adults with low literacy

In Daryl F. Mallard, Jason L. Anthony and Kari L. Woods' research paper, "Understanding oral reading fluency among adults with low literacy: Dominance analysis of contributing component skills," factors impacting fluency are analyzed. They looked at two definitions of fluency- one quantified by correct words per minute (cwpm) and the other comprehension based.

What they found was that the number one factor that influences fluency is word reading efficiency. If looking at only cwpm and processing speed was the second most influential factor followed by vocabulary. If comprehension is included in the analysis, then vocabulary is the second most influential factor followed by auditory working memory.  Phonemic awareness and phonetic decoding were both relatively of little importance. What was virtually noninfluential to reading skills was nonverbal IQ scores.

What does this research mean to us, the practitioners? One thing it means is that as our students age, we need to shift from teaching decoding and phonemic awareness to sight word recognition and vocabulary development. Since we need reading to include comprehension, we need to focus on skills that influence comprehension such as fluency and vocabulary.

It means that high quality vocabulary instruction is essential. This is not news. We know that vocabulary is the number one determinate of comprehension. The Common Core stresses the importance of academic vocabulary. I am constantly surprised at the words my students do and do not know. They do not know words I regularly use in my oral vocabulary. This means that when they listen to teachers, they are confused by instruction but will rarely ask questions about it for fear of looking dumb. One of the contributing factors could be related to auditory processing and working memory. The average kindergartener can understand 90 words per minute. (This is why kindergarten teachers talk in that slow rhythmic manner- so their students can follow what they say.) The average high school student can comprehend 150 oral words per minute. When we speed our talk up beyond that level they loose words and meaning. Students with limited processing speeds or auditory working memory need us to speak more slowly than their peers. Students who are struggling readers may not benefit from the vocabulary we use, if we speak too quickly. If we speak more slowly, we may increase comprehension and meaningful exposure to vocabulary. This can help them read in general and in their school achievement in specifics.

Providing Reading Instruction to Adolescents with Learning Disabilities

Providing Reading Instruction to Adolescents with Learning Disabilities, a paper submitted by Jennifer Wickstrom in 2012, provides a review of the literature regarding high school reading interventions. Interestingly concerns that she notes over the literature include the fact that most of it contains very small sample sizes (some as small as 3) and interventions completed over short periods of time (10 weeks). Generalizing from this limited research base could be determined to be problematic.

One of the suggestions for reading remediation is pull-out one-on-one  services, a challenge in most high schools both for staff resources and student time. Reexamining schedules might provide part of the solution- students could be encouraged to explore five year graduation plans in order to develop delinquent skill sets, extended day or year programs could enable extra instructional time, schedules that include time for sustained silent reading or DEAR time within the ELA component could be utilized. Overall, however, our time in the high school is limited and trade-offs must happen. We need to provide a program that will yield college and career ready capabilities as much as possible, which in today's Common Core focus means perhaps limiting or dropping elective requirements, mandating summer programing and/or delaying graduation. Our students with reading disabilities need the gift of time in order to increase their reading skills.

In today's atmosphere of providing push in special education services we need to acknowledge that this often offers very limited opportunities to address foundational problems that students may have. We are sometimes building a house of cards that will collapse upon itself when the academic demands exceed the underlying capabilities of the students. Students may require more pull-out services that focus on building skills rather than homework support.

The intervention that Wickstrom recommended most strongly was repeated reading- short readings, read over until a fluency goal is reached as defined by correct words per minute. This technique builds fluency, vocabulary and comprehension skills. Further, it is relatively simple to implement, requiring only five minutes or so to complete. The challenge is to find materials that the student can be successful with (often grade level materials are too complex) and one-on-one time in which to work with the student.

Wickstrom also provides a listing of resources. This is broken into component reading skills and includes apps. The nature of technology, however, means that the offerings have expanded exponentially since the publication of this work.