Repeated reading of Poetry Can Enhance Reading Fluency and Phonics

Sherri Faver's article, Repeated Reading of Poetry Can Enhance Reading Fluency, from The Reading Teacher 62(4) and Timothy Rasinski, William H. Rupley, and William Dee Nichols' article, Two Essential Ingredients: Phonics and Fluency Getting to Know Each Other, from The Reading Teacher 62(3), share a common thread of using poetry to support reading instruction. They both advocate poetry to be read and reread to develop fluency. Rasinski et al. also showcase how to use poetry to reinforce phonics- pulling poems that utilize a rime being taught. Rereading the poem offers opportunity to see the phonics skill in action.

For example they suggest using
     Rain, rain go away,
     Come again another day
     Little Johnny wants to play
when teaching the -ay rime/word family (away, day, play). Similarly you could use "Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would not take the garbage out!" by Shel Silverstein when  discussing the -out rime (Stout, out, shout) or the -ate rime (late, state, hate, gate, fate, relate). You could also use it to springboard a discussion of different sounds ou can make.  Not only can you practice and recite the poems, which is fun, you can use them as jumping points for rime discussion. You can pull words for word sorts- v-c-e words, words with short a sounds, words with suffixes, words with two vowels next to each other, words with consonant blends, and so forth. Nestled in amongst the rereading you can insert phonics review and instruction as is appropriate for the students you are working with. Word study and word play elevate simple repetition and provide purpose for rereading when performance is not available.

Not only does poetry provide an excellent opportunity to quickly practice reading in an enjoyable manner, it also provides practice using word families which facilitates fluency as well. It is a win-win situation. While both articles focus on early readers, this approach could also be used with older struggling readers so long as the poems are found to be interesting to them. This might, in fact, be better tolerated by older readers since it avoids some of the "babyish" and "senseless" criticisms leveled at reading materials often used with remedial readers.

What's the Perfect Text for Struggling Readers?

Timothy Rasinski and Belinda Zimmerman's short article , What's the Perfect Text for Struggling Readers? Try Poetry! from Reading Today April/May of 2013, describes a critical piece of Kent State's summer reading clinic's approach to remedial reading- poetry lessons. This approach is fleshed out in Raskinski, William H. Rupley and William Dee Nichols's 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 book.

They propose teaching students one poem a day. The teacher reads it to the class and discusses its meaning. Then a variety of rereads occur with the group- choral reading, reading at different paces or with different voices to make it more interesting. Then pairs of students read the poem to each other three times. Then students are encouraged to read the poem to as many people as possible. This performance component provides a rationale for repeated readings which improves automaticity and prosody of reading. Having the initial discussion about the meaning of the poem places emphasis on comprehension rather than merely on speed of reading.

The article includes a list of favorite poets for children which includes some perennial favorites like Prelutsky and Silverstein and some less well known ones like Lee Bennett Hopkins and Arnold Adoff. When working with trying to teach decoding or simple comprehension strategies, it is important to consider student reading level. Working with short poems with extensive scaffolding means that student interest is more important than  reading level. Students tend to enjoy reading poetry and they tend to be less intimidated with short poems than longer works of prose, making it ideal for reading with struggling readers.

This approach has proven highly effective for improving word recognition and fluency among students who are struggling readers. Adopting this as part of a remedial program could be very helpful in improving reading skills and motivation with our struggling readers.

Teaching Children to Become Fluent and Automatic Readers

Melanie R. Kuhn, Paula J. Schwanenflugel, Robin D. Morris, Lesley Mandel Morrow, Deborah Gee Woo, Elizabeth B. Meisinger, Rose A. Sevcik, Barbara A. Bradley and Steven A. Stahl's manuscript, Teaching Children to Become Fluent and Automatic Readers, published in the Journal of Literary Research 2006, 38(1), describes a study in which the authors attempted to tease out if wide reading or repeated reading is a better reading instructional model than other traditional methods. They chose second grade classrooms in New Jersey and Georgia in which to perform their year long research.

Overall both wide reading and repeated reading models proved superior for developing word automaticity and comprehension over more traditional approaches. The authors point out that gains for wide reading occur earlier than those for a FORI (a specific text repetition method- Fluency Oriented Reading Instruction) but that over the course of the year the gains level out to be equitable for both. One of the things they pointed out was that since most texts appropriate for second grade readers have a significant proportion of sight words and word repetition, narrowing in on material appropriate for that grade level resulted in significant exposure to very similar word lists.

In their study they included all students in the classes. For the lowest performing six students in each classroom, reading interventions focused on foundational sight word and decoding skills were provided for 45 minutes per day in addition to full participation in the class reading lessons. This additional scaffolding enabled these struggling learners to interact in the whole class lessons and activities and provided remediation as needed. Further, both the wide reading and FORI methods presented the teacher reading the material the first time through to provide support for reading the grade level texts. The authors identified the appropriate level of difficulty to be on materials that the students could read 85% of the words correctly. When students struggled with material, additional practice time was provided by sending the reading home for practice.

The major difference between the control and the experimental groups was the amount of time spent reading contextual material. Students in the experimental groups spent over two hours a day reading. It is instinctively obvious that that more time spent reading the greater the reading progress.

I would caution the reader of the manuscript- it is not in final published form. There are a significant number of typos including comma/period exchanges and missing spaces. They also quote the amount of time reading per day in the experimental group as 2040 minutes which equals 34 hours, clearly there is a confusion here. This increases the challenge of reading; digging out the final published form may be worth the effort.

Fluency: A Review of Developmental and Remedial Practices

Melanie R. Kuhn and Steven A. Stahl's article, Fluency: A Review of Developmental and Remedial Practices, from The Journal of Educational Psychology , 2003, 95(1), is an often quoted reference in the fluency literature. After describing Chall and Ehri's proposals on stages of reading development, they look at  research in the field. They broke the research into three main groups: repeated reading, assisted reading and classroom interventions. The lack of control groups prevented the use of meta-analysis of the research so the authors used a more simple counting strategy.

Ultimately, the authors concluded that a focus on fluency improved reading as assessed by comprehension. They found that the majority of the interventions for remedial students did not improve reading at a rate faster than their reading proficient peers. This was a concern since we would like to identify methods of intervention that improve reading rates faster than for average peers. The  challenge is that one definition of a learning disability is that it takes longer to learn the material than typical peers. Consequently, without additional time in reading, it may be impossible to bring disabled students to grade -level performances.

The chart of studies included in the survey is a valuable tool. Interestingly, it reveals the  dearth of research regarding older students. Only three of the studies included involved students at the secondary or college level and only one of them involved students with reading disabilities. This means that the conclusions of the review may not be applicable to older students.

Hollingsworth conducted two studies that had intriguing results. One showed no improvement in comprehension when fourth grade at level peers were given fluency instruction. The other study examined remedial fourth and sixth grade students. They showed above average growth in reading comprehension using assisted reading.

According to the results of the review, fluency instruction proved most valuable to students reading between a late preprimer level and a late second grade level. The authors said "It is not the repetition that leads to the effect [improved reading skills] but the amount of time spent reading connected text." (p. 17) This falls into line with the idea that time equals progress more than a specific strategy. They also concluded that the level of reading that was most successful with progress was the individual student's instructional reading level.

Research that has been conducted in the decade since this review seems to indicate that intensive remedial programs with fluency components can be effective at improving reading skills in secondary students as well as with elementary students. Meta-analysis of current research would be interesting to evaluate.

The Six-Minute Solution

Gail N. Adams and Sheron M. Brown put together a reading fluency program for grades K-2 and remedial grade 3. They published their work as The Six-Minute Solution: A Reading Fluency Program (Primary Level). The intermediate level is found here and the secondary level is found here. Passages of which are found here. The main part of each book is, if not exactly the same, similar enough to not require duplication. The appendices at the end of each book, however, are useful for their leveled passages. Each level of the system has a different appendix.

The gist of the program is that in six minutes a day for a whole class, a teacher can implement a reading fluency program. After two days of teaching students how to time and record progress, student pairs are set to work together. Pairs are determined to be at the same reading level with fluency rates within ten words per minute of each other. When matches are not available, parent volunteers, paraprofessionals or the teacher can fill in as a partner. The authors suggest using cross age peers as possible partners as well. The authors provide instructional scripts but do not require that the scripts be used during instruction.

This program appears to be a suitable for implementing in a whole class setting. The authors offer suggestions for monitoring if additional support is required. Students who do not make fluency gains for two consecutive weeks are identified as needing additional support. This could mean changing the reading level of the passages attempted, providing sight word instruction and practice, or providing decoding/phonics instruction. It may also indicate that the individual has a learning problem that requires additional support through extra time. This guideline could be especially valuable in assigning students to response to intervention services. A tier two intervention could be for anyone who fails to make adequate progress in the whole class model for two consecutive weeks. Intervening after such a short period could truly enable problems to be solved before they mushroom into more complex ones.

Since fluency challenges are seen in students who are identified as successful readers (they decode and comprehend within grade level norms), finding a short and effective intervention is important. The idea that a mere six minutes of time could be spent to significantly increase reading speed, accuracy and expression is hopeful. Even teachers feeling pressed for time could dedicate 6 minutes to a daily program that they quickly (within two weeks) saw as making their class read better.

Hotsheet: Effective practices for reading fluency

Melanie R. Kuhn's Hotsheet 3: Effective Practices for Reading Fluency does a wonderful job of quickly outlining the essence of fluency instruction. It points out ineffective (round robin and such type practices) and effective examples (challenging materials, echo reading, choral reading, partner reading, and reading-while-listening) of fluency instruction. It has a rubric for evaluating reading fluency of students. It also highlights components of effective instruction: modeling, practice, challenging material, wide reading, and repeated reading.

What I found especially important to recall is the definition Dr. Kuhn uses for challenging reading. The Common Core standards use the term challenging reading, but it is not defined. Most people interpret it as material at or above grade level. Kuhn's definition is material that is read at 85-90% accuracy on the first read. For approximately one-third of all students, this is material below grade level, sometimes far below grade level. In order to develop fluency, students need to practice on material that is at their instructional reading level. While exposure to readings at and above grade level can develop vocabulary, background knowledge and listening comprehension, developing fluency which will in turn develop reading comprehension requires readable material.

Developing Comprehension Skills

Dr. Scott Paris's monograph, Developing Comprehension Skills, identifies five foundations to reading comprehension:

• conceptual knowledge- In other words background knowledge. Common Core advocates can argue for not explicitly accessing and developing conceptual knowledge, but it is essential for comprehension. If we want kids to understand what we teach and what they read we need to build foundations and frameworks upon which to hang later learnings. This is why we spiral curriculum.
• language skills- Our speech and language pathologists will tell you that without adequate expressive and receptive language skills, reading skills will be difficult to build. Students with language delays go on to struggle in reading. English language learners require special support to be able to read English. Vocabulary is the single most important determinate of comprehension after decoding is achieved.
• text features- Common Core emphasis on nonfiction showcases this aspect of reading tangentially. Readers need to know about the meaning and importance of titles, subtitles, bold print, pictures, captions and such. Readers also need to understand critical aspects of different genres. Stories have a plot structure with mysteries usually having lots of twists and false leads and romances being more simple love stories. Haiku is not only 3 line poetry, it is about nature with its own set of symbolism. News articles typically answer either explicitly or inferentially the five wh- questions.
• strategies- Special educators tend to love these. We see graphic organizers and question and answer skills. Typical texts have question sets. Elementary classroom teachers enjoy the prediction and answer techniques such as reciprocal reading. Beers and Probst's notice and note strategy is good at teaching students to independently look for signposts that highlight deeper meanings. (See my blogs here, here and here.) While some students will move to independently apply these strategies, others need instruction on generalizing them beyond specifically directed tasks.
• fluent decoding- This really refers to reading fluency more than decoding. Automaticity of decoding enables more mental resources to be corralled for comprehension use. It makes reading less fatiguing and more enjoyable.

Clearly, comprehension is the critical result of reading. Without it, we cannot say that reading has taken place. When we read something and have no idea what we read. We go back and reread because we did not really read it meaningfully. Unfortunately many students spend so much time reading in this fugue that they do not even realize that text is supposed to make sense. Consequently they do not bother with reading. It is essential that we build underlying foundations so that students do understand what they read.