A child can benefit from teacher modeling once he or she knows at least 50 sight words and has a good sense of beginning sounds. The reading rate of the model reader is important. Christopher Skinner, a reading researcher, found that students who read lists of words with him slowly were more fluent with the words than students who read with him at a faster rate.
The slower rate enables students to learn new words and clarify difficult words. As students learn more words, they naturally become more fluent. Another form of modeling is the neurological impress method. In the neurological impress method, a proficient and a struggling reader read together from a passage, with the more able reader reading near the rate of the struggling reader.
Heckelman showed that after 29 minute sessions, 24 seventh- through ninth-grade boys, who were an average of 3 years behind in reading, gained an average of 1.
Another technique that research has shown significantly builds reading fluency is repeated reading. In fact, the National Reading Panel says this is the most powerful way to improve reading fluency. This involves simply reading the same material over and over again until accurate and expressive. In the s, LaBerge and Samuels studied what happens when students read passages over and over again. They found that when students reread passages, they got faster at reading the passages, understood them better, and were able to read subsequent passages better as a result of the repeated reading.
Repeated reading is a form of mastery learning. The students read the same words so many times that they begin to know them and are able to identify them in other text. Besides helping students bring words to mastery, repeated reading changes the way students view themselves in relation to the act of reading. People who play video games are presented with a specific goal and with immediate, relevant feedback about their progress toward that goal.
This combination of having a goal and getting feedback on progress can be very motivating. Progress monitoring takes advantage of this combination to motivate students to read. You give students a specific, individual reading goal, and you tell them exactly how you're going to know they've met it. Then, you give them the means to measure how they're doing. Finally, you make it simple enough that they'll know they've met their goal even before you do.
This progress monitoring is what motivates students to practice reading the same story over and over until achieving mastery. The research-based Read Naturally Strategy combines these three strategies into highly effective programs that accelerate reading achievement.
Students become confident readers by developing fluency, phonics skills, comprehension, and vocabulary while reading leveled text. The time-tested intervention programs engage students with interesting nonfiction stories and yield powerful results. Choosing the right Read Naturally Strategy program. Armstrong, S. The effects of material difficulty upon learning disabled children's oral reading and reading comprehension.
Learning Disability Quarterly , 6, pp. Breznitz, Z. Increasing first graders' reading accuracy and comprehension by accelerating their reading rates. Journal of Educational Psychology , 79 3 , pp.
Fuchs, L. Oral reading fluency as an indicator of reading competence: A theoretical, empirical, and historical analysis. Scientific Studies of Reading , 5 3 , pp. Heckelman, R. A neurological-impress method of remedial-reading instruction.
In contrast, the interactive model of reading proposes that higher-level processes are initiated simultaneously, rather than awaiting the completion of lower ones.
This view offers the possibility that the relationship between reading fluency and comprehension may be reciprocal. Thus, a reader with poor word recognition ability may be able to use higher-level comprehension skills to compensate for weakness in foundational skills, and their reading fluency would be a reflection of comprehension ability rather than an indication of competence in basic reading skills.
How does processing speed impact fluency? Global processing speed, the ability to quickly process information, impacts how efficiently all the subskills involved in reading can be coordinated.
The relationship between rapid automatic naming RAN — that is, rapid naming of letters or numbers — and global processing speed is not entirely clear.
Some consider RAN to be one facet of global naming speed, while others believe that RAN makes a separate contribution to reading fluency. Regardless, it is well-established that slow naming speed is linked to difficulty in developing reading fluency. Teacher tip: Fluency Ramp The growth of reading fluency is a lofty goal —one that requires many different kinds of instruction.
Teacher tip: Practice! Try these suggestions for developing fluency for any type of skill: Practice for short periods of time. Teacher tip: Scoop it Practice scooping words in grammatical phrases in connected text to support prosody.
Teacher tip: Expression Aids meaning Prosody is a relatively strong indicator of how well a student comprehends the text being read. Teacher tip: Graph it, chart it Practice daily and keep a graphic record of progress, which is very motivating for students! Teacher tip: Take a Phrase Walk Take a word or phrase walk in lieu of a picture walk if a teaching objective includes reading text fluently i.
Teacher tip: When and how to intervene When reading fluency shows little improvement, check the fluency of the various subskills that contribute to overall fluency.
Tips for Principals: accuracy,rate,prosody Make sure that teachers understand the three aspects of reading fluency and how best to measure them. Tips for Principals: Observation Notice some of the following as evidence that the teacher is stimulating fluency behaviors: Incorporates fluency-building activities e. Utilizes techniques that build reading fluency throughout the day, including modeled fluent reading, choral reading, repeated readings, paired reading, independent reading.
Read More to Learn more Adams, M. Bashir, A. Fluency: A key link between word identification and comprehension. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 40 2 , Hasbrouck, J. Drop everything and read—But how? American Educator 30 2 , Summer Hudson, R. The complex nature of reading fluency: A multidimensional view. May Some children have these abilities, since they understand oral texts; however, they have difficulties with written texts, probably due to problems in reading fluency.
The aim of this study was to determine which aspects of reading fluency are related to reading comprehension. Four expositive texts, two written and two read by the evaluator, were presented to a sample of primary school children third and sixth grade. Each text was followed by four comprehension questions.
From this sample we selected two groups of participants in each grade, 10 with good results in comprehension of oral and written texts, and 10 with good results in oral and poor in written comprehension. These 40 subjects were asked to read aloud a new text while they were recorded. Using Praat software some prosodic parameters were measured, such as pausing and reading rate number and duration of the pauses and utterances , pitch and intensity changes and duration in declarative, exclamatory, and interrogative sentences and also errors and duration in words by frequency and stress.
The results showed that children with less reading comprehension made more inappropriate pauses and also intersentential pauses before comma than the other group and made more mistakes in content words; significant differences were also found in the final declination of pitch in declarative sentences and in the F0 range in interrogative ones.
These results confirm that reading comprehension problems in children are related to a lack in the development of a good reading fluency.
The difficulty understanding written texts is a major cause of school failure because it requires some cognitive abilities, such as previous knowledge activation, inference performance, mental models building, etc.
But some children, despite having these skills, fail in understanding texts. Following the Simple View of Reading Hoover and Gough, , linguistic comprehension and word recognition are needed to achieve reading comprehension. Besides, fluency could facilitate reading comprehension because it frees resources for understanding Adlof et al. Therefore, there could be several causes of this poor comprehension; one of them could be that they have not developed a good reading fluency nor have poor decoding skills.
Fluent reading involves accuracy, speed and good expression National Institute of Child Health, and Human Development, These three characteristics depend on several cognitive processes and are usually achieved in that order, although overlapping.
There are some evidences about the relationship between text reading fluency and reading comprehension, Kim and Wagner showed that the role of text reading fluency walks together the reading comprehension improvement.
Text reading accuracy is one of the more decisive factors in reading comprehension. Thus, if a child makes many mistakes he cannot understand what he is reading. Moreover, there are some words that are more difficult to read, such as long words Muncer et al. These kinds of words are often read with less accuracy, and that could affect comprehension. Speed is also an important part of the reading process. Perfetti in his Verbal Efficiency Theory states that readers who lack efficient word identification procedures are at risk for comprehension failure.
If readers are quick and accurate in identifying words, they will have more attentional resources to devote to understanding what they are reading. Therefore, slowness is also an additional problem, as it consumes working memory and, thus, prevents the reader from thinking about the text while reading. Consequently, slow reading especially affects long sentences, because when the reader finishes with the last words of the sentence, he has already forgotten the first ones.
Another important process of reading fluency is expressiveness, or prosody. Some authors defined fluency as the ability to project natural pitch, stress and juncture of spoken words or written text automatically and at a natural rate Richards, , considering equal prosody and fluency.
Besides, other authors consider that fluency is related, not only with appropriate prosody, but with a deep reading understanding Rasinski, ; Ravid and Mashraki, ; Hudson et al. However, the direction of the relationship between prosody and comprehension is not clear. Schwanenflugel et al. Good readers usually made fewer and shorter pauses within and between sentences, while less skilled children paused often Schwanenflugel et al.
Similar results have also been found in studies with adults Binder et al. Thus, these readers made a higher number of inappropriate pauses while reading and for longer durations.
Moreover, Clay and Imlach , from their study with 7-years-old children, suggested that good readers made not only fewer and shorter pauses, but also had a specific contour pitch in declarative sentences when reading.
Similar results were found by Miller and Schwanenflugel , , as they reported that adequate pitches and better abilities to decode are related. In addition, children who used larger pitch changes and larger end-sentence declinations in reading performed better on reading comprehension than children who used these prosodic features to a lesser extent Benjamin and Schwanenflugel, However, it is possible that early accuracy leads to neglectful reading, and consequently children take a long time to acquire reading fluency.
Besides, the prosody is less worked in schools, maybe because of the difficulty of quantifying. This scale measures speed, accuracy and pauses when children read a text for 1 min.
It is usually used as a measure of the progress of students, who may be at risk for difficulties in future reading comprehension in the educational field. Another scale, the Multidimensional Fluency Scale Rasinski et al. Finally, another scale Klauda and Guthrie, assesses several prosodic dimensions, such as expressiveness, phrasing, pace or smoothness. Children from different grades were assessed using this scale Calet et al. These scales are very useful in the educational field, but they have some subjectivity.
Today, thanks to programs like Praat Boersma and Weenink, , it is possible to measure the components of prosody by analyzing the acoustic wave. This is an objective measure of the prosodic features. This software is a tool for phonetic analysis of speech to analyze prosodic aspects such as frequency, intensity or duration. The aim of this study was to determine which aspects of reading fluency are related to understanding, that is we are interested in the mechanic aspects of reading that could be related to reading comprehension.
In this way, several prosodic features, such as pitch, intensity, pauses, duration of syllables and utterances, were collected using Praat software. Besides, words with different lexical frequency and stress were included. A group of children from third and sixth grade with low written comprehension was compared with a group of children with good written comprehension to deal with the objective. A total of primary school children 58 females participated in this study.
They all had Spanish as their first language and the school served a broadly typical catchment area with the majority children coming from mid-income backgrounds. None of them had developmental, behavioral, or cognitive problems and they also attend school regularly. The texts were presented in the same order for all the children.
Each text was followed by four questions two inferential and two literals in order to measure their oral and written comprehension see Table 1 for the main means. We selected the children with better results in oral comprehension, with scores between 6 and 8 points out of eight in the oral comprehension texts, in order to ensure that they had the necessary cognitive abilities needed for comprehension.
These children were divided into two groups according to their level of reading comprehension, high reading comprehension group when written comprehension results were similar to the above, and low reading comprehension group when they were about three or four points out of eight.
In this way two groups of 10 participants in each grade were selected see Table 2. These two final groups were considered the experimental groups, which participated in the second part of the study as described below.
Selected children were also assessed with the reading of words and pseudowords subtests of the PROLEC-R test in order to ensure that everyone had an adequate reading level by age and scholar grade.
The reading of words subtest consists of a list of 40 real words, with two or three syllables. In the reading pseudowords subtest children have to read a list of 40 pseudowords, paired by number of syllables, syllabic structure and initial letters with the words list. Children have to read the words and pseudowords aloud; the measurements taken are the number of errors and the time they spent reading each list.
Then, written informed consent was received from the parents of participants. The text was created including declarative i. The text was presented on a piece of paper Times New Roman, 12 point font, double spaced and the participants had to read it aloud individually in a quiet room. The reading was recorded by an H4n voice recorder and an Ht2-P Audix headset dynamic microphone. From the. First, we analyzed some characteristics of the whole text, and then we extracted six sentences, two declarative, two exclamatory and two interrogative sentences, in order to evaluate different parameters.
Finally, we selected eight low frequency words, half of them repeated twice in the text, and eight words with different stresses on the penultimate and on the antepenultimate syllable and frequency high and low.
From the whole text we considered the number of reading mistakes in the content and function words, and the number and duration of intersentential pauses before commas and full stops and inappropriate pauses pauses made in not corresponding places. Also the total pause duration and the total pronunciation time reading time between pauses were collected.
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