Children can improve their reading fluency with explicit, systematic instruction. Treatment should be individually designed to address specific underlying weaknesses, which may include: phonological awareness, phonological memory, word attack skills, vowel patterns, common word parts and patterns, syllabification strategies, and linguistic retrieval.
Increasing the automaticity of word recognition and retrieval for high-frequency words and phrases is also critical. Other components of an oral reading fluency program include learning to read with expression and intonation, reading in phrases, and visual scanning while reading. Parents can help by modeling fluent reading, and by engaging in tandem oral reading activities such as "echo" reading and choral reading. Repeated oral reading of a passage also builds overall reading fluency, by giving repeated practice in phrasing, scanning, prosody, and word recognition.
When should I seek help? Many children with reading problems are bright, and able to mask early reading weaknesses by using contextual meaning to guess at unknown words. Reading fluency problems may not become obvious until 2nd to 3rd grade. The rate at which students read is important because slow reading hinders comprehension.
Automaticity is the effortless and autonomous recognition and production of a word. Effortlessness is apparent when we see someone reading for long periods of time without fatigue and when they are reading in an easy and natural way.
Automatic word reading is important because it allows the reader to pay attention to the meaning of the text rather than decoding the words. Reading speed does not suddenly go from slow to fast. For children who are learning to read, their speed increases with repeated practice, as they build up their orthographic memory and their reading stamina.
Text reading speed is dependent on more than just singular word reading speed. This demonstrates the reciprocal relationship between fluency and comprehension when students are reading more complex text. Finally, show children how you can change the tone of a sentence simply by stressing different words and phrases e. I knew it was you. As teachers, we have to be the model for good prosodic reading. Read the text aloud showing how each written cue affects prosody.
Encourage children to draw explicit links between the way you read and how it aids comprehension. Am I using my voice to properly communicate how this character feels? The benefits of taking a little time every day to read aloud to children are well documented. But remember that teaching prosody is only part of a complete literacy education. Creating and using phrase-cued text has been shown to be helpful for all readers. Phrasing difficulties can disrupt meaning, but phrase boundaries can be difficult for students to detect.
Punctuation offers help, but readers still have to infer the appropriate places to phrase text within sentences. For readers who are already struggling, this may be just too complex and challenging. Instruction in this area, especially for students struggling with fluency, is very worthwhile. The article, Building Fluency Through The Phrased Text Lesson , as well as providing a scientific basis for this technique, also describes these lessons in great detail. These lessons help develop syntactic awareness in students, as they learn the correct ordering of words and phrases in sentences.
While researching this blog, I came across a Phrase-Cue Text Generator to help teachers, tutors, and parents to train their student or child to recognize the natural pauses that occur between phrases in their reading.
The phrased text lesson is one approach to helping students gain proficiency in this often neglected area of fluency. I will close with an apt quotation from Lynn Givens:.
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