Timothy Rasinski, Ph.D.

 

In my previous blog posting for The Robb Review, I focused on what should be the real goal of phonics instruction – to get kids to the point where they don’t have to use phonics much in their reading.  We want students to be so proficient and efficient at word recognition that minimal attention is given to word decoding and maximum attention can be directed toward comprehension.   Staying with this theme of reading instruction goals, I’d like to focus on reading fluency and state right off the bat that the goal of fluency instruction should not be to make kids read fast.    It has been this incessant focus on increasing reading speed, I think, that has unfortunately given reading fluency a bad rep.

 

What is Reading Fluency?

Fluency has been called the neglected goal of the reading program (and it is) (Allington, 1983); it has also been called the bridge from word recognition to comprehension.     I like that bridge metaphor a lot. Fluency is the critical link to making meaning while reading. There are two components to fluency. The first is automaticity in word recognition – the ability to recognize words so effortlessly that most of a reader’s attention can be devoted to comprehension.   Automaticity is the part of the bridge that links to word recognition.

The other part of the fluency bridge is called prosody or reading with expression.  This is the link to comprehension. When a reader reads with appropriate expression that reflects the meaning of the text, she is striving to comprehend that text.    This is the part of fluency that is often neglected in instruction; yet it is critical for comprehension to occur, even when reading silently.

 

How Should We Teach Fluency?

As with anything we want to become fluent at (e.g., speaking, driving, golf, cooking), fluency is developed through practice.   In reading we have several forms of practice that can and should be employed. These forms of practice include wide reading, assisted reading where a reader reads while simultaneously hearing a fluent reading of the same text by a partner or recording, and repeated reading where a reader reads a text several times until she achieves fluency on that text (Rasinski, 2010).    In all these forms of practice the goal should be reading for meaning, and if reading orally, to read with appropriate expression that conveys meaning to anyone who may be listening.

 

How Does Reading Speed Fit into the Fluency Equation?

Reading speed (words read correctly per minute) is an indicator of word recognition automaticity and is often called the oral reading fluency (ORF) score.   The more automatic or effortless you are in recognizing words in text, the faster your reading becomes, AND the more attention you can devote to comprehending the text as opposed to analyzing the words in the text.    Reading speed is an indicator or consequence of the fluency component of automaticity, BUT it is not fluency. Our reading speed increases as our fluency improves, not the other way around. I often say that I want our children to become fast readers just the way I am and all of you reading this blog are reasonably fast readers;  but I want them to become fast the same way we all became fast readers – through lots and lots of authentic practice in reading.

So go ahead and use DIBELS and AimsWeb ORF scores, or Hasbrouck and Tindal’s norms (Words Correct per Minute) cautiously and sparingly as indicators of students’ growth in automaticity, but please please please do not let children think that you are trying to get them to read faster.   The increase in reading speed (as well as improvements in reading with expression) will happen with authentic reading practice, not with overt instruction or implied emphasis on reading fast.

  

Fluency is More than Automaticity

A few years ago I came across recordings of arguably two of the most fluently read speeches in American  history – Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” and John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address “Ask Not What Your Country…”     I subjected the oral readings of both of these speeches to an ORF (reading speed) assessment. In both cases, Dr. King and President Kennedy’s readings of their speeches may have landed them in a remedial reading class based on their very low ORF scores.     I am sure they were both automatic in their word recognition, and they could have read those speeches quickly. But doing so would have taken away from the meaning they were trying to convey. Because they were automatic in their recognition of the words in their speeches they were able to devote their attention to making and elaborating on the meaning they wished to share orally. They raised and lowered their voices, had dramatic pauses, changed volume and tone in order to more effectively to deliver their intended meanings to their audiences.   What truly made those speeches fluent was not the speed, but the expression (prosody) that they embedded in their readings.

For fluency instruction to truly work we need to see the goal of fluency as expressive oral (and silent) reading that reflects the meaning of the text.    When we make expressive and meaningful reading of texts the true goal of fluency (and avoid putting emphasis on fast reading) we will see significant improvements in reading comprehension (as well as reading speed).

 

You can find resources on teaching accurate and automatic word recognition and expressive prosodic reading (i.e. fluency) at Tim’s own website – www.timrasinski.com

 

Please see also my new book on reading fluency (written with Melissa Cheesman Smith) – The Megabook of Fluency published by Scholastic.

 

References

Allington, R.L. (1983).  Fluency: The neglected reading goal.  The Reading Teacher, 36, 556-561.

Hasbrouck, J., & Tindal, G. A. (2006) Oral reading fluency norms: A valuable assessment tool for reading teachers. The Reading Teacher, 59(7), 636-644.

Rasinski, T. V. (2010).  The fluent reader:  Oral and silent reading strategies for building word recognition, fluency, and comprehension (2nd edition).  New York: Scholastic.

 

Many years ago my principal asked me to attend a conference and then train the staff at our school. I tried to learn more about what training the staff meant. Was this a common practice? It seemed intimidating to me. The train the trainer model, taken from the business world, was becoming a popular term in education. It did not work for me.

 

Yes, I attended the conference, had a good time, and learned some. What was not good for me? The faculty meeting I had to lead a month later where I was to “train” the staff on what I learned.  A horrible experience. I was not confident in the new information I learned while attending the conference and less confident to train a faculty where most were more experienced than me. Does your school or Division sing the praise of “train the trainer” models?  I hope not. I have rarely seen them work. Many times staff can be great in front of 25 students but not comfortable at all in front of peers who they need to teach. I propose a new method, well not exactly new, I propose ongoing professional development. Professional development meeting the needs of the school, occurring at the school, and for all staff in the school.

 

There are two ways to start ongoing professional development in a school: hiring a paid consultant or a school-wide book/professional study.  I will address both in two posts. In this post, I will give tips for using a paid consultant.

 

Assuming your school has access to professional support, the first step is to figure out what your faculty needs.  This can be accomplished through conversation, data analysis, and observation. Pick one focus area all staff can benefit from in all disciplines. As an example, in my school, our year-long focus is differentiating instruction.

 

Tips for successful year-long professional development:

• Know what you want to focus on and work with staff to build a commitment.
• Secure an educator who can meet with your staff at least six times during the school year. Add the dates and times to your staff calendar, so staff knows when each session is over the course of the year. I like to focus on professional development days or use time in the place of regular faculty meetings.
• Along with several staff members, meet with the presenter to grid out what topics will be addressed during each session. Know what the outcome should be at the end of all sessions and communicate this to staff throughout the year.
• I am a stickler that a consultant will let staff know at the start of the session what they will learn. Also, there must be collaborative opportunities during the sessions, and a task staff will try in preparation for the next meeting.
• It is critical for the principal and other administrators to be part of all sessions.  In my school all teaching staff, guidance staff, and administrators attend.

When reading this, you might think, O.K. it’s great, but it could be expensive.  My counter, it is not if you cut back on sending staff to conferences and training.  It is not costly if you consider the gain of all staff in your school receiving training instead of a few, or replacing “train the trainer” models which I do not feel are very successful.  Bringing on-going professional development to your school it is the best way to generate excitement and energy for a full year.  It is a positive and significant shift away from the one and done sessions and the false expectations that this method can bring change to a school.  You want positive change to impact students and staff. Choose a school focus that is inclusive and work on it all year long through purposeful professional development.

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Timothy Rasinski, Ph.D.

Enjoy our most popular post from Tim Rasinski! Tim will share a new post with the Robb Review on August 25!

For many of you, the title of this blog entry may sound a bit nonsensical — Why teach something and then not use it?  But let me ask you to think a bit more deeply about phonics.  If you are reading this you are likely a proficient reader.  When reading how often do you have to stop and analyze or “sound out” individual words?  My guess is that more than 99.9% of the words you encounter in reading are not analyzed or “sounded.”   Most words we encounter as proficient readers are sight words – they are recognized instantly and near effortlessly.  Phonics is hardly used at all when proficient readers read.

We need phonics and other word analysis skills in order to get words into our heads.  But after a few encounters with analyzing specific words, those words become “imprinted” in our brains as sight words.  We need phonics to get words into our internal lexicons.  But once those words are automatized or made into sight words phonics is no longer needed.

Getting words to the point of automatization is critical to proficient reading.  The problem in reading is that all of us have a limited or finite amount of attention or cognitive energy.  Analyzing words, as is done in phonics, uses up a lot of that cognitive energy.  And that energy that is applied to word analysis cannot be applied to the more important part of reading – comprehension.  So what often happens are readers who can read all the words correctly, but because they are spending their precious cognitive resources on word analysis their comprehension falters.

Carol Chomsky noted this phenomenon in her 1976 classic article entitled “After decoding: What?”  Working with struggling readers, she taught them to decode words. However, despite the fact that they were able to decode words accurately, “albeit slowly and painfully (p. 288),” they continued to struggle with reading comprehension and general proficiency in reading.  The answer to her question of “What?” was helping students develop automaticity or fluency in their reading.  She did this by having students read interesting and challenging materials while simultaneously listening to an audio-recorded version of the text.  In a 15 week intervention period (less than four months), her students made approximately 8 months of progress in reading!

Phonics is important, no question about it.  It is a tool that readers use to get words into their internal lexicons.  However, proficiency in phonics should not be the goal. Rather the goal should be to get students to the point where most of the words they encounter are automatically recognized so that their attention can be devoted to making meaning.

The way to get young readers to the point of automatic word recognition is the same way a person develops automaticity in any activity – practice.  However, the practice needs to be the kind that allows children to move to proficient reading.  Two of the best ways of providing proficient practice is through assisted reading and repeated reading.

Assisted reading is what Carol Chomsky used with her students.  Students read texts while simultaneously listening to a fluent reading of the text.  This can occur by reading with a more proficient partner, reading with a group of others, or reading while listening to a recorded version of the text.  In all of these situations, the assist of another reader provides students with a scaffold that allows them to approach fluent reading on their own.

Repeated reading simply involves reading a text multiple times until a student can read it at a level that approaches proficiency.  When students who struggle in reading read a text, the initial reading is not proficient.  However, when they read it a second, third, and perhaps even a fourth time their proficiency improves until they are able to read it much like a proficient reader.  The “magic” behind both assisted and repeated reading is that the improvement that comes from reading one text with assistance and/or repeatedly transfers to new texts that students have not previously read.  In essence, students begin to pull their reading up by their bootstraps.

While I don’t want to get overly technical in this blog, I do want to mention that, in this age of scientifically based reading instruction, a good deal of research supports both assisted and repeated reading, especially with students who find reading difficult.  In a recent review of research related to fluency interventions Stevens, Walker, and Vaughn (2017) conclude that “Results showed repeated reading,… and assisted reading with audiobooks produced gains in reading fluency and comprehension” (p. 576). My own research on the Fluency Development Lesson (Rasinski, 2010), a lesson that integrates assisted and repeated reading consistently results in improved performance in word recognition automaticity and comprehension.

While it is critical that we provide students with solid instruction in phonics or word decoding, it is equally important that we keep in mind that we need to take students to that next level word reading—fluent, automatic, and proficient reading.

References

Chomsky, C. (1976). After decoding: What? Language Arts, 53, 288-296.

Rasinski, T. V. (2010).  The fluent reader:  Oral and silent reading strategies for building word recognition, fluency, and comprehension (2nd edition).  New York: Scholastic.

Stevens, E., Walker, M., & Vaughn, S.  (2017). The effects of fluency interventions on the reading fluency and reading comprehension performance of elementary students with learning disabilities:  A Synthesis of the research from 2001-2014. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 50, 576-590.

 

You can find resources for teaching accurate and automatic word recognition (i.e. fluency) at Tim’s own website – www.timrasinski.com

Daily Word Ladders by Timothy Rasinski

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In grades four and five many teachers have a large block of time for reading and can organize instruction into three or at the most four guided reading groups.  Once students enter middle school, many teachers have 45 to 60 minutes to teach reading, therefore, meeting frequently with guided reading groups becomes a challenge or it is impossible.

Whether your curriculum is based on guided reading, reading workshop, or a more traditional model, three teaching, and learning practices should be an integral part of instruction: Instructional Interactive Read Aloud, Instructional Reading, and Independent Reading.

INSTRUCTIONAL INTERACTIVE READ ALOUD

Reading can be taught.  The teacher can model in a think aloud how he/she applies a reading strategy and/or enlarges students’ mental model of how a strategy works.  For this aspect of instruction, I suggest that the teacher models with a short text that matches the genre and/or theme that ties a reading unit together.  Short texts can include a picture book, an excerpt from a longer text, a folk or fairy tale, myth or legend, a short, short story, or an article from a magazine or newsletter.

Once you’ve modeled how to apply a strategy such as making inferences, add the interactive component. The goal is to involve students as soon as possible for two reasons:

1. You can observe students’ thinking process. You can also identify students who don’t respond and confer with them to explore their reasons for not participating. Once you know why active involvement is minimal, you can help them gain the confidence to participate by helping them prepare to answer a question.
2. You’ll involve students in the lesson and make it interactive instead of passive. Involving students in the lesson can lead to engagement and an investment in the learning.

Here are some skills and strategies that you can model in interactive read-aloud lessons:

• Making inferences
• Identifying big ideas and themes
• Identifying central ideas and themes
• Locating important details
• Skimming to find details
• Author’s purposes
• Purposes of informational texts (nonfiction) and literature (fiction)
• Literary Elements and how each supports comprehension: setting, protagonist, antagonists, plot, conflicts, other characters, climax, denouement
• Informational text structures and how these support comprehension: description, compare/contrast, cause/effect, problem/solutions, sequence, question/answer
• Word choice as a guide to pinpointing mood or tone
• Vocabulary building with an emphasis on general academic vocabulary, figurative language, and comprehension, using roots, prefixes, suffixes, discussing concepts, diverse word meanings, and different forms of a word.

During class, the teacher can continually circulate among students to observe and offer quick, desk side conferences.

INSTRUCTIONAL READING

Instructional reading should happen during class. Students need to read materials at their instructional reading level—about 95% reading accuracy and about 85 % comprehension.  Organize instructional reading around a genre and theme—for example biography with a theme of obstacles—permits students to read different texts and discuss their reading around the genre and theme.

The reading workshop model is ideal for this type of reading instruction.  The class opens with an interactive read-aloud lesson that lasts about ten minutes and occurs daily. These lessons include vocabulary and word building.  You can find books for students in your school library, your community public library, and in your class library and school’s bookroom (if you have one).  Instructional reading books stay in the classroom, as students from different sections will be using the same materials each day.

Teachers have students chunk instructional texts by putting a sticky note at the end of every two to three chapters.  When students reach a sticky note, they stop to discuss their books with a partner and then a group of four.  During this stop-to-think time, students can write about their books, connect the theme to the book, and apply strategies and skills the teacher has modeled during interactive read-aloud lessons.

Partners should be no more than one year apart in reading levels so they have something to contribute to each other.  Students reading far below grade level learn with the teacher.

INDEPENDENT READING

Reading forty to sixty self-selected books can become the achievement game changer, especially for students who read below grade level.  Students can read graphic novels, comics, magazines, e-books, and print books.  By encouraging them to read accessible books on topics they love and want to know more about, you develop their motivation to read, read, read!

Have students keep a Book Log of the titles they’ve read and reread.  Do not ask students to do a project for each completed book, for that will turn them away from reading. A book talk a month and a written book review twice a year on independent reading is enough.  Trust and a personal reading life is what you’re building.

Students should complete thirty minutes of independent reading a night, and that should be their main homework assignment.  Try to set aside two days a week for students to complete independent reading at school.

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Check out Evan’s blog posts on ScholasticEDU!

Learn more about Laura’s ideas on reading- check out- Teaching Reading in Middle School