GLAD® and the Science of Reading II: Reading Fluency

I love an infographic!

Maybe because they remind me of a Project GLAD® Graphic Organizer. If you ever search images for  “models of reading instruction”, you’ll come up with a plethora of graphics that researchers and authors have created to illustrate the various components. From the reading rope to the simple view, they all pretty much describe the same components, and it is important to note that all the elements share equal weight.

We will refer back to these models of literacy instruction as we go through this series on Project GLAD®’s literacy strategies. It seems like the best place to start is with decoding, but I’d rather switch our focus to certain GLAD® strategies as evidence-based practices. We’ll save word study and decoding for a future issue. In this issue, we’ll cover the equally important skill of reading fluency and how it relates to several GLAD® strategies that we can use to teach and practice it.

What is reading fluency?

Reading fluency is being able to automatically recognize words as you move through a text at a sufficient speed and with expression to comprehend the message and meaning of the text.

Tim Rasinski, Professor of Literacy at Kent State University, writes that reading fluency directly relates to comprehension. “The goal of phonics instruction is for the students to not need it. Decoding will only get you so far. Students should then move to automatic reading with sight words.” Reading fluency, with automaticity and prosody, is the bridge between word recognition and comprehension.

 There are 4 elements to achieving reading fluency.

Accuracy

The ability to decode words with a high level of accuracy is the first step. In order to increase your reading rate and comprehend the text, students must know how to read the words. Every time a student needs to slow down their reading to sound out a word or think about what it means, they are diverting mental energy away from comprehending the text. An independent level text is one that a student can read with 95%-98% accuracy. But it’s not enough to be accurate with your words. You have to also be automatic.

Automaticity

Automaticity is the ability to recognize words so effortlessly that when a student is reading, they are not devoting energy to decoding the word. Their mental effort can be devoted to comprehension.

The more often a student encounters a word, the easier it will be for them to recognize it. There are two brain processes that are happening. The first is orthographic mapping or internalizing the structure of words. Orthographic mapping is how we recognize the difference between pat, plate, and planet. It is the process by which the brain can instantly recognize words because we’ve already done the mental heavy lifting of sounding them out. They are now stored in the brain as known words –  sight words.

Repetition is the other brain scaffold that enables sight words to become more automatic. In addition to retrieving the word from memory, students’ comprehension of the word meaning improves after multiple repetitions. Intentional word exposure helps students peel back the layers of meaning and nuance of each new word as they hear it, read it, and use it in multiple contexts.

Rate

When students can read words accurately and have a large bank of sight words they can read automatically, the faster their reading rate will become. The way to increase reading rate is more reading. Lots of practice! Reading speed is a direct result of automaticity.

The problem is when assessing reading rate is used as instruction. There are common assessments teachers use to assess how many words students read correctly in 1 minute. It’s important that students (and teachers) understand that reading speed is an indicator of word recognition and automaticity. Otherwise, students get the message that reading faster than the day before means an improvement in reading. This is incorrect.

“Am I supposed to read this as fast as I can,” asks the student? We want to get students to read at a higher wpm, but we won’t get them there from a stopwatch. When teachers time reading rate on a regular basis, they are focusing on speed but not word recognition. Speed will not make you an automatic reader. Speed is the consequence of automaticity. Automaticity is not the consequence of speed.

Prosody

Prosody is how you express yourself when you read a text. Prosody is the sounds and rhythms of language. The way you pause or chunk phrases, the pitch and volume, and which words or syllables are stressed. Prosody is the expressive purpose of language. To read with expression, you have to have a good understanding of what you are reading.

Prosody is different that reading rate, but both are important for comprehension. Tim Rasinski illustrates prosody with a short anecdote about using DIBELS to score famous speeches. Here is the link (less than a minute watch).

https://shorturl.at/bgUpN

Are there GLAD® strategies that practice reading fluency?

Two of the ways teachers can incorporate reading fluency practice into their instruction is repeated reading and a focus on phrasing. Remember, the way to increase automaticity, rate, and prosody is lots of practice but reading the same passage over and over again is boring for students. If reading becomes boring busy work, then you’ve lost the power of the activity. Repeated reading for a purpose is the key.

Chants & Poetry - The Project GLAD® classroom uses the chants and poems we have posted on our walls as repeated reading practice. In fact, there aren’t any charts on our walls that are “one and done”. We use the vocabulary-packed charts for content retention and reading practice on a daily basis. Singing and performing our chants and poems together is a great opportunity for repeated reading.

Narrative Input Chart - Using the narrative input chart for reader’s theatre is another repeated reading opportunity. However, our favorite strategy for repeated reading and to focus on phrasing is the Emergent Readers Group with the Cooperative Strip Paragraph. Whew! Say that 10x fast. Let’s just call this the Co-op Reading Group.

Co-op Reading Group - This strategy starts with a class created Cooperative Strip Paragraph. Once this student-generated writing has gone through the revision and editing process with the class, you are ready to pull a small group of struggling readers for automaticity and fluency practice.  

The teacher has prepped ahead a duplicate set of sentence strips that retain the color coding of the original paragraph. Sentences are passed out to the students, who rebuild it on the floor below the original. Once it has been rebuilt, read it together.

Then the teacher cuts the sentences into phrases, passes them out to the students, who rebuild the paragraph again. Read it together.

When the teacher cuts these phrases, care should be taken to create meaningful phrasing. Start chunks with prepositions, for example. In addition, when the teacher tracks the re-read make sure it is by phrases and sentences. People who aren’t fluent readers read word by word. There is a danger for teachers to fossilize students at a beginning level of reading if we track word by word. We want kids to read by meaningful phrases, so teach students to chunk reading.

Finally, the teacher cuts the phrases again and students rebuild at the word level. This is ok! We’re not reading or tracking at the word-by-word level. If tracking is still necessary, the teacher should take care to track by meaningful phrases and sentences.

 The purpose of going down to the word level, is for the students who may still need practice with accuracy and orthographic mapping. They will have the opportunity to focus on the individual words in the passage. But because we’ve worked with this text from whole to part, rather than the other way around, the student can hear and read what it is supposed to sound like. Prosody was modeled and practiced, and they knew the content. This knowledge-based reading leads to comprehension - but that is a whole other topic!

Until next time, where we’ll pick up right where we left off…

For your own opportunity to learn more about the Co-op Strip Reading group, as well as learning how to write a Cooperative Strip Paragraph with your class, please join us for our upcoming Acceleration classes.

Thanks for reading,

Jody and Sara