Reading Fluency Revisited Helping Students Become Accurate Expressive Readers: Fluency Instruction For Small Groups Why were there no differences in fluency outcomes for students in the repeated reading and wide reading instructional groups?

Reading Fluency Revisited Subjects: Grade 2 students reading at a first grade level as measured on the Qualitative Reading Inventory (QRI) Procedures: Three reading groups: (1) fluency reading group; (2) wide reading reading group; (3)listening group Three sessions per week for six weeks for each group: (1) read the same text three times each week; (2) read three different texts each week; (3) listened to the texts read by group (2) Groups (1) and (2) engaged in echo, choral and partner reading Results: Pre-post assessment using the QRI. Groups (1) and (2) exhibited greater growth in CWPM, fluency rating scale, than group (3). Only (2) showed improved comprehension

Reading Comprehension “Best Practices in Narrative Text Comprehension Instruction” “Encouraging Young Children’s Language Interactions with Stories”

The Role of Word Recognition in Comprehension Instruction Skilled reading consists of decoding and linguistic comprehension (“Simple View” and theory of automaticity) o Efficient decoding is necessary but not sufficient o Instruction in word recognition must be accompanied by instruction focusing on comprehension There are students who struggle with comprehension who have adequate word recognition skills “Fourth grade slump” or when learning to read shifts to reading to learn (Chall, 1983) Shift in skills most related to reading comprehension as children move up in the grades

Subgroups of Poor Readers (as determined by a measure of reading comprehension) GradeDecodingLanguage Comprehension MixedOther 232.8%16.3%36.3%15.0% 422.3% 31.0%32.9%13.8% 813.3%30.1%33.0%23.6%

Dialogic Reading Conversational interactions around storybooks The child becomes the storyteller Adult asks open ended questions Research suggests that dialogic reading o Enhances expressive language development o Supports emergent literacy skills Text Talk is based on this body of research o Text talk is a read aloud approach that aims to engage children in conversation about a story o Through open-ended questioning Text Talk scaffolds children’s comprehension of the story

Text Talk Examples of open-ended questions: o What’s happening now? o What do we know so far about the family? o How have things changed? o How does what Harry did fit in with what we already know about him? o What’s Harry up to now? o They called Harry “this little doggie.” What does that tell us? Examine the questions that accompany one of the storybooks in Text Talk

Text Talk What do the authors suggest as follow-up when children’s responses are limited or incomplete? o Adopt a conversational style or tone (moves the interaction away from being evaluative to a consideration of the content of the student’s response) Teacher: Can the wind really talk? Student: NO Student: The wind wants the dress Teacher: But we just said the wind can’t really talk, so what’s happening? Student: She’s hearing things. Teacher: So, do you mean she’s just thinking that’s what she hears?

Text Talk What do the authors suggest as follow-up when children’s responses are limited or incomplete? o Repeat what the student said Teacher: What’s happening to Hansel and Gretel? Student: They’re getting lost. Teacher: How did that happen to Hansel and Gretel? Student: They walked in the woods. Teacher: So they went for a walk in the woods? And how did that connect with what [the student] said about getting lost? Student: They were walking, walking, and it got dark. Teacher: OK, so they walked until it was dark. So they couldn’t find their way any more; they were lost.

Text Talk What do the authors suggest as follow-up when children’s responses are limited or incomplete? o Reread the text as often as needed The text is a permanent resource Understanding the text demands interacting with what is in the text, not what one thinks might be in the text or guessing what is in the text

Text Talk Text Talk also includes a vocabulary component with a focus on Tier 2 words But there are students who have vocabulary knowledge, and adequate background knowledge to comprehend texts and still have difficulty understanding them. So.. It may be that decoding, vocabulary and content knowledge is necessary but not always sufficient.

Comprehension Instruction A brief historical context: o Dolores Durkin ( ) What classroom observations reveal about reading comprehension instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 14, Observed in 24, 4 th grade classrooms in 13 school districts Found that fewer than 28 of 4469 minutes (less than 1%) was spent teaching students how to comprehend texts What Durkin did find were teachers assigning students to read and then asking them questions Assessing comprehension was synonymous with teaching comprehension

Comprehension Instruction Questioning techniques o Question Answer Relationships (QAR) (Raphael, 1986) Right There (literal questions) (on the surface questions) Think and Search (demands the reader draw a conclusion) The Author and You (demands the reader make an inference) (under the surface questions) On Your Own (evaluative, background knowledge questions) o “wh” question What or who is the paragraph about? / What is happening to the who or what? (Mastropieri and Scruggs) Who, what, where, when, how (why)

Strategy Instruction A brief historical context: Joseph Torgesen (1977) Memorization Processes in Reading-Disabled Children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 69 (5), Performance of 4 th grade good and poor readers on a memory recall task differed significantly Good readers engaged in active strategic behavior whereas poor readers did not When poor readers were taught to approach the task in an active and organized manner (use of rehearsal strategy) their performance was comparable to good readers

Comprehension Strategy Instruction A brief historical context: o Brown, A. and Palincsar, A. (1984) Reciprocal Teaching of Comprehension-Fostering and Comprehension Monitoring Activities. Cognition and Instruction, 1(2), Students assume responsibility for four strategies: summarizing, question generating, clarifying and predicting Once they are able to assume these responsibilities they would lead a discussion about what was read o Pressley et al, (1995) Transactional Strategy Instruction o Klinger and Vaughn (1999) Collaborative Strategic Reading

I Read It, But I Don’t Get It

Principles of Effective Strategy Instruction Explicit instruction (teacher modeling, explanation, think-alouds, long term guided practice) of a set of comprehension strategies o Setting a purpose/predicting o Making connections o Visualizing o Questioning o Taking advantage of text structure o Monitoring comprehension o Identifying the main idea o Summarizing

Principles of Effective Strategy Instruction These strategies should be thought of as a set; i.e., they are flexible and interconnected o Good example on page 235 of various “fix up” strategies Strategies should be practiced while reading authentic texts Strategies should be practiced over time until responsibility for their use shifts from the teacher to the student (long-term guided practice while reducing the amount of scaffolding provided)

Principles of Effective Strategy Instruction With that shift comes agency (active participation in one’s own learning), metacognition (thinking about one’s own learning), and transfer (using strategies in different contexts) o Provide opportunities for students to discuss with one another their thinking – verbalization and explanation that is neither “right” nor “wrong” o Ask open-ended questions o Pre-plan lessons for the transfer of strategies to a new context

Next Week Read “Best Practices in Informational Text Comprehension Instruction” I will post Chapters 1,2, and 3 in Proust and the Squid Critical Review presentations: o RAV-O (Wendy and Mitchel) o Achieve 3000 (Jennifer Luna) o REWARDS (Joshua)