|
|
Trainer’s Tips By Miryam Jannol
Because accuracy is a fundamental component of fluency, when you work with beginning readers you must focus a significant amount of your time on basic word recognition and word analysis skills. To do this effectively, you should provide weekly opportunities for your student to learn to read words accurately—the very first important step in becoming a skillful, proficient, and motivated reader. Pushing students to “read faster” too soon could cause some students to begin guessing or otherwise undermine their focus on reading carefully. Fluency researchers recommend that students be given opportunities to re-read sentences and encouraged to make their reading “sound like talking” as soon as they are making good progress with basic decoding, demonstrating an understanding of the act of reading, and showing some degree of confidence—whether that happens in kindergarten or in first grade. You, as the reading partner, should also model fluent reading, demonstrating, and sometimes explicitly pointing out, how accurate reading can be done at a reasonable rate and with good phrasing, intonation and expression. The ability to read text accurately, at a reasonable rate, and with appropriate expression and phrasing is a key factor in being able to understand what has been read and to enjoy the reading process. |
|
Since the importance of fluency has become widely recognized, educators have been doing their best to improve students’ fluency. But, the research has shown that sometimes the information they have to work with is incomplete, and leads them down the wrong path for helping children improve their reading fluency. Increasing fluency requires more practice, more support and more guided oral reading than any other strategy in practice now. That’s where, you, the reading partner can be the greatest help.