Strategies, Practices and Tools
Decades of research provides a clear understanding of how skilled reading develops and how to most effectively support children in learning to read proficiently. Evidence-based, structured literacy instruction develops all the foundational language and literacy skills that must be woven together so that children can make meaning from the words they read.
The information presented here is intended to complement evidence-based core reading curricula and intervention programs already in place and help educators fill in gaps or modify their approaches with effective strategies, instructional practices, and tools and activities to implement them.
Early childhood educators can focus their practices to help children build language and emergent literacy skills. Pre-K and K-3 educators can find evidence-based ways to provide explicit, implicit, and incidental instruction across the essential components of literacy. And English Language Arts teachers across grades 4-12 will find effective practices to help students meet the increasing need for skilled reading.
Instructional Strategy
Provide students with opportunities to build reading fluency.
In grades 4 and 5, reading fluency still continues to contribute to overall reading comprehension. Since students in these grades are shifting to reading more complex texts, they still need daily practice in reading aloud with corrective feedback. It’s important for educators to use student assessment data to determine if the students need fluency instruction and the focus of the needed instruction.
Source: Lane, 2014; Honig et al., 2018
Effective Practices
- Provide students with ample amounts of reading practice in a wide range of texts.
- Teach students how to read expressively and at an appropriate pace.
- Provide students opportunities to listen to models of fluent reading of grade level texts.
- Provide opportunities for students to engage in partner reading.
Source: Torgesen et al. 2007
Tools and Activities
Instructional Activities Aimed at Building Fluency:
Paired Reading
Pair students up. Have them take turns reading the text to each other. One student reads a page or paragraph and the other gives feedback. Then the students switch roles. During this activity, the teacher circulates throughout the room, giving feedback as needed. Link some comprehension work to this. At the end of each section of reading, have the students determine the main point(s) of that section or compose a good test question about that part of the material.
Repeated Reading
Students read aloud a portion of text (perhaps a 100-word chunk, or the first couple of paragraphs). The teacher or another student gives feedback, and the student tries it again. This repetition continues three times or until the student can read it with 99% accuracy, at more than 100 words per minute, and with expression that suggests successful comprehension. This can be combined with paired reading. Repeated reading is especially valuable with content materials. Understanding such texts often requires this kind of intensive rereading anyway, so the rereading is appropriate.
Pause, Prompt, Praise
Not all students are great fluency partners. PPP provides some support in this area. Partners and teachers are encouraged to give students some slack if a mistake is made. Let the student read to the end of the clause or sentence and see what they do. Better readers try to fix the mistake. That’s the pause. But if a student can’t remedy the error (or doesn’t notice it), then provide a Prompt. If the mistake doesn’t make sense, then give some feedback about meaning. If the word read doesn’t look or sound like the word in the book, then direct the student to look more closely. If the student can’t fix the error after one prompt, tell them what the word is. Finally, for anything done well, provide praise.
Recorded Readings
Students can make progress without much individual feedback. Consider having students record oral reading for homework. Have them read an assigned portion of text (no more than 5–10 minutes worth). To complete the assignment successfully, the students will likely need to practice prior to recording. Teachers can spot-check these to check on performance. Again, it is a good idea to link to some comprehension tasks.
Chunking
Studies suggest that chunking can be helpful with older students. In this, the teacher initially provides text with phrasal boundaries marked. Students of all ability levels tend to get a boost from this material. After they have had some practice reading materials so marked, then give them unmarked texts and have them work in teams or individually to identify phrasal boundaries.
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Related
Developmental benchmarks and literacy behaviors that most children display at a particular age/grade.
Evidence-based reading interventions support students who are identified as struggling with specific foundational literacy skills.
Evidence-based core curricula, interventions, and supplemental programs play a critical role in supporting students’ reading success.
While seemingly effortless, good reading is made up of a set of complex skills and strategies.