Hi! As I read your responses, I realized that I'd love to know more about the design of studies that support focusing only on speed in trying to develop reading fluency in children. I know Stephen Krashen has found that studies which do not support the value of free, voluntary reading are all studies which focus only on specific aspects of reading, and unsurprisingly conclude that approaches to teaching reading which focus on the narrow aspect(s) they are studying are more effective. It would be like defining skillful basketball playing as being able to shoot foul shots well, and then doing a study that proves that extensive practice in foul-shooting produces good basketball players!
Over the summer, I survey the parents of the incoming 7th graders to see how they perceive their children as readers and writers. One mother wrote that I should know that her daughter, quote, "doesn't read." The family is Mexican, which caused me to wonder if language ability would be a complicating factor given that she wouldn't even read books in her native Spanish. And indeed, though the first book we read in the class was "Lily's Crossing," as "easy" a book as I plan to teach this year, this girl kept saying the book was beyond her, and she was very quiet in class discussion. So we decided I had to informally evaluate her reading ability. By this point in time, we were reading "A Mango-Shaped Space" by Wendy Mass (fantastic book, by the way; I highly recommend it!), whose language is much richer than "Lily's Crossing" and which is a markedly thicker book as well. I actually did start by getting a base reading rate, and she was reading at 200 wpm. I had her read aloud and note when she didn't know a vocabulary word, and we found that there were about three words per page with which she was unfamiliar. I had her read aloud and simultaneously think aloud about the book, and we found she spontaneously used strategies of inference, prediction, questioning, and book-to-self and book-to-book connections. I was able to explain to her that, whether she liked to read or not, she was actually a pretty fluent reader in many ways - she read at a reasonable rate for academic purposes, the book (though not an easy 7th grade book) was about the right reading level for her, and she exhibited many of the habits of good readers. That was all she needed - she flew through the rest of the book, and has fallen in love with Meg Cabot's "Princess Diaries" series as well as the Georgia Nicholson books. "Mango" was the first book she'd actually finished, Spanish or English, since 3rd grade, "The Princess Diaries" the second. It was as if all she needed was to believe in her own abilities as a reader and know she could do it. Actually liking to read, oddly enough, didn't seem to be an issue. My gut instinct is that she probably needed all that information to come together in order to believe in herself and take off - MOSAIC reading strategies alone wouldn't have done it, nor vocabulary level alone, nor yet reading speed alone. And we're back to the importance of a balanced approach... Take care, Bill Ivey Stoneleigh-Burnham School _______________________________________________ The Literacy Workshop ListServ http://www.literacyworkshop.org To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/lit_literacyworkshop.org. Search the LIT archives at http://snipurl.com/LITArchive
