I have found this conversation so interesting. I was one of the lucky participants who saw Tim Rasinski last summer at the Georgia Reading and Writing Conference and I was convinced to try some strategies he had presented. Before that time I had used Reader's Theater to help with fluency, but after hearing him speak I knew I had to be consistent. This year it became consistent, and EVERY student made gains in their rate as measured by DIBELS. That is enough for me to know I will continue to use it as I did this year. On Monday, students came in and found a new script (plays, poems, speeches, etc) on their desk and put it into their binder. Their morning work was to practice with their group, about 15 minutes each day. On Friday they performed. Yes, they increased in rate....but they also improved in fluency. I LOVED to listen to them read, they began to see the importance of expression, to pay attention to punctuation, to think about the meaning and adjust accordingly.
I was disheartened when we looked at DIBEL scores and was told that the instruction was not effective because students did not meet the benchmark. But I still disagree, it was effective. They did make gains in rate, every student, and more importantly made the gains I mentioned above. I do believe in this strategy and will use it again. Also, they loved to perform, they became more confident, and they understood fluency's importance. Each time they performed they also made comments to the students, pointing out the things they did well, and they noticed the gains of specific students. I am saving all the sites listed here for next year. I also purchased some of the books from Benchmark with a grant I received. I see they have some new ones with speeches and other genres. I am hoping to order more. So glad to see Tim Rasinski post here, if you have not heard him speak, and have the opportunity, GO! Thanks, Terry/Fl/2,3 Loop -----Original Message----- From: Tim Rasinski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Mosaic: A Reading Comprehension Strategies Email Group <[email protected]> Sent: Sat, 26 May 2007 9:44 am Subject: [MOSAIC] Re-replies to my fluency v. comprehension Hello Everyone. This is my first posting, so I hope you will all be entle with me. I was asked to join the conversation inasmuch as I have een studying reading fluency for the past 27 years and have written widely bout it over much the same period. My interested started when I ried to understand the struggling readers I worked with who seemed to be ighly intelligent, yet had difficulty with reading and understanding what hey read. When I first read about fluency it was an epiphany. Let me begin by saying that I don't agree with all that has been done with luency, particularly over the past ten years or so, in fact I strongly isagree with the direction it has generally been going. Your comments argely reflect my own thoughts on the issue. I do operate under the ssumption, however naive it may be, that we are all trying to do what's ight for kids. Even those folks who are doing odd things to reading luency honestly believe they are helping children become good readers. Let me outline specifically my concerns and ideas related to fluency. Fluency is related to comprehension, quite strongly in fact. My own esearch has in fact found strong correlations between fluency and omprehension all the way through senior high school. We found we could redict high school students' performance on Ohio's High School Graduation est (a silent reading comprehension test) with a measure of reading luency (see Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 2005). We have ound similar results in working with older kids in Chicago and maha. Interestingly, however, policy makers are not terribly interested n fluency with older students. It's just not issue they say. I'd like or them to see that 9th grader who is reading without any expression or nthusiasm, or who reads at 25 words per minute. Think about it - if an verage 9th grader reads at 150 words per minute, what would normally be an our reading assignment for an average reading 9th grader now becomes a 6 our marathon for the student reading at such a slow rate. And, I can ell you that we have a lot of kids in middle and high school who like this. on't get me wrong, I am not advocating teaching kids to read fast for the ake of reading fast' but we have to at least consider it. My interest is in struggling readers. I run our reading clinic at Kent tate and I believe it is a huge concern for students experiencing severe ifficulty in reading. Mike Pressley and Nell Duke and another colleague rote that among students experiencing severe difficulty in reading, etween 75-90% of them have difficulties in reading fluency that are a ignificant source of their comprehension problems. think that fluency is important for comprehension -- it is not ecessarily comprehension, but it sets the stage for comprehension. Fluency has at least two components -- 1) automaticity -- recognizing the words so effortlessly (in the way that ll of us are doing right now) that we can use our limited cognitive esources to make sense of the text, not just decode the words. Reading rate is a pretty good measure of automaticity, very strongly orrelated with overall reading proficiency. And so measures such as IBELS, AIMSWEB and others have been developed. To be honest, I use eading rate as a measure of automaticity in my own work. The problem has come when this MEASURE of automaticity has become YNONYMOUS with automaticity - that is, as many of you have so clearly ndicated, reading speed, not automaticity, has become the goal of reading luency instruction. Now I see kids charting their reading rates, well eaning teachers invoking kids to read faster and faster,etc. I don't lame teachers -- they are hearing this from policy makers and thers. Last year I did a little survey of kids in my region. I would sk them to name the best reader in their class. Once done, I would then sk them to tell me why that person is such a good reader. The number one nswer was "He or she reads fast" Kids get what we teach them, and I hink, they are all getting the wrong message here. Reading speed is a easure of automaticity in the same way the my dog's tail is an indicator f her happiness. But I don't make my dog happy by wagging her tail for er and I don't make a reader fluent by tell them to read fast. 2) There is a second component to fluency that gets acknowledged, but not uch else -- prosody, or reading with expression. I think this is where e really connect fluency to comprehension. In reading, meaning is arried with the voice as well as with the words -- through our pausing, ur tone, our emphasis, our phrasing etc. Even when we read silently I hink we are still listening to voice in our heads. The US Dept of Ed has done two large scale studies which found a strong elationship between oral reading expression and silent reading omprehension. Kids who when reading orally read with expression tended o be the best comprehenders when reading silently. Kids who read like obots when reading orally (without regard for reading speed) tended to be he same kids who had difficulty with comprehension when reading silently. I think teaching kids to read with good expression needs to be as important goal for reading instruction as automaticity. And yet, I think that is iven very little attention. In fact, oral reading is given very little ttention in schools.; and yet the research shows that the more oral eading done in classrooms is associated with higher reading achievement see Rasinski & Hoffman, Reading Research Quarterly, 2003). I am not dvocating round robin oral reading, but authentic oral reading. Automaticty and prosody in reading are, I believe, well established. The uestion becomes, how to teach both in ways that are authentic, engaging, nd not overly time consuming. However I think I have written enough. I ould love to read your responses. But let me close with a brief case study I did back in January. I love the ork of Dr. Martin Luther King, admire his principals, but also his ability o communicate. I think most people would agree that he is one of the most luent speakers/readers of all time. Yet, in January I printed out his I ave a Dream Speech and listened to his delivery of the speech from 963. On impulse, I decided to subject his reading of the speech to the IBELS oral reading fluency test. As you might expect he did not do ell. I calculated his reading rate at 102 words correct per minute, the evel of a primary grade student. It's hard to believe that if his speech as a test, it might have landed him in a remedial reading setting. Of ourse, no one in their right mind would claim that his speech, or any ther great orator for that matter, was disfluent. We have to ask urselves, what made that a fluent reading? The answer of course is not eading speed, but his use of prosody -- his pausing, his volume, his oicing, his phrasing, -- that is what gave the speech a deeper meaning han the words alone could do. Well guess that is enough for me. I hope that gives you a sense of where I m coming from when I talk about reading fluency. Thank you for reading this. Best wishes, im rasinski At 06:39 PM 5/25/2007 -0700, you wrote: What I think honestly, is that DIBELS doesn't assess students as much as it trains them in an approach to text. I have all the independent research including Michael Pressley's study of DIBELS. I hate to even get into that because it's really controversial and controversy can be divisive. On the other hand, it can also push our thinking. I know I need to constantly rethink my positions. So as far as DIBELS goes, I can always refer to the research. And yes-- the comprehension section on it does indeed have the assessor count the number of words in the story that the kids recite whether or not they are even in sequence. That is efficient training of an approach-- look at the words, look at the details, don't put together the big picture or it literally works against you if you paraphrase, or expand on the text or personally relate to it using your own words. I found the research on DIBELS in particular and on fluency in general to be just fascinating. It is in such opposition to what schools are told and sold. On Friday, May 25, 2007, at 05:11 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > In a message dated 5/25/2007 10:42:45 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, > [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > > I totally agree with your definition of fluency-- that it must be > inseparable from comprehension. However, I would note that assessments > such as DIBELS and some fluency programs > You are right about the DIBELS. I was very disturbed when we looked > at it > that the way they measured comprehension of the passage was by > counting the > number of words the child used in their retell. This is one of the > major > reasons we never purchased it. > > I am not advocating fluency programs at all. I really don't think you > need > one. I think the reason we see so many now is because it is easy to > package > and sell. I teach my fluency lessons with text the children are > reading and > short passages that are on an appropriate level for the child. I > also vary > the genre to be sure they understand how to read these as well. > > > I'm > understanding your posts, you believe that fluency and comprehension > are reciprocal--that each influences the other. That's what the > research shows too. > Yes that is exactly what I was saying. > > The difference in what many teachers are being told > is that if we train kids to read quickly, comprehension will follow. > Actually, the research shows that's not the case. Comprehension does > not just suddenly pop up when a child can read a passage flawlessly. > > That is absolutely right. That is why we have to understand that when > someone says they teach fluency it does not merely mean we time the > children and > get a score. It is so much more than that and should be included in > the > reading instruction we do. I really teach it in reading as well as > writing. > > I also agree with what you said about the data regarding ELLs and > decoding > instruction. Many ELLs that I have worked with are good word > callers. They > can call the words but do not have great comprehension. > > Laura > readinglady.com > > > > > ************************************** See what's free at > http://www.aol.com. > _______________________________________________ > Mosaic mailing list > [email protected] > To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to > http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/ > mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. > > Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive. > _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive. Timothy Rasinski, Ph.D. eading and Writing Center 04 White Hall ent State University ent, OH 44242 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] hone: 330-672-0649 ell: 330-962-6251 ax: 330-672-2025 _______________________________________________ osaic mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] o unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to ttp://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive. ________________________________________________________________________ AOL now offers free email to everyone. Find out more about what's free from AOL at AOL.com. _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive.
