Alright, Tim and Elaine...I am going to be brave and post a few thoughts here. I am a fan of both of you...and I can see more than a little common ground. Somewhere, I read that a true definition of fluency INCLUDES comprehension. If we say a fluent reader must also need to comprehend, then we can take the research that seems contradictory and it makes more sense. When I am working with my struggling readers with recorded books (to build word recognition automaticity) I spend an even greater amount of time teaching them the comprehension strategies. Every classroom I walk into, every colleague that gets model lessons from me, knows that I make very clear to students that the basic skills of reading--the phonics, fluency, are the means to an end and the end is comprehension. It is all about balance and too often, I think, when we as professionals lose that sense of balance, we get into trouble. If you will permit me, I would like to share a personal story here... Two years ago, I worked with a fourth grade class of struggling readers who where from 6 months to 3 years below grade level at the start of the year. (Let it be said here, the regular classroom teacher was also struggling and on an assistance plan. Part of my job was to help him develop more effective teaching techniques.) I modified a process that I read about in one of Tim's books. The first day, we read the text for the week to the students. I modeled a comprehension strategy and we had a rather deep discussion about the author's purpose, the main ideas, vocabulary, character traits or the author's language choices.We used graphic organizers to make text structures explicit. On the second day, we read the text again...but it was an echo read. This time, I made explicit a fluency component, such as observing punctuation, phrasing, etc, and then tied it back into the comprehension strategies we worked on the day before. (i.e....how does changing the intonation of what a character says change the meaning). On the third day, the students read with a buddy and as they read, they were to keep a pack of post its by their side. If they noticed something interesting or important they were to mark it and we had a share session afterwards. Again, while they knew they wanted to improve their accuracy, the comprehension aspect was the end goal. On the fourth day,we would practice the story for a performance.The students self evaluated their oral fluency based on a rubric. On Friday, we performed the piece for an audience and I sent the piece home as a "lucky listener" project. (The kids read it to as many people as they could find who would sign the back of it. The kids goal was to read it to more people than anyone else.) After about 6 months of this, the students were given the SRI-Scholastic Reading Inventory and most of the kids made huge gains. I have been told that 100 lexiles was a year's growth on this comprehension test. These kids made an average of 400 lexiles growth. When the kids read orally at their instructional level and I checked reading rates, I was interested to find growth but it was not exactly within grade level norms. Yet on our state test here in Maryland, I had 74% of them meet proficiency in reading comprehension. What this tells me, is that by teaching fluency as a means to comprehension, and by making clear that the end goal is comprehension, not simply reading faster, we can improve comprehension over all. Jennifer Maryland In a message dated 7/8/2007 10:42:02 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Those quotes are correct. I think the more recent research, though, is > moving us forward. We have found correlations between .50 - .60 > between > fluency and comprehension for older students. Not huge, but not > insignificant either Tim. I'd love to see the studies you refer to. And again, as you've pointed out, correlation is not causation and therefore, it is entirely possible and maybe even likely, that comprehension is influencing fluency-- or at the very least, the relationship is reciprocal rather than it's fluency that's influencing comprehension, right? ************************************** 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.
